Everything I Know About Morning Sickness I Learned on my Bathroom Floor

Everyone, I'd like you to meet Mat.

Mat hangs out on my bathroom floor with me. He is soft and blue and we picked him up at Target a few weeks ago to replace our really old IKEA bathmats. I adore Mat, he's been a great pal as I've been feeling so sick.

My other constant companion while I'm huddled on the bathroom floor (or the couch, or the bed, or - just once, it was a low point - the floor under my desk at work) is my iPhone. Never before have I been so grateful for a piece of technology. I can read gossip websites and play endless games of Solitaire and distract myself from the feeling of "ZOMG I want to throw up right now!" My iPhone is my link to the vast repository of human knowledge about the symptoms of early pregnancy. If you were to look back at my search history, every so often it would go from normal things like "jezebel - demian bichir - hela cells" to a string of "morning sickness causes - morning sickness cures - morning sickness home remedies by continent - ginger safe in early pregnancy." Here are the top five things my iPhone has taught me about morning sickness so far:

1. You don't have to throw up for it to be morning sickness. 
Somehow I had lingered under the misapprehension that morning sickness was defined by vomiting spectacularly like you see in the movies. To date, I have only actually puked once. There have been a couple of dry heaves here and there, but here's the thing: my stomach is actually happiest when there's something in it. It's counterintuitive, and it means that most of the time I'm forcing myself to eat when it's the absolute last thing I want to do, but it's a pretty typical presentation of morning sickness.  When I feel sick right after eating, which is often, I fight it: if I throw up now then I'll undo all of that good work choking down food! The statistics on this are fairly reassuring, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence as well that fellow bloggers have suffered from nausea that goes on and on without ever actually upchucking. (However: now that I have written this down, ten bucks says I'll start really barfing within the hour.)

2. It does vary from day to day.
Wednesday might be horrible. I might wake up on Wednesday morning and spend all my energy on just putting one foot in front of the other and think to myself that if this is the way the rest of the pregnancy is going to be, then I should consider checking myself into a psych hospital for the duration so at least there's a paid professional to listen to my crazed ranting. And then I wake up on Thursday morning and... I'm okay. I eat a bowl of cereal and walk the dog like it ain't no thang. I start to convince myself that my symptoms are disappearing from a missed miscarriage and everything is doooooooomed, when I feel... what is that? Is that a twinge of nausea? It sure is. Huh. But it stays at a manageable level the entire rest of the day, and I wonder if it's leaving for good. That is, until I wake up on Friday and before I even get my eyes open my brain is receiving an urgent signal that reads "NAUSEA! ALERT! NAUSEA! ALERT!" That's when the wonderful ladies of Yahoo!Answers reassure me that morning sickness totally varies and I am not alone in this experience.

3. You read one list of suggested remedies, you've read them all. 
Nobody has anything new to say. Cut lemons, ginger root, eating every 2 hours, blah blah blah. Occasionally someone will say something like "meat has been associated with nausea in pregnancy" and I'll think, "that's it! I will stop eating meat! I will never eat meat again!" Then I eat a meal of plain pasta and veggies, and I feel just as sick as I did before, and I start searching for things like "vegetables associated early pregnancy nausea." Bottom line, I'm not sure there's any way of predicting what will help or hurt from one day to the next - heck, it changes from one hour to the next. Sometimes a mug of lemon-ginger tea makes me feel much better, sometimes I have to psych myself up to take a sip. There's no rhyme or reason to it. You might as well stick to this site, it's as good as any other.

4. OHSS is different from morning sickness.
Despite my RE never giving me a firm diagnosis, I do think I ended up with a mild case of OHSS as the hCG in my system started to rise. I had a few risk factors - 22 follicles at retrieval, I was pretty young (28), I had a fairly slim build, and as my beta hCG values rose, my entire abdominal cavity swelled up in the most bizarre fashion. I wasn't even 4 weeks pregnant when I started feeling some serious GI awfulness, including but not limited to nausea and vomiting. It came on fast and was pretty debilitating, but after about a week, I looked down one morning and realized that I could actually see my waist a little bit. As the OHSS subsided, I had about 3-4 days where I ate like a normal-ish person (and convinced myself yet again that I had had a missed miscarriage, but that's a separate story). We even went out to a French restaurant where I consumed escargot and blue cheese and cassoulet, and it was delicious! (Note that it took some significant effort to even type that sentence now. Blech.) Then, at 5w6d, one day shy of the Internet's wise estimation that most women will begin to feel morning sickness around 6 weeks, I began to feel a bit of nausea. Real nausea. Not accompanied by diarrhea, headache, gas cramps, back pain, nothing like that. Just nausea. That was the morning sickness saying hello.

5. No, I don't know how I'm getting through it.
Prior to getting knocked up, I would hear about all the unsavory aspects of pregnancy - weeks of unrelenting nausea, a huge distended uterus constantly pressing on your bladder, and of course the horror of labor and delivery - and I would assume that there must be some sort of magical pregnant-woman force field that descends to make all these things seem bearable. There is not. It is awful. I am getting through this for only one reason: I don't have any other choice. And, it is true that you don't know what you're capable of doing until you have to try. In my old pre-pregnancy life, I would have called in sick to work every day this week; now, I am writing polite emails and participating in meetings when all I really want to do is curl up on the floor and rock back and forth and groan. If you find yourself in the same spot, I recommend bringing some sort of device or book or magazine or something as a distraction. Or, you know, you could start a blog and then complain there!