Pregnancy Weeks 8-13: Nausea
Twitch at ten weeksThe day I started sleeping was also the day I started feeling ill. (A perfectly acceptable trade off, in my opinion.) As unpleasant as this phase of my pregnancy was, it wasn't that bad, for two reasons. 1) Just about anything was bearable now that I could get some frikkin' sleep! and 2) I have to admit that I didn't have to put up with much compared to some of the horror stories I've heard. I was not a pukey pregnant woman. I really thought I would be, seeing as people always say a woman can tell what her pregnancies will be like depending on what her mother's were like, and my mom was a puker. But while I didn't spend a lot of time in front of the toilet, I did constantly feel as though I were about to vomit. I think this may be worse because I constantly carried around that horrible nauseated feeling without ever having the relief of actually throwing it all up. The only times I ever did throw up was when my new, super-sensitive gag reflex was activated. Taking my monster-sized prenatal vitamins, coughing too hard, or trying to reach my back molars while brushing my teeth all triggered eruptions.
My gag reflex was not the only thing that became super-sensitive; my sense of smell also reached outrageous heights. Now, I was fully aware that this was likely to happen, as it often does to pregnant women. What I wasn't expecting was how BAD everything would smell. It was as though my life became a five-week leisurely stroll through a festering garbage dump. My precious dogs became rank stink beasts and my house became unbearably cloying, despite my constant fumigations of Lysol. When we went out, I had to be very careful. I could smell the bathroom in a restaurant if I was seated within a 20 foot radius of it. Walking by the snack bar at Target or Costco was enough to make me run screaming. I could always tell if I was within a hundred yards of a trash can. And let's not even mention my classroom, which, inexplicably, is located inside the hundred-plus-year-old science building this semester. I often wondered to myself how dogs could live like this, smelling all of these horrible things every day of their lives, until Ian pointed out that dogs like the smell of ass.
I didn't eat much during this time. Not necessarily because I couldn't keep things down, but because everything always smelled so bad that I never wanted to eat. I actually lost two pounds by my 12 week OB visit. There was only one food that ever sounded good to me, and that was vinegar. Yes, vinegar. I consumed vinegar in whatever form I could find it: salt and vinegar potato chips, pasta covered in balsamic vinegar, deli sandwiches with extra vinegar, anything with strong mustard on it, pickled anything--well, you get the picture. I had to get pretty creative about getting my daily dose of vinegar lest I sink to drinking the stuff straight from the bottle. Case in point: right in the midst of my vinegar craving, Micaela and I visited a new Crate and Barrel store, and right there in the middle of the store was a vinegar tasting bar. I kid you not. An unmanned vinegar tasting bar. There I stood doing shots of vinegar until I started getting wierd looks. Sad. Ian's theory is that our baby wanted lots of vinegar to feed its sour personality. I choose to believe that our baby is just so sweet that my body needed lots of vinegar to counteract that.
My gag reflex was not the only thing that became super-sensitive; my sense of smell also reached outrageous heights. Now, I was fully aware that this was likely to happen, as it often does to pregnant women. What I wasn't expecting was how BAD everything would smell. It was as though my life became a five-week leisurely stroll through a festering garbage dump. My precious dogs became rank stink beasts and my house became unbearably cloying, despite my constant fumigations of Lysol. When we went out, I had to be very careful. I could smell the bathroom in a restaurant if I was seated within a 20 foot radius of it. Walking by the snack bar at Target or Costco was enough to make me run screaming. I could always tell if I was within a hundred yards of a trash can. And let's not even mention my classroom, which, inexplicably, is located inside the hundred-plus-year-old science building this semester. I often wondered to myself how dogs could live like this, smelling all of these horrible things every day of their lives, until Ian pointed out that dogs like the smell of ass.
I didn't eat much during this time. Not necessarily because I couldn't keep things down, but because everything always smelled so bad that I never wanted to eat. I actually lost two pounds by my 12 week OB visit. There was only one food that ever sounded good to me, and that was vinegar. Yes, vinegar. I consumed vinegar in whatever form I could find it: salt and vinegar potato chips, pasta covered in balsamic vinegar, deli sandwiches with extra vinegar, anything with strong mustard on it, pickled anything--well, you get the picture. I had to get pretty creative about getting my daily dose of vinegar lest I sink to drinking the stuff straight from the bottle. Case in point: right in the midst of my vinegar craving, Micaela and I visited a new Crate and Barrel store, and right there in the middle of the store was a vinegar tasting bar. I kid you not. An unmanned vinegar tasting bar. There I stood doing shots of vinegar until I started getting wierd looks. Sad. Ian's theory is that our baby wanted lots of vinegar to feed its sour personality. I choose to believe that our baby is just so sweet that my body needed lots of vinegar to counteract that.
Anyways, like I said, I can't complain too much because really, I had it easy. I only puked 5 times total, and the very first day of my second trimester, I felt almost immediately better. We went in for our 12 week appointment, and afterwords we went out to breakfast where I proceeded to pig out for the first time in weeks. And I've been eating and eating ever since! Pretty lucky, considering lots of women tried to scare me with stories about how they were sick throughout their entire pregnancies (and my mother is very jealous that I escaped her fate!).
Twitch at 12 weeks
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