While my morning sickness never compromised my health, it did impact my quality of life during the majority of my first trimester. I was just miserable and, if you're pregnant and running to the bathroom almost every hour, you know what kind of miserable I'm talking about. While morning sickness is a well known pregnancy side effect and is usually the first thing someone will warn you about, there are things no one will tell you about morning sickness, too. These things are worth mentioning though, because even though you might not be able to prevent the nausea, you’ll feel better knowing you’re prepared for it and that you're not alone and that the hell you're currently experiencing is, well, normal.
Morning sickness is hard to talk about when you’re experiencing it. First of all, even the slightest discussion pertaining to nausea will just add to your overall queasiness. Second, most women (myself included) keep their pregnancies on the down-low until they’ve entered the second trimester. An estimated 80 percent of miscarriages occurring in the first trimester, so a lot of us don’t want to share the big news until we feel more confident that the pregnancy is viable. Not everyone feels this way, of course, but I was keeping my morning (and noon and night) sickness to myself, because I was keeping my pregnancy under wraps for the first three months. Looking back, that's somewhat of a bummer, because I may have been able to glean some insight on how to handle the sometimes overwhelming nausea, instead of being so focused on trying to sufficiently hide it.
Now that I’m six years postpartum, I’m happy to talk about the nausea and the puke and the things no one told me about morning sickness. If you can stomach reading this, here were some things I experienced in the first few months of both my pregnancies. I stand in solidarity with all the pregnant ladies who can’t look at an egg without dry heaving. I see you.