Stress is a silent killer for pregnant Black women

“We don’t take walk-ins,” the receptionist at my obstetrician-gynecologist’s office at a large academic medical center told me when I showed up without an appointment on a Friday afternoon and asked to be seen by a nurse. I was close to 28 weeks pregnant. I’d suffered severe headaches throughout my pregnancy. For the past several days, my feet and ankles had been so swollen that I could not lace up my sneakers. The night before, while receiving an award, I was so short of breath that I had trouble speaking. The prior weekend, I phoned the nurse on call and told her my blood pressure had been g...