healthymamadoc

healthymamadoc Dr. Sarah Pachtman. The OB friend who tells you what's actually normal. Double board certified maternal fetal medicine physician. No medical advice.

Views are my own!

Someone shows me a photo of their bathroom counter almost every week and asks me which half to throw away.The answer is ...
09/01/2026

Someone shows me a photo of their bathroom counter almost every week and asks me which half to throw away.

The answer is almost never half.

What I see far more often than a woman using something risky is a woman who stopped using everything. No moisturizer, because the ingredient list was long. No cleanser, because a video said fragrance. No sunscreen at all, in Phoenix, which is a bigger problem than anything she was worried about in the first place.

The real list is short, and it is short for a boring reason that has nothing to do with how alarming an ingredient sounds on the internet.

Swipe through for what actually comes off the shelf, the hair and nail rules, and the one ingredient women overcorrect on more than any other.

And if you used a retinol before you saw that second line, read slide 6 twice. You are okay.

Save this for the next time you are standing in the aisle reading a label. Comment GLOW and I will send you the swaps list!

09/01/2026

Things I am qualified to have a strong opinion about: aspirin and preeclampsia, what a blood pressure of 160 over 110 mmHg means for the next hour, why 100.4 is the number that changes the plan, whether that movement you counted is enough.

Things I am not qualified to have a strong opinion about: your kid’s lunch. I have one anyway.

08/31/2026

The gap between what you search at 2am and what you say out loud at your appointment is where most pregnancy anxiety lives.
 
You are not wasting my time. The questions you are embarrassed about are usually the ones with the fastest answers, and I would much rather hear them from you than have you sort it out alone at 2am with a search bar.
 
Keep a note in your phone. Bring the whole list.
 
I have also been working on something for those hours in between, because four weeks is a long time to sit with a question. If you want to hear about it first, the waitlist is open at the link in my bio!

Had the best time celebrating this friend turned family (like 45 years ago) for his 80th birthday 🎉 So lucky to have suc...
08/31/2026

Had the best time celebrating this friend turned family (like 45 years ago) for his 80th birthday 🎉

So lucky to have such wonder people in our lives to love and celebrate ❤️

08/28/2026

Ten movements in two hours is the version everyone repeats, but the part that actually matters gets left off.

Your baby already has a normal, and you are the only person who knows it. A time of day when they are busiest. A rhythm you could describe out loud.

If that pattern changes, call. Not at your next appointment, and not after you have talked yourself out of it. This is what we are here for, and nobody on the other end of that phone is annoyed with you.

Send this to someone in her third trimester.

08/27/2026

People assume being the doctor made it easier.

I knew every number. I knew what each failed transfer meant statistically. I could read my own chart, and I did, at 2 am, more than once.

Knowing the medicine does not protect you from the wanting.

I had my son at 39, after four years of it.

The drive home is the worst part.Somebody said “we’re going to call this a high-risk pregnancy” and moved on to scheduli...
08/27/2026

The drive home is the worst part.

Somebody said “we’re going to call this a high-risk pregnancy” and moved on to scheduling, and now you’re in your car in the parking garage doing math about a word nobody defined for you.

I have been on both sides of that. I am the doctor who says it, and after four years of IVF I am also the person who has sat in the parking garage.

So let me define it. High risk means more eyes, more scans, more visits. It is a category, not a prognosis. Plenty of pregnancies in this category are completely uneventful, and most of my patients still deliver with their own OB, with me consulting alongside instead of taking over.

If you got this label recently, swipe through. Then screenshot slide six and bring it with you.

08/25/2026

Everyone books this one for the reveal, and almost nobody knows what we are actually doing for those 45 minutes.

The anatomy scan happens between 18 and 22 weeks. We are looking at your baby’s anatomy in detail, where your placenta has settled, and the length of your cervix. All three of those change what your care looks like for the rest of the pregnancy.

The s*x is the part you tell people about. It is the least medically interesting thing on the screen.

Send this to your friend who is booking hers.

Lots of things are normal in pregnancy. Nausea, aches, swelling, exhaustion, weird twinges at 3am, all real and all comm...
08/25/2026

Lots of things are normal in pregnancy. Nausea, aches, swelling, exhaustion, weird twinges at 3am, all real and all common. The same vocabulary covers “your body is doing pregnancy” and “this needs to be looked at today,” so “is this normal in pregnancy” comes back yes almost every time.

The question that actually helps is whether it is normal FOR YOU.

You are the only person in the room with the baseline. You know what your own headaches feel like, and whether your baby moves more at 9pm than at noon.

There are about 672 hours between one appointment and the next, and for all of them, the person keeping track of how you are doing is you. That is the gap I have been working on. Something is coming. Comment WAITLIST and I’ll add you to the list to hear first.

Tracking your cycle does not have to mean three apps and a spreadsheet. Your body gives real signals: an LH surge, a tem...
08/21/2026

Tracking your cycle does not have to mean three apps and a spreadsheet. Your body gives real signals: an LH surge, a temperature shift, a change in cervical mucus. Any one of them can tell you what you need to know.



The fertile window is roughly the five days before ovulation plus the day of. S*x every one to two days during that stretch is enough. You do not need a perfectly timed spreadsheet to get pregnant.



Save this for your next cycle.

Follow for more evidence-based fertility guidance.

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