I have missed you. Let me tell you where I've been.
First, let me state that I really hope to get back to sharing helpful parenting tips (or at least personal insights), experiences and practical resources soon. However, I feel that I need to post a bit about why I disappeared for so long before I can attempt to pick up where I left off (to the extent that is still possible). My return has been further delayed by not knowing how to write this post—where to start—but I must begin somewhere.
Perhaps I should say that I've been learning to rest. Have you learned to do that yet? It is a very undervalued endeavor in our culture. It seems that I'm a pretty slow learner because I'm still working on it, despite a crash course a couple of years ago.
So... I started off well with this blog, posting about once a month, and then things went downhill. We were busy over the summer, going in and out of town with lots of travel, but then I planned to pick up again in the fall.
...and then came the positive pregnancy test. I knew immediately I needed to give up on all my plans for the fall. There were people I had wanted to have over (I love hospitality!), meals I wanted to make for people, play dates I wanted to plan, ministry-related tasks I wanted to catch up on, organizing I wanted to do in the house. I knew immediately I had to give it all up.
That may seem a bit drastic to you. Maybe you have easy pregnancies. (Maybe you wish you could get pregnant!) Unfortunately, my pregnancies have been anything but easy. This pregnancy I was a lot more open with my doctor and with my friends and community about my struggles during pregnancy. I knew with two little ones to care for this time, it was going to be a challenging several months. To be clear, I love my kids. I was excited to watch our new little one adapt to our family and grow and develop. ...but I knew that the next several months were going to be very hard, physically and emotionally.
I cried any time I told someone we were expecting. It was really embarrassing. I felt guilty crying when I knew women who would love to be pregnant. Our kids are wonderful people, but my pregnancies have been on the traumatic side, and with those memories and fears plus the current pregnancy hormones, I couldn't stop the tears from slipping out.
Ever heard of hyperemesis gravidarum? More people are familiar with the term now than ever before because of Princess Kate's rough pregnancies.
Here's an informative news article about her second pregnancy (though she has now had three pregnancies with HG—I guess we have something in common!):
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/prince-william-wife-kate-expecting-child/story?id=25341486
Here's my experience.
This was my third pregnancy with hyperemesis gravidarum (also known as HG) but my first time to be diagnosed. You see, during most of my first pregnancy, we lived in Africa. I went to an OB in a neighboring country twice during the first six months of my pregnancy but otherwise went occasionally to a local missionary doctor in our town who had a very fuzzy ultrasound machine and would affirm that the baby had a good heartbeat and "looked tall" (she wasn't tall when she was born :) ).
I knew I was pregnant almost right away and confirmed it with a positive pregnancy test before I was even late for my cycle. We were excited and a little nervous to begin this new adventure in our lives. We had family coming to visit us soon, and we were planning to move back to the U.S. in about 5 months.
A little over 6 weeks into my pregnancy, I suddenly felt AWFUL. I put blankets on the floor and camped out just outside the door to the bathroom. My intestines were a mess, and I was also vomiting and couldn't keep anything down. My husband and my dad (who had arrived for a visit) had to step over me to get to the bathroom. After a couple of days, I managed to make it out of the house to get lab work done (a common occurrence for us, living in Africa).
I had giardia (giardiasis—intestinal parasite). No problem. I've done this before (though it wasn't THIS bad!). We drove over to the pharmacy and asked the pharmacist what medicine he'd recommend during pregnancy (because this is how you do things where we lived; I didn't even see a doctor that week). "Six weeks pregnant??" he said. "No, you shouldn't take any of these medicines."
So, there I was. Trusting my body to fight off giardia on its own while adapting to pregnancy hormones. I was sick a lot that pregnancy. Every couple of weeks or so, I spent 2-4 days vomiting nonstop. Then it would take me several days to rehydrate myself and get some nutrients in my system so I had the energy to get out of bed and be up and about again. Once I was feeling better, I felt like I should go back to work. (Everyone else I knew kept working full-time while pregnant, so shouldn't I?)
I would also start taking some Zofran that another expat had left over from another country from his wife's pregnancy. However, it was a pill you had to swallow, so I couldn't take it on the days I was already sick—so how could I tell if it was helping? After a few days, I would quit taking it again. (I had a limited supply after all and wanted to be careful about medicines in pregnancy.)
By the end of a full work week, I was exhausted, and within a couple of days, I would start vomiting again.
I read about HG a couple of times, but I didn't think the symptoms fit. I'd seen something about vomiting 5 or more times a day. I had days where I didn't vomit at all (I'm sure many other HG sufferers are jealous reading that!). However, there were also times when I vomited every 30 minutes to hour for three or four days straight. (Sometimes I could go 2 straight hours without throwing up! ...or even 3 or 4 if I was sleeping!) I weighed less than I had since I was 13 years old. ...but I was already at a low weight when I got pregnant, presumably because of parasites from living overseas, so I figured I hadn't lost enough weight during pregnancy to qualify as HG with whatever diagnostic criteria I was reading at the time. ...at least not on the good weeks. Certainly I lost several pounds each week I was sick, but the next week I was able to eat some food and drink liquids and start to regain the lost ground.
An occasional ultrasound assured us that our baby was
healthy, despite my inability to keep food or drinks
down half the time.
The sick periods were desperate. I would lie in bed waiting for the next vomiting episode to strike. Sometimes I felt a little better for a few minutes after clearing out everything in my system. I might try to eat or drink something (but that meant I would throw up even sooner!). If I didn't eat or drink anything, I knew I would definitely throw up again, too... My body needed food! When I would kneel at my sacred throw-up bowl, the exhaustion and desperation would often bring me to tears. When you've been exhausting yourself clearing out your entire insides every 30-60 minutes for 24 or 48 or 72 hours, you almost want to die. It seems like it will never, ever, end.
Somehow, though, I would eventually find something that would keep the vomiting at bay long enough for me to recover for the time being. Sometimes it was sipping an electrolyte mixture you could buy at the local pharmacies and mix with water. If I had one teaspoonful every fifteen minutes (starting 15 minutes after vomiting), sometimes that would do the trick. If I could fall asleep for several hours, my odds of temporary recovery were even higher. One time a friend made me a homemade beef stew, and that saved me after a particularly bad few days. Somehow I was able to sip it and keep it down! (Again, this is a paragraph where many HG sufferers would completely envy me! Some people never get a break.)
When things would calm down, I told myself it was over. After a few days in bed to recover from the dehydration, I was back at work. Full time. In a foreign language and culture. In a place where you cook everything from scratch and you can't drink the tap water. (Yes, that means there were no ready-made meals to stick in the microwave for dinner so I could head to bed early.) Somehow, within a week, I would be surprised and disappointed to find myself stuck in bed with my sacred throw-up bowl again as my trusty companion.
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| This is not the actual beef stew I ate. Mine had smaller bits of pureed food. Photo by ZHU GUOYONG on Unsplash |
By my third pregnancy, I had figured out that, in addition to antinausea medicines that are available in the U.S. and acid reflux medication, I had to GET MORE REST to avoid continuing to return to this state! There was no way I should have attempted to work full-time. I learned that I needed to try to get 10 hours of sleep per night and not do anything too taxing during the day (especially physical stress, but emotional stress could be a factor, too). If I did, I needed extra rest the next day—if it wasn't already too late.
I plan to talk a little more about the strategies that helped me survive my most recent pregnancy in the next post. Why am I writing about all this? For one, I still need to process my experiences. Writing helps me sort out everything going on in my head and with my emotions so I can deal with it all in a healthy way. ...but why share? One reason is that I hope to connect with other people who have had similar experiences. I hope I can in some way encourage them, even if it's just by encouraging them to seek help. If your current doctor isn't taking your concerns seriously, find someone else! If your employer or family or whoever is not helping you find ways to modify your life to get more rest and regain some of your health, find ways to get more help! Ask your doctor for resources. Contact friends and family to brainstorm ways they can help.
Finally, I'm sharing my story because I want to encourage all of you to reach out to friends who are struggling (whether with HG or with other health or life crises), to find ways to help and encourage and serve, and to encourage them to get help. (Need I say that women with hyperemesis gravidarum, many of whom wanted to have a child, are more likely to have an abortion? For some sad stories about real women with HG, read here: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/women-hellish-morning-sickness-elect-abortion/story?id=11043146 or here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/24/abortion-extreme-morning-sickness-hyperemesis-gravidarum .)
I'm sure if I were in the U.S., I would have been on an IV with my first pregnancy—or perhaps we would have found medicines to help more. Instead, I just lay in bed, sipping my electrolyte drink, hoping some of it would get absorbed before I threw it up. There was no way I could do that with my third pregnancy. I had two small kids to care for, and I knew I couldn't make it without help.
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