Guest Blogger: Stephanie Freeman

Cory asked me to write about my pregnancy experience. The bottom line is that it was so awful it’s indescribable. One of the hardest things while going through the experience was communicating how depleted, tired, and sick I was. Everyone understands feeling sick for a few days or weeks, but for an entire pregnancy, the longevity factor was brutal.

Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG or hyperemesis) literally translates into “Pregnant Woman who Vomits Excessively.” It affects about 1% of the pregnant population, and I had never heard of it before. Vomiting excessively doesn’t even begin to describe the horror of my pregnancy. Yes, the vomiting was uncomfortable, constant and messy, but the debilitating 24-hour nausea was worse. Vomiting usually relieves nausea from the flu or crazy evenings. I can write these words and intellectually conceive of the nausea horror, but living with it for 10 months is indescribable. Remember your college day hangovers? Have you ever had a horrible flu? What about seasickness? Have you ever experienced them all at once for 38 weeks?

As many of you know, Cory and I wanted to have children right away. I had a miscarriage two months after we were married. It was the most devastating experience of my life. I experienced all that you would expect during a pregnancy: nausea, exhaustion, a little vomiting. I didn’t get far enough along to experience hyperemesis. After that loss, I was terrified that we wouldn’t be able to have children. When we conceived a few months later, I thought, “You won’t hear me complaining about a little morning sickness.” I was definitely not feeling well, but thought I could tough out the first three months, because everyone knows, women are only sick for the first couple of months of pregnancy. I had just moved to Portland after teaching 1st and 2nd grade and was off for the summer, so fortunately, I thought, I didn’t have any work obligations. In retrospect, that contributed to me not seeking help sooner. I absolutely could not have worked. I was exhausted; the kind of exhaustion where you feel like someone poured concrete into your veins.

I told my doctor I was pretty sick, and I had lost a few pounds, but it’s not unusual for women to experience morning sickness. She actually said it was a good sign that my HCG levels were rising and the baby was healthy. The initial sonograms showed a heartbeat and other healthy indicators. She mentioned not taking prenatal vitamins for a while, and I heard, “Stop taking them,” so, I did. Because I didn’t have any obligations, I was able to rest. If I had to work, I would have had to seek help sooner, and I may have had an earlier diagnosis and treatment. I wanted to be a relaxed “Zen yoga” mom, but the two times I went, the yoga teacher kept reiterating how terrible I looked. After I vomited during class, I decided it wasn’t a good idea to go back again. My deteriorated state also led to Cory and me missing part of our birth classes.

At the four-month point, I couldn’t take it anymore. I scheduled an appointment and tried again to Google morning sickness remedies. Maybe there was something that I missed. There was. I found a site www.hyperemesis.org, which compared morning sickness with HG.


MORNING SICKNESS
You lose little if any weight.

Nausea and vomiting do not interfere with your ability to eat or drink enough each day.

You vomit infrequently and the nausea is episodic but not severe. It may cause discomfort and misery.

Dietary and/or lifestyle changes are enough to help you feel better most of the time.

You typically will improve gradually after the first trimester, but may be a little queasy at times during the remainder of your pregnancy.

You will be able to work most days and care for your family.

HYPEREMESIS GRAVIDARUM
You lose 5-20 pounds or more. (> 5% of pre-pregnancy weight)

Nausea and vomiting cause you to eat very little and get dehydrated from vomiting if not treated.

You vomit often and may vomit bile or blood if not treated. Nausea is usually moderate to severe and constant.

You will probably require fluid hydration through a vein and/or medications to stop the vomiting.

You usually feel somewhat better by mid-pregnancy, but you may continue to be nauseous and/or vomit until late pregnancy.

You will likely be unable to work for weeks or months, and may need help caring for yourself.


I read the above chart [mangled in translation from Word to Blogger] and knew I clearly had HG. I had lost 12 pounds, couldn’t eat, had constant nausea and needed help caring for myself. I couldn’t give a urine sample because I was so dehydrated. My doctor personally walked me to a hospital room where I received the first of many IVs and began the first of many medicines. I stayed overnight and needed three bags of IV fluid before I could give a urine sample. I received IV Phenergan that gave me hours of blissful sleep. Sleep was my only reprieve from HG Hell. The IVs brought me back from an almost delirious state. I almost felt drunk because my thoughts were blurred, my body wouldn’t do what I asked it to do, and of course, I was vomiting. I was sent home with Zofran, which is an antiemetic drug given to chemo patients to help with the nausea. It helped on the mornings where I didn’t vomit it back up.

There were days I was too tired to change the channel with the remote. Moving my arm was too strenuous. Cory would come home from work and I would ask him to help me off the couch (which was a good day since I moved from the bed to the couch at some point during the day, proving I could walk a little) to the bathroom to vomit. I would lay in bed and think, “If only I could make it to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice, I think I would feel much better.” Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night when it’s cold and you think, “I should get another blanket,” but you’re too tired and sleepy to get up and do anything about it? That’s how I felt about getting orange juice.

My personal hygiene became non-existent. I went days without brushing my teeth because toothpaste made me nauseous and a toothbrush in my mouth activated my gag reflex. I was too tired to lift my arms over my head, so Cory had to wash my hair. The steam from the shower caused me to vomit also. At least it was a quick clean up.

Well-wishers offered sage, old-wives-tale advice: Eat crackers; try vitamin B-6, drink 7-Up. I was so dehydrated, the thought of eating crackers sounded like pouring sand into my mouth. Any kind of advice that included swallowing any kind of substance was out.

I feel like I’m writing information and still am not able to convey the awesome devastation of this disease. The sure but steady decline is hard to describe.

I went from washing the barf splatters on my shirts, to wearing the barf splatters, to just hanging out naked. Cory surprised me with maternity clothes early in my pregnancy, and they’re hanging in my closet in pristine condition. My aunt, Maggie gave me a bathrobe that I lived in for many months. It was all I could manage.

As my body deteriorated, so did my good cheer. Remember, I was thrilled to be pregnant and planned so that I could stay home with my children as a stay-at-home mom. My patience was non-existent. I asked Cory not to eat in front of me. If I smelled him making toast, I mentally stabbed him with sharp knives, but tried to muster enough kindness to simply ask he “open the doors.”

I definitely felt isolated. I had just moved, so didn’t have any local friends and couldn’t have gone out with them even if I wanted to. Even when I felt lonely, it was a huge chore to talk on the phone. Engaging in conversation was exhausting. My grandma and aunt came to visit and it was wonderful, but tiring. After they left, my grandma offered to pay for a cleaning lady. Did I mention how gross the house became? The bedroom floor was littered with Popsicle sticks because for a time, that was all I could try to eat. On one good day when I managed to make my garbage into a can, Cory commented that I must have been feeling better.

Any kind of smell made me sick. Cory was offended that I told him his breath stunk. I even tried to mitigate the comment with a “It’s not even bad breath, it’s just breath.” The musty smell of the basement made me gag. I could tell if the basement door was open from any room the house.

I am officially an expert on vomit. I know how many seconds I have to reach the toilet from the onset of nausea. I know how food will taste going down and coming up. I ate food depending on how it would taste and feel when I vomited. After the food would come up, the battery acid bile taste would follow. Worse than that was the time I vomited up blood. It was very scary for me. How much else could go wrong?

Some of the details are such a blur, and from a delirious mind, I can’t put the sequence of events in order, but at some point I also got a permanent IV line. The motion of the car made me vomit also. I couldn’t stand to drive myself to the hospital for IVs any more. My mid-line IV came with a home health care nurse who came to change my bandages. Cory was a big help with the IVs. I was tied to my IV pole most days and evenings. Dehydration is awful. There is a reason people can only live a few days without water. I felt very close to death most days. I fantasized about it even, but was too tired to act upon my suicidal thoughts.

I wanted to believe people when they told me the morning sickness would go away soon. The problem was that I didn’t have morning sickness. I had HG. During my fifth month, my doctor put me on steroids. This is usually only offered as a last resort for the severely sick. I had a two-week reprieve from vomiting, but as I tapered my dose, it worsened again. The rest of my pregnancy, I only vomited about three times a day. My doctor and I thought that was a great success.

Needless to say, I missed out on a lot. Because I rarely left the house, no one asked me how far along I was, if I was having a boy or a girl, or if I had picked out names. Only one person, a real-estate agent a few doors down giving an open house noticed my pregnancy a few days before I delivered. I barely noticed it either. I didn’t feel pregnant, I felt like a cancer victim. I ended up gaining only about ten pounds and didn’t really have a belly. I was too sick to have a baby shower. I didn’t bond at all with the fetus, and actually had negative feelings. It’s hard to imagine now because I love Elliott so much, but at the time, I blamed him for making me so sick.

My doctor had mercy on me and induced me two weeks early. I had to wean completely off the steroids the last week, and it was miserable. I didn’t care if I had the teeniest preemie in the history of the planet. I wanted him out. I told Cory that the doctors had ventilators and medicine to keep the baby alive outside the womb, but that my body couldn’t do anything more. Elliott was only 5 pounds 10 ounces when he was born. My doctor said it was common to have small placentas and babies with hyperemesis. I was starving the poor thing. Elliott is healthy, big and thriving now. He is also loved more than I could have ever imagined.

Re-reading this makes me want to cry. I feel like I had a year of my life taken away from me. Any fantasy I had about being pregnant was destroyed. What should have been one of the happiest experiences of my life was the worst experience of my life, usurping my miscarriage.

Fortunately, three months later, I have some pregnancy amnesia. Like I tried to describe before, I know this all happened, but it seems like a nightmare. I’m somehow strangely detached from it. Loving Elliott definitely helps. He’s the mellowest, easiest baby. He’s beautiful and interesting and fascinating to watch grow. Elliott is the most wonderful present ever after surviving the misery of HG. I definitely want more kids. I just don’t want to have to go through another pregnancy.