My Journey with Hyperemesis Gravidarum

I found out I was pregnant at 5 weeks and 3 days. I was having some symptoms. Mostly ones that felt like precursors to my period, such as cramping and sore breasts, but they felt more severe this time. So I took a test and there it was! A positive!

And a few days later, all hell broke loose. I began to notice an increase in need and desire for food.

All. The. Time.

I would wake up in the night and need to eat. And smells. Oh Lord of horrors, the smells. I made the naive mistake of making a healthy meal for myself in my brand new instapot: roast chicken and vegetables. My error was that I included brussel sprouts in my vegetable selection. That meal was my first indication that life was going to be different for a while.

I like brussel sprouts. Not everyone does, but I do. I don’t mind the smell, I like the taste, and they are good for my body.

Correction! I didn’t mind the smell. I liked the taste. And they are good for my body, yes, but only if I can get them down into my stomach and not vomit them up immediately. I gagged at the smell, but forced myself to eat a plate of chicken and vegetables, and saved the leftovers.

But there was another problem. The entire house smelled like brussel sprouts. And my fridge smelled like brussel sprouts. And I needed food so much more now, and every time I opened the fridge, or walked toward the kitchen, I would dry-heave. So, I made Brock get rid of the leftovers. Almost an entire chicken and tons of vegetables wasted.

And things didn’t stop there. I started realizing I was struggling to keep up with my hunger, and any time I let my stomach get empty, I would experience terrible nausea and dry-heaving. Once I got to that point, it was difficult to eat anyhing to help remedy the empty-stomach because of the nausea, and when I would manage to get food down, it wouldn’t alleviate the nausea right away, if at all.

Normally, I ate paleo, but quickly found that vegetables didn’t ward off my nausea, and keeping protein next to the bed for my night-snacking was unsanitary and too hard to maintain a steady supply. I started incorporating gluten-free crackers and gin-gins made with cane sugar into my diet. Sometimes they would help, and they certainly were easier to pack around without worrying how long it had been out of the fridge, but eventually things got worse.

I wondered for a couple weeks if my increasing nausea was a result of my diet change since I had added in a lot more sources of sugar than I had been used to. So I cut out all sugar, including paleo-friendly, natural sources like sweet potatoes. It was like a terrible, stricter version of Whole30, and IT DIDN’T WORK!! So I cut that out after a couple weeks because, again, it was too hard to maintain. And I was getting so, so sick of hard-boiled eggs. Brock and I calculated it out one Saturday, and we realized between my morning breakfast, morning snack, lunch and afternoon snack, I had eaten an entire dozen eggs the previous day. It had to stop.

And still, the nausea continued. I was beginning to miss work, and lamented the term “morning sickness” and wished mine was confined to just that time-frame. No, I had “all day sickness.”

I found seabands—tight wrist-bands that have a bead that presses in between tendons on the inside of your wrist and are meant to relieve nausea. They were a uncomfortable and a little painful at first, but worked for a couple weeks in decreasing my nausea. Eventually, whether because the pressure-point stopped responding to the accupressure, or my nausea-levels increased, they stopped helping and I was back to square one, curled up on the couch in the fetal position, alternating between dry-heaving and vomiting up whatever I managed to get down.

Then I found unisom and B-6, and that worked for a time… and then stopped. And Queasy Drops (an off-brand of Preggy Pops with a sugar-free option) helped if I ate 15 of them a day, but then they stopped working fully and the citric acid in them began to wear down the enamel on my teeth. I’m big into essential oils, but nothing I used was making a dent in my nausea.

I went from my six week mark to about thirteen weeks with no real resolution. I was managing here and there with seabands and staying on top of snacks and mealtimes, but I was miserable and was missing work.

If you know me, you know I like natural options. I believe God made our world and gave us plenty of tools for dealing with discomforts, healing wounds, and being healthy. Plus, being pregnant, I know it’s extra-important to limit exposure to things that might harm my tiny fetus, so I wanted to try what I could that was natural and low-risk first. By this point, though, nothing was cutting it, and I was quickly running out of sick-time.

So my midwife prescribed Zofran. It’s normally used for chemo-patients as nausea-relief, but works well for women experiencing severe pregnancy nausea. They recommend it to women in their second trimester since one study showed there may be a connection to heart-defects. Since the heart has finished its main development by the second-trimester it is safe to take then. I was finally in my second trimester, and I had made every effort in every way I knew how, so I accepted it.

And it mostly works. I still have days when my allotted two Zofran in an 8-hour period does me the barest of services and I’m choking down my dry-heaves at my desk, but I have days when I can actually get up and do some dishes, or run a load of laundry, or go to church. And the work days that I have missed are significantly fewer, which is encouraging.

I’ll probably still ask my midwife if there are any other, stronger options for me, but for now, I’m grateful for a few moments of breathing. And eating. And less vomiting.

It’s amazing how incredible it feels to not feel terrible.