Through the haze of exhaustion and elation that often characterizes the first disorienting weeks of motherhood, Karen Good felt something else: a gnawing fear for her own health.
Good, then 41, had given birth to a healthy baby boy in late December 2007. Her son was delivered four weeks early because she had developed preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition characterized by high blood pressure and protein in the urine. In most cases the remedy is delivery; once the baby is born the mother’s blood pressure usually returns to normal.
But Good’s did not. Her blood pressure remained dangerously elevated, sometimes reaching 180/120 mmHg, far above the 120/80 considered the upper end of normal. She had severe headaches and sometimes would see stars. Doctors had started her on one drug, but it hadn’t done much. Before her pregnancy no one had told her she had high blood pressure.
“I was really scared,” recalled Good, a physical therapist in Baltimore. She had worked with young stroke victims and didn’t want to join their ranks.
Four months after her baby’s birth, Good would look with new understanding at the seemingly disparate problems that had plagued her for much of the previous decade and at clues that had been overlooked for longer than that. Her situation resembled the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Each of the men touches only one part of the animal—tusk, hide or trunk—and assumes it is the totality, missing the larger truth.
“I didn’t have a primary-care doctor, so no one could see the whole elephant,” Good said.
“She saw a lot of doctors, and sometimes the big picture does get missed,” said Kantha Stoll, the Alexandria internist whose hunch led to the correct diagnosis.
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