By now you probably think I intend every pregnancy-related post title to be read with a sour connotation 😉 And I know, I KNOW, apart from the debilitating happiness, I have struggled with the first 14 weeks and moaned a LOT! A lot = should be read as “almost constantly”.
Friends, family, Chrissy, thank you every-one for dealing with me. Okay, truthfully I barely saw anyone. I think I saw my best friend TWICE in those rough weeks! Chris, poor, poor Chris, had no choice but to see me every-day. HAHAHA.
Moving swiftly along.. Everyone speaks about that magical second trimester. Sickly? Nauseous? Headachey? Don’t worry, the second trimester is on its way! I, however, would have placed bets on the fact that I would be one of those rarities who stayed sick THE ENTIRE TIME. Both Chris’s mother and sister had full-blown all-day sickness for the nine months that they were pregnant. HOW they had 5 kids between the 2 of them is beyond me. I almost gave up before this one was born! So I knew there was a chance. Oh, boy, did I know. My mom however is one of those horrible specimens who did not throw up once in 3 pregnancies. Of which spanned over almost 10 years. And all three were natural. With practically no drugs. And one was a home-birth. So she is basically Wonder Woman.
So I have moaned on and on about my first trimester, and how bad it was, when in reality it could have been SO MUCH WORSE. Lord forbid, I could have been unable to get pregnant at all. And I think about this fact every single time I write a pregnancy blog post. So just humour me here – these posts are more to encourage currently pregnant women to KEEP GOING. Hey, future Rayne may decide to have a second (NOT happening ever according to Chris) and might need some encouragement.
My array of first trimester woes were as follows:
- Starting with what was my personal worst. And the one you all know is coming because I harped on about it every chance I got. FOOD AVERSIONS. At last count I weighed 60.5KG and I went into my pregnancy weighing roughly 69KG. The latter was a bit heavier than my usual so losing more than 10% (the danger zone) of my bodyweight did not worry me too much as I had a little extra “to lose”.
The effing food aversions killed me. I could not go near 98% of foods. If fruit did not exist, I would have dwindled away. People will comment “but just eat” and you know, it’ll all come back up if you even try. - The dehydration. Have you ever been so thirsty that your lips are cracked yet you cannot stand the thought of forcing a liquid into your body? This was almost as horrible as the food aversions. To top it off your prenatal vitamins are very important but you need to get them in with something. And running to the bathroom and bringing them back up again is horrid. Those little things are expensive!
- The nosebleeds. Yet another that you have heard me go on and on about but let me sum it up quickly. Waterfall style blood gushing for about 20 minutes. Any medical professional would advise you go to a hospital if you were not pregnant. They are brutal, messy, and hit at any time.
Those were my main three and I’ll leave it there. There are obviously all sorts of other niggles and annoyances but these were the three that really did me in. There are also radmon bouts of things; sore neck, sore back, insomnia, constant tiredness, which hit all over the show. But also, all of these could hit a non-pregnant person too. Although the tiredness should really be there in bullet-form too… man, did that hit me HARD at one point!
So today I am 14 weeks 6 days pregnant (you’ll only read this in about four weeks though as I have had an energy surge and have about 15 blog posts stockpiled) and from our 13-week scan, I have been so much better. SO MUCH BETTER. I could shout it from the rooftops. Part of me thinks it is a placebo effect. The other part of me realizes that, while your brain is strong, the sickness I felt could not have been “cured” by placebo. I say cured in quotations because I am not 100%, but I am ten times better.
We had our 13 weeks NT scan at 13 weeks and 1 day and the baby was healthy as can be. I have been deemed as low-risk a pregnancy as possible (touch wood it stays this way), and Baby McD is cooking away perfectly. We left the hospital and stopped off for lunch and I had half a tomato soup for lunch. This in itself was miraculous. From there I have been eating more and more every single day and in turn, I feel better overall. I mean DUH. I had almost zero nutrients and vitamins going into my body before, of course, I felt terrible.
For reference, you enter your second trimester at either 13 or 14 weeks. Doctors tend to differ on this. But I was definitely in the second trimester region.
With the extra food came a huge energy increase too. And again, DUH. Suddenly I was Ms Cleanliness. I decluttered my entire beauty room, our bedroom and kitchen in one weekend (beauty room alone took over a day, don’t judge) and I got started on the nursery (currently Storage Land). That initial surge to clean everything has disappeared (haha) but it is such a relief to come home in the evenings and actually cook dinner. Or watch a TV show with Chris. Instead of jump into bed. Sometimes I would go to bed without even showering! Okay, that happened like twice, but still.Â
In closing, I really want anyone who is suffering at the beginning to remember that it will most likely get better. I wanted to smack the all-knowing look off of anyone’s face who told me so. Because what if things don’t get better?! But generally, it will! As soon as your placenta takes over, Baby will leave you alone for a bit and get on with things themself 🙂
There will always be that small percentage, albeit awful, of women who never stop feeling sick. But hey, you get a baby at the end!
Rayne XX
