Pregnancy. A time of happiness and excitement. Of planning and preparation. Of glowing skin and thicker, glossier hair.
Or, in my case, a time I was wishing away from the moment the little blue line appeared.
From almost exactly six weeks pregnant I was sick. To start with I felt glad, that’s what all the books said would happen. Morning sickness: tick box.
But it wasn’t normal. It was an all-consuming nausea, vomiting between ten and twenty times on a good day.
I couldn’t sit up without being sick, focusing on a book or a magazine was out of the question, even the smell of my husband had me running for the bathroom.
The feel of anything on my skin was so painful and nauseating I couldn’t even shower.
Nothing would stay down; particularly water which would barely make it past my lips before spraying back out of my body. I had to spit out any saliva that was forming in my mouth because swallowing it made me retch. In just a few weeks I lost nearly two stone and was confined to my dark bedroom, unable to move without being sick.
By nine weeks pregnant I dragged myself to the doctors in the hope they could prescribe me something to ease the nausea. I saw three doctors before anything was done. The first, a male GP, tested my urine for ketones.
A positive test showed how dehydrated I was.
He told me it was just morning sickness and that some women couldn’t cope. I felt an overwhelming sense of inadequacy at his words. I felt guilty. Why couldn’t I cope with something so inherently natural?
Soon after, another male GP didn’t even let me sit down before telling me I’d left it a bit late to start a family. Friends, I was thirty! He repeated what I had already been told, that it was just morning sickness and I’d have to deal with it like everyone else.
I left the surgery wanting to cry, if only I hadn’t been too dehydrated to produce tears.I felt like I was weak. Not a proper woman. How could I be when I wasn’t even past my first trimester and already I wanted the nine months to be over?
I could sense that some friends and family were judging me just the same as these doctors had. You’re not ill, you’re pregnant. Just get on with it. And I truly believe that it had a part to play in the eventual breakdown of my marriage. Who wants to be married to someone who vomits any time you’re near them?
On my third visit to the doctors I was seen by my own GP, a woman, who sent me straight to A&E where I was admitted onto a ward with my organs on the cusp of failure.
Hooked up to a drip I felt almost human again. I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, the same illness that the Duchess of Cambridge endured throughout her three pregnancies.
Hyperemesis Gravidarum. It had a name. I felt validated. I wasn’t weak, I was ill. Yet the damage was done, I carried the trauma of guilt throughout my whole pregnancy. It was all too easy to take the doctor’s word as gospel. They were the professional, after all.
But I think what it taught me, and what I try to impress on my clients in my professional work now, is that we are the experts of our own bodies and conditions. We live with ourselves and we know when something is not right.
With anti-sickness medication the vomiting reduced to only a handful of times a day, and my daughter was born healthy at 40 weeks.
However, I was not only physically exhausted but mentally drained too.
The first few weeks of motherhood were hard and saw me admitted back to hospital with an infection.
I think, had I received proper care and not been fobbed off as weak, that my pregnancy would have been a time to cherish.
As it was, I couldn’t see myself having any more children, and that is something I grieve to this day.
