Right now all I can think of are moments with my youngest, Grace.  She turned 3 when I had been ill with HG for about 45 days.  One of the first times I vomited excessively was when I got up out of bed to make her some food.  She stood there watching me vomiting violently into the trash can and she said, “Mommy, STOP THAT!  And make my sandwich!”  I actually started to laugh.  She had her hands on her hips and was dead serious.  She was hungry and this puking was ridiculous and so could wait.

Then maybe a month later she walked in on my throwing up in the bathroom.  She gasped and shrieked, “Oh no Mommy!”  In between pukes I said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be okay.”  “She pointed to the toilet’s ugly contents and cried, “your baby’s in the toilet!”  I was confused at first.  “No, my baby’s in my tummy.”  Grace said with a shaky voice, “I know and you threw the baby up!”  I later explained that the “tummy” was an area around our middle/front and that our stomachs are where the food, only, is.   She so did not get it and recently asked why I swallowed my baby.

Because Gracie has seen me vomit more than anyone besides myself, she has got it down well -sound, expressions, where one would/should vomit, etc.  MANY times she would play throw up -especially when she put a baby doll under her shirt and said she was “preg-ah-net.”

Gracie got sympathy nose and I swear she can smell stuff like a true HGer can.  Everywhere we go and all throughout the house she identifies unpleasant smells.  She has said in lines at grocery stores, “Oh that man smells horrible!”  (funny only when you are back in your car and not feeling so bad for the poor stinky man!!!)  She has said, “Eww, yuck!  I am going to puke!  That smells HORRIBLE!!!”  She usually stresses the “horrible” in a way only a cute 3 year old can do.  She sorta says it without the “r” sound: HO-wa-Bull.

Both my girls have gotten into my purse and smelled my gum like I did when waiting in the urgent care and could not take the smells around me.  And both have played with my blue vomit baggies that have the white plastic rings and a huge long blue sock like tube with measuring lines.  If you have HG I know you know what I am talking about.  I never leave home without it!!!  My girls have used them for hats (looks like they are wearing enormous smurf condoms on their heads -sorry, but it does look like that!!!  I should take a picture of them doing that!  You will surely laugh!).  And they have used them for shoulder length gloves when playing princess dress up.

My husband has found that if you fill the saline push syringes with air then loosely cap them you can have hours of fun shooting them.  And on Easter he filled a bunch of them with water and let the kids shoot the caps and squirt each other (we were at my in-laws’ and there were about 8 kids over there).  My mother-in-law was a bit grossed out, no matter how many times he assured her no bodily fluids were ever in them…

And my list of names I came up with for my April Fools Facebook status were the following:

Hurley ( <– What we said we were naming our son); Ralph; Chuck and John (less obvious, but you know how a toilet can be called “the John”).  I said that if it had been a girl her name would have been “Ivy”  (<– Really, how perfect of a name is that??!!!)

I have lots of other general pregnancy stories, but these are the top HG related humor moments I can think of to share!  Comment if you have some funny ones   We all need to laugh, because there are days when all we can do is laugh or cry and crying is bad for hydration! 

I communicate with many HG sufferers and survivors and I hear accounts of not eating for 5 day stretches all the time.  Some lived off of scraps that could hardly keep a small dog alive for months.  Our families urge us to eat -despite how absurd and cruel it seems- because they see (sometimes better than us) how little we are consuming and it terrifies them.  I am past the days in which I lived off of apple sauce and canned peaches (and I am talking like 3 table spoons of apple sauce 3x a day and two small school-lunch sized things of canned peaches made it past my lips on a good day).

Even though I am past those very hard days of meager nutritional intake I am torn.  I don’t know what is easier to endure.  Those days or the days I find myself in now.  I know which are better for my body and baby, but I do not know what’s easiest to accept.  When I lived off of apple sauce and peaches I hardly felt hunger.  I did not want to eat a bite on most days.  Now, I do feel hunger.  I feel it like a monster in me.  I want to eat anything and everything at once at some moments.  But if I do not pace myself and go very slow and eat only a very small amount in total I will pay dearly for eating.

In fact, my new dilemma is compounded all the more by the fact that on most days if I do not eat or drink anything at all I feel better nausea wise.  But clearly cannot live that way.  I wrote last week that I was going to try just drinking ensure smoothies and give up on solid food.  I tried that with NO success.  I got maybe 6 sips in and was dying from the nausea.  I did not throw up, but hurried to bed and slept off the extreme nausea until I woke to the alarm screaming to me “get up get your kid from school.”  It did not say that -but that is the only way I got up -I told myself I HAD to get up and get her.  I had to force myself.  Not fun.

When I got back I was so thirsty I tried to drink some juice.  I knew that I could not drink thin fluids, but I was so thirsty I was determined to drink it and I felt confident I’d keep it down.   I poured a tall glass (wishful thinking!) and then sat down with it.  I took 2 sips and was back in bed for 4 hours.

No other way to put it, if you ask me, this is torture.  I do not want to be back in the days I lied in bed nearly 24/7 and puked my guts out and only ate a few bites a day.  But the extreme hunger pangs and thirst that only lead to attempts to eat/drink which causes me to have more nausea is just awful.  And this can often lead to quite a bit of anxiety and depression for me.

I woke today with such hunger pangs I could not ignore them.  I felt certain I’d vomit if I did not get up and eat.  But I learned from last night’s hunger and subsequent eating that I needed to not only eat slowly but only a very limited amount.  I have been nibbling on a muffin that tastes wonderful and I want to eat it fast, for about 2 hours now.  I am still feeling greatly hungry and horribly nauseated.  Really, this is such a lose-lose situation.  I could cry.

I just cannot wait for this baby to be born.  Yet, my house is such a disaster right now I cannot imagine bringing him home to THIS!  Sure they don’t know and don’t care, but I want to come home to a clean home and a sweet baby in my arms.  But I have time…too much.  I have about 105 days until my due date and I just know I’ll be late with this one too -I was late with both my girls.

I am feeling quite depressed now.  This just sucks.    I need something to give soon.  Either HG let up or some kind of excitement to really distract myself.  I am just so sick of this.  I know anyone with HG can relate.  Whether you are 12 weeks along or 38 you are sick of this too.  Literally sick -physically- and the burden of it has worn you so thin mentally.  We are often thin in thought and body.

Bye for now.

Emotionally I feel like throwing in the towel.  I want to give up.  I am so very sick of this.  I had been feeling much better last week and over the weekend I got out a lot and had a good time (well, a good time for HG sufferers that is) and now this.  Yesterday was worse.  I could not move my head without such intense motion sickness/nausea that I began to vomit.  Sights/sounds were triggers again -like in the worst days.

The sensation that the room I am in is moving all around me was so intense yesterday that I felt an actual earthquake and wondered if I only sensed motion that was not there.  Later that night I found out there had been one, after all.  At least I had proof for myself that the sensation is very real -messes with reality real.

I spent most of today sleeping.  But I have eaten so that is good.  I had only a few bites of food yesterday.  I actually never threw up -so odd.  But I am thankful.  I hate vomit.  But this INSANE nausea is worse.  I have read that some women with HG are not too bad in the nausea area but just find that they vomit a lot.  I am not sure who has it worse -but I think intense nausea alllllllllll day long is worse than not any until a vomit comes up/on.  Maybe I am wrong.  What is the point in comparing?

Here’s the picture I just took of my dining room table.  It looks better in this picture than it really is.  This camera doesn’t have a wide lens and I feel too crappy to try to get up and show a better full view.

The food on that plate is from LAST night’s dinner -not tonight’s.  See, I said it was bad.  I need to walk around my house and take pictures of how bad it all looks.  Not so I can feel ashamed or to make my husband/kids feel bad.  But so I can share with you all who likely have messes too.  My husband works 2 -3 jobs a day (yes, 2-3) and I have a 3 year old and a 5 year old and well -need I say more?  Even w/o HG I struggled to keep the house clean and nice (I worked from home and did not have the girls in child care so as I worked they played and made huge messes).  Now I am usually in bed cringing when I hear noises that sound like trouble and mess making.  Like the time I heard the girls gasp because they poured out about 2 cups of sugar on the floor and when they tried to clean it up with a few cups of water -it not only did not work it got worse.  Oh and that was on the carpet that they did that!  O_0  God has given me supernatural patience many times this pregnancy with them.  Though, today I have been a very snappy/snippy mommy.

I am tired of this horrible chair.  Feels like my bones are sinking through my butt in it.  Baby boy is kicking me a lot too.    Despite it hurting at times, it is the perfect blessing I need to be feeling on such a day as this.  I am going to lie in bed.  I hate my bed because of how much time I have spent in it, but it is much more comfortable.

Tomorrow is another day.  I am afraid of it, but in slight hopes it will be better.  God, please!  For those of you going through HG hell right now too -don’t give up.  Breathe in and out until another day passes.  We are fighting the good fight, aren’t we?  Look at how far you have come.  Don’t focus on how much longer there is still to go.  Just know this will end, eventually.  Night…

Looking back on the day I cried, “uncle!”

About a month after the nausea began and exactly 23 days since the vomiting began I hit a wall I could not get over, through or past. I really don’t know how many times I vomited that day.  But it was far more than anyone should ever vomit in one day -maybe in a lifetime?  Again, I don’t remember many details about the early morning, but in the late morning I remember getting up to get something for my daughter, I think it was the younger one, and when I opened up the fridge the smells of it sent me straight to the trash can and I vomited.  When I was done I took a few steps to the sink to rinse my mouth out and before I could do that I began to vomit again.  This went on for what seemed like eternity.  It got worse and worse, like labor pains near the end of transition, each time I vomited it was more extreme, more violent, longer in duration and each time came quicker than the last.  I clearly remember being panicked that I was going to suffocate and my children would be traumatized for life, left alone with their dead mother’s body lying on the kitchen floor with vomit all over.  The highlight was when stomach bile was shooting out my nose and I was about to pass out.

Up until that day I had held strong to my “no meds” guns.  This pregnancy was not my first experience with nausea and vomiting.  I was ill from 8 weeks to 22 weeks with my first and from 8 weeks to 17 weeks with my second.  With my first the doctor pretty much refused to give me anything for the nausea.  Not until I called saying I could not keep anything down did I get any help and it was only Phenergan.  (A suppository form of the drug that not only made me very uncomfortable, but also very sleepy and “out of it.”)  I never found that the drug really helped so I stopped taking it about a week after I went on it.  Why bother?

With my second pregnancy they started me on daily vitamin B6 injections.  I had to drive each day to get a painful injection in my butt/hip area and never saw any improvement.  I was supposed to do it for 14 days, but gave up about 10 in -again, Why bother?  Then they put me on Reglan.  It did nothing for me so a few weeks later I stopped, yet again, Why bother?  And after I had my second child I saw commercials on TV talking about birth defects or heart problems for the mothers who took Reglan while pregnant.   This time I ignored the friends who insisted I had to try Zofran and that if I would only take it, I’d be much better off.  I was managing without medication until January 5.  After that drawn out awful episode in the kitchen finally stopped I cried “uncle!”  And I called the advice nurse number.

I could hardly tell the woman who answered anything.  I began to cry the minute I began to talk.  I had just made it through the scariest vomiting episode of my life and I literally had feared for my life.  She took down some general information and said a nurse would call me back soon.  I called my husband at work and said what had happened and that I needed him to come home “right now.”  Then I lined up childcare so when I got the call back I could go right-away to urgent care or wherever the nurse would be sending me.

I sat and waited for forever for the call back.  Maybe 2 hours?  I remember thinking, I know if I get in the shower the phone will ring…  I had vomit in my hair and had not showered in about 5 days.  I was utterly disgusting.  When the nurse did call she was able to get me in to see an OB -if we left right then!  As she explained it would be faster than the Urgent Care and by avoiding Urgent Care I would be avoiding a lot of germs. So no shower for me.

Once weighed and urine sample given the medical assistant said, “put this gown on, the doctor will likely do a vaginal ultrasound.”  I was horrified!  Again, puke in my hair and no shower in days.  What could I do?  My husband said, “sorry babe.”  And I rushed to get the dumb hospital gown on (I hate when they come back before you are done getting it on fully).  The doctor was nice and if my memory serves me right he was more interested in getting the ultrasound done than why I was there with puke in my hair and bloody lips (yeah, I also had bleeding lips from dehydration -I was a hideous sight).

I heard the baby’s heartbeat and it was emotional.  I cried.  The sound meant the torture had a reason behind it.  But then the doctor said, “your baby is measuring at 8 weeks, not 10.”  I could burst into tears!  WHAT?!!!  All I could think at that moment was, “At 10 weeks I was only 2 weeks from 12 weeks, which is when there is a chance that the hormones will begin to die down.  Now that’s 4 weeks away -a month from a possible hope!”  I was terrified as the horrors of the morning were fresh in my mind and I imagined 30 some days of going through that again and again…  Unless you have had HG, you probably could never imagine the fear I felt.

So the doctor kept talking and my husband nodded and “uh-huh”ed while I lost my mind for a few moments there on that exam table.  I don’t remember much before I spoke and said, “I want Zofran.”  He wanted to try other things first seabands, ginger.  I shook my head and reminded him this was baby #3 and those things have never worked for me.  He then suggested other drugs first, B6 injections; Phenergan and Reglan.  I told him again, “I have not tried Zofran and I have tried the rest with no relief.”  I also admitted that I was doing my best to go drug-free because I feared harm to the baby.  He said that there was a risk with any drug during pregnancy, but I had to weigh the pros/cons and as I felt strong waves of nausea rippling through me again and the thought of weeks upon weeks of this I said, “Yes, please, I would like Zofran.”

He never said anything about my urine sample, said nothing about how much I vomited that day, nothing about my bloody lips and my complaint that I had been in bed for nearly 3 weeks too ill to move.  He sent us on our way telling us where the pharmacy was on the second floor and that I would feel better soon.

On our way to get the girls from our pastor’s house (he so kindly agreed to watch our lil monkeys for us) I asked my husband if we could stop by Carl’s Jr on the way.  I was starving (or so I thought -little did I know then that I would have a new understanding of the term in a few weeks).  When we got home I took the Zofran and then proceeded to scarf down the turkey burger and fries.  I did not throw up again for almost two weeks.  The nausea never let up, but I was able to eat and drink and never ran to the toilet.  I was feeling sure I was going to be lucky and be done with the nightmare soon.

I will write more about when the Zofran stopped working for the vomiting and when I got my HG diagnosis.

If you’ve read this far -you likely have heard of HG or you are just so intrigued you want to know more…  What can I say about HG?  I can list a bunch of links about it -but you can just Google it and find out that way.  What I will say is it’s a disease that some very unfortunate women get during pregnancy.  Stats show between 1 and 2 percent of pregnant women get it.  (How special I am!  Not!!!)  The name basically means a whole lot of vomiting in pregnancy.  But the name doesn’t do it justice.  Vomiting is a horrible part of this disease -for sure- but it’s kind of only the tip of the iceberg.

Not all women suffer in all the same ways, but the criteria for a diagnosis for HG (according to the HelpHER website) are:

• loss of greater than 5% of pre-pregnancy body weight (usually over 10%)
• dehydration and production of ketones
• nutritional deficiencies
• metabolic imbalances
• difficulty with daily activities

My weight loss: To-date I have lost 15 lbs.  I keep “yo-yo-ing” up and down on the last 5.

My dehydration & production of ketones: I have had quite a few IVs for hydration.  I have lost count how many, actually, but I think I have had maybe 14.  Two Saturdays ago I had to have two bags (1,000 ml each) at urgent care because I was “severely dehydrated.”  The doctor that night brought up hospitalization, but I said I was not sure what the hospital could do for me and so I declined the offer.  Typically when I have had to get an IV I have been told I am spilling at least 2+ ketones in my urine.  Ketones do not mean dehydration exclusively, but can be an indication of it.  I have also heard that the doctors in my medical group (Kaiser) test for the “specific gravity” of my urine.  I know I am a candidate for in home health care (hhc) but my doctor is generally against hhc.  He worries about risk of infection and blood clots.

My nutritional deficiencies: I had blood work done on Valentine’s Day -4 weeks ago today.  It showed I was starting to get low in several areas, but the only true deficiency was in Vitamin D.  I am supposed to be taking 4,000 IUs of Vitamin D3 per day for a month and then 2.000 a day for 6 months.  It took me a while to get the vitamins after the doctor emailed and even now that I have this huge Costco sized bottle, I don’t always remember or choose to take them…  Why not choose to take them?  Well, that’s HG for you!  Drinking water is torture.  Every sip of water = extreme nausea for me and can lead to vomiting (hence all my IVs for dehydration).  Some women have shared with me on a support group I am a part of online, that 1 teaspoon of any liquid can lead to a 20 minute vomiting episode (as in vomiting over and over for a stretch of hellish time).  So to take a pill with water is very hard for me to do.  Though, it is easier at 18 weeks along than it was at 14 weeks.

My metabolic imbalances: I really don’t know what mine have been/are.  No one has really said anything about them in all my urgent care trips and blood draws.  But I know I have had to get what we ladies call a “Banana Bag” where the IV is yellow from all the vitamins and electrolytes they put in them.  So at least once I was deemed in need of help with my metabolic imbalance.  But I have only had my blood drawn for deficiencies twice or maybe three times.  I personally know I have had them.  I often have a very hard time thinking, concentrating and functioning mentally.  And often my vision is so blurry I cannot see very well.  It even gets to the point of double vision when it is really bad.

My difficulty with daily activities: Oh where to start here???  Now that I am no longer in the worst days I am able to do a bit more -but literally I went from a very active person, busy mommy of 2 young girls (ages 5 and almost 3) and the manager and co-photographer of my photography business with my husband.  When I took the pregnancy test I said to myself before I took it, “If it’s not positive you will sign up for a marathon and run it within a year!”  I now can hardly walk at a grocery store without using the shopping cart as a walker.  My husband just gave notice to our photography studio’s landlord that we are closing shop (he cannot run the business alone -he has other jobs and we are not making enough with just the amount he is able to do).  My house is a disaster; I cannot clean it.  I usually am in bed all day and I am not functioning very well as a human being these days.  And please don’t ask me when I showered last.  I am not very proud of that answer and am not ready to admit it!

Well, this has to be it for my first post.  I have had a rough day in many ways.  It is almost 10 pm and I am about to do my favorite thing: sleep (my only escape from this awful nausea that plagues me!  -though I do wake up in the night with it raging and urging me to vomit on some “lucky” nights).  I also took a Vitamin D3 pill and the water is causing me to feel like I could puke soon if I don’t lay down fully and try to sleep soon.