Friday 12 September 2014

My Pregnancy Truths #1 Morning Sickness

I thought I would start a truthful series of things I have experienced while being pregnant. These posts are simply my experience and are not researched or applicable to all pregnancies. Please feel free to comment if your experiences are different to mine or to simply share your pregnancy experiences.

I discovered I was pregnant because of my morning sickness. I had been 'ill' for almost three weeks before I took a test as I thought I had come down with norovirus Nope. I was nearly 7 weeks pregnant.

I must say if you have never experienced morning sickness you are very lucky and you will never truly understand how utterly awful it is. First things first, it is not 'morning' sickness. Whoever came up with that term is an idiot. It lasts from the moment you wake up to the second you fall asleep. I was not always actually sick but I think the nausea was worse. The only way I could describe it to Jimmy was a really sicky hungover feeling that never goes away. I could handle the throwing up and generally felt a bit better for a while afterwards. The nausea I could not stand. 

You know you should eat but sometimes even the thought of food will make you sick. I thought of a fried egg once and proceeded to throw up. You will have tried every remedy in the book with no success. Everyone will offer advice about biscuits, ginger or whatever and you smile and think "I've tried all of those and nothing fucking works!" I was once sat in bed eating a biscuit, wearing travel sickness bands and drinking peppermint tea. Guess what? I was still sick and to add insult to injury my cat sat and watched me. Brilliant. 



I prayed for good old week 12 to roll around and for the magic switch to be flipped and for it all to stop. Week 12 came and went and my morning sickness continued. The same happened with weeks 13, 14 and 15. By week 16 it had pretty much cleared up and I had no nausea but just randomly threw up every now and then. 

The best piece of advice I received was "nothing works, it just goes away when it's time" It did, but there were times when there was no light at the end of the tunnel and I thought I would have to live on biscuits for the rest of my life! You can read my full morning sickness story here


photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mekman/869825543/">SteveC.</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>