Melissa Ferrari and Angelina Collins answer questions from course participants.
All right. So I guess I'm just wondering from your experience because over the last couple of years I've been working in IBD, we have had a couple of pregnant women and the my experience, our book ends, some women definitely understand that the importance of staying on their medications and they continue them straight through and I have no problems whatsoever. But then I do still have a lot of the fear sometime with these biologics and I do find and I do love that you suggested the trimester early visits because sometimes just having that hand holding and that reassurance and even sooner if needed really helps our patients just keep the course and calm their nerves. What's been your experience? I think if so I recommend it to patients. They don't always do that and you know, like advice. You know, some will take it and some won't. But the ones that do are the ones who just seem a little bit more anxious. Or I have a lot of patients who, you know, they're very diligent and they write down all their questions at every visit. Um and I just, you know, those patients, you have those patients, we all have those patients and um I think it's really helpful for them because they want that upfront advice and I think that it's helpful for them because then at each of the different visits you can kind of talk about, you know, what's going on initially and how they're feeling and you know just reiterate about them taking their medication all the way through. As I mentioned for some of my patients if they if we're talking about you know going all the way through and they asked me the question about what do I need to do? Do I need to dose my medication any differently or do I need to adjust the timing of my infusions for example. Um Then I've had some super diligent women who have wanted to do that up front and we've kind of done that as part of the planning. Um But really what I'm trying to do too is just sort of piece mail information to them and you know what I actually direct them to the A. G. A. Um IBD parenthood project website because there's information for both the providers and patients. So actually we'll put that in there as a resource like hey if you want to do more reading here's a great way to do it. So I find a lot of our patients especially. But maybe I think just in general I think the moms are a little bit more anxious anyway. I don't think it mattered. I don't think it was a lot different from when I was using community practiced and now at U. C. S. D. I think that the moms are just pretty well read a lot of times and so they're happy to have extra resources which I think has been useful
