Monday 16 July 2012

Bobben's Guide to Pregnancy: Part 1



Pregnancy sucks. It really does. I just wanted to get that out there straight away so I can never be accused of lying about it after I have this baby and apparently get that hormone which erases all the memories of discomfort and pain. It’s probably the same hormone that makes you go all squishy and rose-tinted so I thought I’d better start writing this just now, before it’s too late to be brutally, helpfully honest. I’m not trying to put anyone off doing anything; I’m just trying to provide a bit of transparency.

Before I got pregnant I had this image in my head of me as I was with a perfect round bump, wearing tight fitting t-shirts and flip flops, wandering around my daily life like a ray of sunshine, happily performing a miracle with seemingly no extra effort. All of these daydreams were hazy and warm and contented. I used to say to people “I can’t wait to be pregnant. I don’t mean so I can get a baby, I just mean to be pregnant and have a bump”. It was a funny and endearingly odd thing I liked to say and it was true that I felt that way. Oh how I laugh now when I think back on it.

I’m going to go into a lot of detail about how pregnancy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that people were lying to me about the reality but actually I was warned a little. My Mum told me what happened when she found out that she was pregnant with me. She had been trying to conceive for many, many months and had given up caring to test or notice. When she started feeling ill she took the bleed she had had that month as good reason not to suspect anything other than a stomach bug. It was when she had been suffering for two weeks that she went to the doctor to tell him she thought she was dying she felt so awful. He told her that she was pregnant and signed her off work. She told me of her disappointment as the family came to visit her poorly self and she sat in a crumpled heap by the radiator uttering angrily “I’m pregnant”. I really should have taken a lot more heed.

So, when I found out I was pregnant I smiled back on her story and planned with my husband the perfect way of telling the family. I assumed it was just a bad experience for her, to feel so awful all at once. I thought of all the other information about receiving the good news and all the television programmes which portrayed that happy moment. I smiled and we decided to make our news a Christmas eve surprise; what better present could anyone have at that time of year? That was on the Friday. On the Monday I went to the doctor and decided I was coming down with something as I felt so hot and iffy waiting in the corridor. Immediately after eating my dinner that evening I wanted to bring it all back up. I didn’t, but I wanted to. From the next morning until 4 months later I felt like I was going to vomit at every moment of every second of every day. Truth number one about pregnancy: Morning Sickness is hell.

Morning sickness is like no sickness you’ve ever experienced before. There are few ways to really described the all-encompassing direness of that incessant nausea. Now I know some people get that morning sickness where they wake up, in the morning, and are sick. They vomit, they feel a bit better, they perk up by midday. That’s what you expect isn’t it? I was watching television the other day and the woman on it was pregnant. At one point she dramatically pulls the back of her hand to her forehead and closes her eyes. “Are you okay?” asks her partner and she nods sadly. “I get my morning sickness in the evening” she replies, before promptly going back to washing the dishes. Earlier in the show she was on the beach in a bikini eating chips. I have a few points to note about how false this whole situation was. Firstly she was in the kitchen doing the dishes. No way are you going to manage to do anything, especially not the food covered dishes in the edible-hell-hole that is the kitchen during your MS. In fact, you can tell it was a totally inaccurate portrayal of MS by the fact she was wearing normal clothes. And standing upright. Think more lying down in scuzzy pyjamas. She probably should have been groaning in discomfort too.

I really want to properly describe morning sickness to you so here is my best shot. Imagine you go out drinking. You drink A LOT. You mix your drinks. Some of them are really sugary alcocrap shots in quick succession. You then eat a massive big donner kebab way too quickly without chewing properly and go straight to sleep. You wake up and you feel awful. The worst hangover of your life bar none. You feel that sensation you get right before you puke, you run to the bathroom, you stick your head over the toilet… and nothing. Nothing emerges, nothing changes. You can’t be sick but you feel just about to. Now, imagine feeling like that for months. And imagine that you not only feel like that but you have to somehow force some sort of food into your stomach while you feel like it. And water. Imagine that point when you are embracing the toilet bowl, knowing there will not be the release after you vomit up the culprit which is making you feel so unbelievable awful, and then having to eat something. The culprit is your baby and you are going to feel like that until your placenta is fully grown at 4 months.

See people who say “oh yes, morning sickness, I didn’t really get that”, or “oh morning sickness… ugh! … I had it for three days straight!”? Don’t talk to them. Just walk away. The injustice in knowing you suffered day and night for months and they had nothing is far too much to handle on a good day, never mind when chock full of crazy pregnancy hormones.

Anyway, to continue with my story. I started feeling like this three days after receiving our positive pregnancy test result. This was two weeks before we were due to tell everyone on Christmas eve. The first few days I remember sort of enjoying the sickness. It took a bit to come to its full strength and I was still reeling in excitement about becoming pregnant. The idea that these were symptoms of my precious baby made them just as easy to cherish as any other aspect of pregnancy that was to come. I felt a bit like I was going to vomit each day and for the first time in my life I didn’t mind. I imagined myself a happy martyr, protecting my baby’s tiny form from all those harmful things in the world that could penetrate it’s wellbeing through my digestive tracts. I was being Mother for the first time. Take a few more days of that and the fun started to wear off. It’s easy to suffer something horrible at first when it has a positive end, your morale is high and expectations are too. But after a week of it my patience was starting to wane and I was starting to get fed up of immediately regretting eating anything.  I think the worst part was that I didn’t vomit once. Not once. I’m presently at 36 weeks and 2 days pregnant and I have not once in this whole time brought anything back up. So it was the Monday before the Saturday we were going to tell everyone about the baby. My Mum happened to visit me and I sat on the couch feeling like death, lying about how I thought I was getting a flu and did I have a temperature and wishing I could tell her as being home alone all day everyday feeling like someone had poisoned me and left me to slowly die was wearing thin. I didn’t tell her but the next day I hit rock bottom. I got up and felt so poor, I couldn’t face anything. But I felt I needed to eat, I was growing a baby and it needed sustenance! So I went to the kitchen and heated up a half bowl of tomato soup and ate it with a slice of plain white bread. Ten minutes later I was on the bedroom floor hunched over our orange sick bucket (fond memories of this chap I must say) crying. I called Stuart and begged him to come home. I had reached breaking point. Stuart said he would try and get home from work and would call me back. I felt marginally better, at least he could scrape me off the floor and help me put on some fresh clothes or something. He called back to say his boss had said he didn’t want him going home because it was now ten and by the time Stuart got back to me it’d almost be afternoon anyway, and I was “only sick in the morning, wasn’t I?”. How I would have laughed hearing that had I not been curled in a ball weeping at that point. I told him enough was enough I was calling my Mum and thus the image of us all sitting around then imaginary fire on Christmas eve, tree lights twinkling as we told them the news and hugged and hugged shattered and all I could see and all I could feel was nauseau. I called my Mum on her work number as it was class time (she is a teacher) and I knew she would be worried as I never call her through the front office so I had to offer it up straight. “What’s wrong?” She said as soon as she answered. “I’m pregnant.” I said. “And I don’t feel well.” I stuttered. “And I need you” I sobbed. Her reply: “I’M ON MY WAY!”. And so Super-Mum flew into action. As she drove to me I cried into my empty sick bucket and felt a weight fall off me. No longer did I have to pretend I was fine when all I wanted to go was lie in a ball and groan quietly and not eat. She arrived in ten minutes and she came in and whisked me off to her house where I sat on the sofa wrapped in a duvet next to the pine smell of the Christmas tree. It took several days for her to realise that I was pregnant I think, but I was looked after like a pro. So, the moral of the story? Don’t expect there not to be morning sickness. Don’t expect the sickness to be bearable. Don’t expect anything less than feeling the worst you have ever felt in your life. And don’t expect to be able to manage it yourself. So many people wait until they are 12 weeks to tell everyone they are pregnant, but believe you me, holding off for ten days was a feat in itself, and I have no idea how others manage to convince their loved ones they are just “under the weather” when they feel as though they are going to vomit all over them every second of every day.

We told my Mum and called my Dad that day. Stuart came and got me from my Mums and we drove via his parents and told them. I sat white and shaking on the couch as Stuart told them I wasn’t feeling well, that I had morning sickness, and they jumped for joy and smiled and hugged and hugged me and I felt I could just die at that moment as I felt so awful. We told the extended family on Christmas day and that was that. I thought back to myself scoffing at my Mum’s miserable tale of telling the family with disgust that she was pregnant but at least she got to do it all in person. My fate was the same and to be honest the whole scenario set the scene for the entire pregnancy: unrealistic expectations shattered by obnoxious reality. I am so, so happy to be having my baby and I would never give anything back or change a single thing that has happened. However I would wish that at the start someone had told me just how hard it was going to be and just how debilitating. Every aspect of pregnancy has been unimaginable and unexpectedly hard and I feel continually that I have been conned and that the tales told of pregnancy are sugar coated fairy stories used to continue the populating of the world unabated. Pregnancy is tough, and the morning sickness is just the beginning.