It starts when I wake up. In fact, I think it wakes me up. A grumbling, empty, nausea. I lie in bed trying to decide whether it will be worse to go to the bathroom or to stay still. Eventually I work up the courage to sit up and eat a ginger biscuit; I don’t know if this makes any difference.
Breakfast is hard to eat, but I have to have something inside me before the journey to work – don’t want to be passing out on the station. My usual drink at work is hot water with lemon juice, but now I can’t stomach this, and I’ve gone back to tea – weak, milky, and with sugar in, like when I was a child.
The mornings are the worst for sickness, and snacking barely makes it tolerable. I don’t actually throw up very often, but don’t think that this makes it any more pleasant. I feel horrible, miserable, want to go back to bed, where I could feel sick in comfort. I have been sent super olfactory powers, for further torment.
After lunch I pick up a bit, only to be hit by a black cloud of utter tiredness mid-afternoon. This makes me think that the sickness in the morning is the combined effect of hormones and an empty stomach, and the afternoon misery is a blood sugar thing. Or an iron thing. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist.
I get sick again on the way home, but it’s better if I eat something just before I leave work – that’s the empty stomach again, you see.
I scour the web and my growing collection of how-to-be-pregnant books for solutions: dry crackers, ginger, vitamin B. Well I already have vit B in my prenatal supplements, and I find that meals are more effective than snacks, but sadly I can’t have a full meal on the hour every hour, or I’m going to look like I’m pregnant… Comfort foods are the most, well, comforting: pasta, cheese, protein kinda stuff. Peppermint tea is good. If I find the perfect remedy, I’ll let you know.
On the plus side, morning sickness indicates a decreased likelihood of early miscarriage. I have very little anxiety about having another miscarriage, at this point in time. And no, that’s not because I want the sickness to stop. It’s because every waking moment, my general feeling of malaise reminds me that I’m still pregnant.