Jeesh, Maxi, is that all you’re going to eat? What are you on some sort of cleanse? — A colleague
After my first ultrasound, the doctor wanted me to come back at 8-weeks to ensure that the embryo was still developing well. The sonographer also noted that there may be more bleeding in the coming weeks because she can see packets of old blood in my uterus that the embryo might expel as it grows. She said not to worry, however, as long as the blood is not bright red in color and is not accompanied by sharp pain.
With my next appointment scheduled, I went excitedly about picking up Zain from the airport the next day and celebrating my 29th birthday the day after that. On my birthday (and Valentine’s and my wedding anniversary and any other holiday I can get away with), Ben buys a flourless chocolate cake from Awfully Chocolate. I normally just get a slice, but on this birthday, we bought two slices. The first slice was entirely for me. The second slice was meant to be for anybody else who might be interested in trying some of its chocolatey goodness.
We celebrated my birthday at Ben’s parents, and everyone decided to let me have both slices of the cake. I only hang out with good people. I enjoyed my first slice very slowly that night as we watched a movie. I was looking forward to the next slice the next day, but I would never get to enjoy it.
The pesky nausea that had started around week 5 was getting increasingly worse. Each day, it became harder to find things I was interested in eating, and I never knew what I would suddenly dislike, like my favorite chocolate cake. At first, I tried my best to fight the nausea with all the usual advice. I drank ginger tea, ginger ale, and several other recommended drinks. I ate small meals several times a day, doing my best to ensure I never got hungry because hunger only made the nausea worse. I ate saltines like it was the last food left on earth, and I drank as much water as possible even though water only made me feel queasy. I even bought two pressure point bands that I wore as often as was recommended to help with the nausea.
Even so, the nausea did ultimately turn into vomiting.
Besides following the usual advice, I searched obsessively for patterns. What times of day was I most likely to throw up? After eating what foods? Did eating certain foods reduce my chances of my stomach flipping back over? When one thing seemed to work, I would try it again. However, almost nothing passed the re-test. I was just as likely to cleanse my saltines and stale ginger ale while wearing my pressure point bands as I was anything else. Also, there was only one consistent thing about my morning sickness, I did in fact throw up every single morning, some days before and other days after a shower. The other times of the day and night varied widely.
So, this blog post is not about how to combat morning sickness, it is simply to commiserate with those women who know they are going to throw up anyway.
Sometimes it does feel better to just get it all out. This does not mean that throwing up is ever fun, and I can tell you the relief I felt after each time is exceptionally short-lived. When not throwing up, I was still nauseous all the time which was awful. So, the act of throwing up did not make me feel better. What I mean is that, I felt much less stressed out when I stopped trying to avoid throwing up. When I accepted that I had tried all the remedies available to me (including acupuncture and Traditional Chinese medicine that I also threw up several times), I could go into the bathroom with a little more peace and say, “Alright, let’s do this.” Instead of viewing every conversation I had with the toilet bowl as battle lost to morning sickness, I felt much better viewing it as inevitable, accepting what was.
Another difficulty of morning sickness was the well-intentioned societal reaction to my morning sickness. This was something I also had no control over, so I took deep breaths and avoided talking to people.
First, our society emphasizes problem-solving. Even single men who have no children were ready to offer advice on my morning sickness. “Have you tried…?” The answer to that question is yes. There is nothing that you, unimpregnable creature with no children, could come up with off the top of your head that I haven’t considered and tested on more than one occasion. More importantly, I do not remember asking for your advice.
Second, our society asks that we evaluate absolutely everything. This will get old when you are consistently sick for 6 weeks. Think about it, we ask people to tell us “How are you? How do you like the food? How’s the weather? How was class? Feeling any better?” We must be prepared with good things to say in all cases. If you have something bad to say, then there is more pressure to say something good next time. People who have never been pregnant or never had morning sickness may not understand how it works. “I felt like crap on Monday, and yes, it’s Thursday, and I still feel like crap. Let me tell you, I will still feel like crap tomorrow. Why? Morning sickness is not the common cold. I’m not going to feel better next week. Stop asking me how I feel with that hopeful look on your face. The answer is not going to change for another month, and maybe not even then. I’ll let you know when I’m okay again, yeah?” By the way, I’ve never said that to anyone; I’ve just wanted to.
Third, people feel the need to point out the silver lining. I remember complaining about how difficult my schedule this semester was. I have class from 4:15 – 5:30pm. Then I have an evening class from 6:15 – 7:30pm. This gives me only 45 minutes for dinner, which is not a lot of time when you spend the first 10 minutes in the bathroom “cleansing” after the first class. Not only does that cut into my dinner time, it’s not exactly like I can just rinse my mouth and be like, “Alright, let’s eat!” Upon hearing my complaint, my colleague responds, “Well, at least you didn’t throw up in class.” … The irony of that day was that I had excused myself during the earlier class to speed walk to the bathroom and cleanse. The after-class session was just round 2 (or more likely 3 or 4 at that point in the day). I do wonder as a society what we think we are accomplishing when we say things like, “Well at least…” I know it’s well-intentioned, but it serves only to erase the suffering the person is experiencing and make them look like a whiner for bringing up the issue in the first place.
Finally, people love to jump to the finish line. “But at least there’s going to be a baby after all this…” or “Just three more weeks and you’re in the second trimester…” First of all, I was very aware of why I was throwing up, and I am not sure the presence of a baby in another 8 months is supposed to make the awfulness of me throwing up right now any better. Why can’t things just be awful, painful, and plain sucky right now? Why can’t we just accept that and sit with it without trying to fix it with advice, silver linings, and promises of the future? Also, when morning sickness ends is not clear. For some people, relief starts as early as 10 weeks, for others, relief comes when the baby is finally pushed out, and for the lucky few, they didn’t struggle at all. So, please I internally begged, stop telling me when this will be over because neither of us know. And I can tell you from experience that when it didn’t stop until almost 15 weeks, it was worse because I had been counting down and hoping it would stop at 12. The last three weeks were worse because there was an expectation that it should have ended already.
All that aside, there were things that I did do to improve the experience as best I could. For instance, I put a soft “cleanse” blanket in the bathroom that I could kneel on during the process. I also reminded myself that women who actually throw up, not just have nausea, are less likely to miscarry, have a baby with a congenital heart defect, or develop breast cancer in the future (Pincott, 2011). My morning sickness was a sign that my body was doing its best to maintain the pregnancy, and the pregnancy was protecting me as well. This was my mantra as tears streamed down my face and my whole body spasmed with the effort of removing the contents of my stomach. I also picked up some useful tips, like when throwing up in the middle of the night, always pee first if you have the time. There’s not much worse than throwing up and wetting your pants at the same time.
Of course, you don’t always get to choose where and when you throw up. Sometimes it’s the side of the road. Living in China, sometimes it was the squat pot, or an Eastern-style toilet. I normally love Eastern-style toilets in public restrooms. It’s easier to keep clean; you don’t have to hover quite so high above the toilet; seems a little more environmentally friendly in its water usage. However, it’s way too low to the ground for me for comfortable purging.
I was already in Shanghai at Ben’s parents when I went to the hospital for my 8-week appointment. The trip to the hospital was fairly uneventful. We saw the baby and got to hear, not just see, its heart beat. I was over the moon.
We then headed back to Kunshan for work the next day. In the two hours it took us to get home, I threw up every half hour almost like clockwork in public bathrooms. It was so unpleasant that by the third time I just started crying in the middle of the train station. I kept saying to Ben, “It’s too hard! It’s too hard!”
Yes, the first 15 weeks of the pregnancy were too hard.
I still taught all my classes, except one session I missed for a doctor’s appointment. I was teaching 3 academic writing classes. Two sections were for the undergraduate students, and one for the graduate students. This meant I needed to prep two different classes. One of those courses I, and no one else, had ever taught before. So, we were learning the course, making it up really, as we went along. I had at least one class every day of the week, and this was all new for me. Up until that semester, I had only been teaching two courses per semester. Both courses were normally either Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday. This meant I had a day free to prep in-between classes, but not this semester. Not the semester when I most needed to be able to rest and rejuvenate. Even so, I know my job made surviving this pregnancy much more feasible than it is for many other women. I don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know how the United States especially gets away with such little consideration for its women.
I did not think about the baby much during these weeks. I figured I was sick because it was healthy. I needed to focus all my attention on my own health and work. I could not sleep well at night because of my bladder, or my stomach, or something else would awaken me in the middle of the night, and it would be hours before I could get back to bed. I then managed to catch a cold on top of the morning sickness. Imagine if you had food poisoning and a cold at the same time and still had teach three classes, grade essays, and maintain appearances of friendliness and energy. Once at dinner, Don complimented me on how well I had faked well-being in a five-minute interaction with some people who had just stopped by our table. I was very good at faking, but the reality was that I couldn’t breathe well, sleep well, eat well, or drink enough water to stay ahead of the dehydration I was experiencing. I lost about 10lbs in the first trimester where others may gain around 5.
I’m still surprised I survived. I’m still surprised I survived. Seriously, women are the strongest creatures I know. We don’t get enough credit for that.
**The featured image is of my belly on my birthday at 6 weeks and 1 day. During a time when I could just have fun with the pregnancy. No cleansing yet.
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