Imagine you have the worst hangover ever. You wake up, throw up, go back to bed, but still the world is spinning. Your head aches, but you can’t keep any painkillers down, so you have to just hang in there. You’re so dehydrated but unable to drink. You can’t even handle the taste of your own saliva so you have to keep spitting into a cup. Even the tiniest odour – the artificial smell of your new fridge – sets you off again. Your stomach aches from all the wretching.
Imagine having this everyday for 5+ months. Like a bad hangover that never wears off. It’s excruciating, debilitating, and LONG. It feels after a while like you don’t know anything else – you are disabled, stuck in a groundhog day type situation that is so miserable, you are just beside yourself. In the back of you mind, you keep going because you would do anything for your unborn child.
How could nature make something this unbearable at the same time of tasking you with incubating a future human? It feels cruel and senseless, stripping away the joy and hope you should feel when pregnant. It robs the glow and excitement you see in other pregnant women, and replaces it with fear, depressions, hopelessness and nausea x 1000%
If that sounds dramatic, it is. It’s hands down the worst experience I’ve ever been through, and I had it with both children. It is thought to occur in between 1-3 out of every 100 pregnancies. so it is fairly uncommon, but not extremely rare. It is not completely understood what causes it, but research being conducted is showing some genetic factors. Research for HG is extremely underfunded, so not a lot is known about the underlying causes, affected diagnoses and treatment. A lot of women are not taken seriously, and sometimes told that their symptoms are psychosomatic. This is so shocking to me. The not being taken seriously makes you even more stressed, and you burrow into yourself like a wounded animal, trying to protect her young. the physical symptoms create a psychological/emotional disorder – some crazy mixture of trauma, dread and sadness. You start to doubt yourself, you start to feel afraid of the future, and even worse of the present.