Questions & Answers

My experience was similar to mnor0406 with switching to heparin at 36 weeks. My OB office doesn't like to let women on blood thinners go past 39 1/2 weeks so I ended up being induced at 39w3d. I just didn't take the heparin that day. The blood thinners didn't cause any problems with my labor at all. The pitocin induction was more of a pain for me.

I was on lovenox 1x per day my whole pregnancy and switched to heparin 2x per day at 36 weeks. Normally that's what doctors will have you do. The reasons being that lovenox stays in your system for 24 hours, but heparin is only 12 hours so even if you just did a heparin shot and go into labor if you labor for 12+ hours you are good. Also, there is a shot they can give you to counteract the blood thinning effect of heparin but there isn't one to counteract lovenox. I was told that if I experienced any contractions at regular intervals to call them and not do any shots of heparin unless they told me to. If your doctor thinks labor is inevitable, they will tell you to stop doing the shots. In my case I was taking heparin at 9am and 9pm everyday. My water broke early at 39 weeks at 8:45pm so I skipped my 9pm shot and by the time I got to the hospital I was good. I didn't have any issues with excessive bleeding. After I left the hospital I went back on lovenox until 6 weeks pp.