This is going to be one of those cathartic posts.  Love it or leave it.

HG can bring out the best and the worst in our friends and family.  Heck, even the most well-meaning comment can be… shall we say, ill-timed.

I want to take a moment to highlight a few of the low- and high-points of comments I’ve personally heard over these one and a third pregnancies.  This post is intended to be eye-rolling and funny.  If you find yourself on the guilty list, don’t get your undies in a bunch.  Laugh, shake your head, and go forward a little wiser.

I’ll start with the Hurtful things people have said to me and the witty and snarky responses I wish I could have come up with at the time:

1. “Have you tried ginger?” “Seriously?  Ginger?  That never occurred to me!  And here I am shelling out $40 a day for this Zofran pump!  Wow!  Thank you so much for that priceless piece of advice!”  See also, Ginger is a bad idea for HGers.
2. “Have you tried eating [insert food item here]?”  Bonus points if the speaker begins waxing poetic about said food item. “Really?  And all this time I thought starvation was good for my baby!”  The absolute worst example of this came from a woman working in the Panera Cafe when I was pregnant with Gabi.  She began describing in detail how her mother could only eat liver and onions.  No I am not making that up.  Can you imagine?  I was feeling proud of myself for being able to get down the damn broccoli and cheddar soup and she’s over there describing freakin’ liver and onions!  It was jaw-droppingly stupid on her part.  As I recall, I had to just walk away from her mid-sentence because she would not shut up about it.
3. “I feel sorry for your baby.” “I feel sorry for your face.”  There really is no good comeback to that kind of comment that doesn’t involve physical violence.  The one time this was said to me, it was said in reference to the meds I was taking and with such a tone of disgust and disdain.  I never really spoke to that person again.
4. “But is that safe for the baby?” “What about me?”  This is the gentler cousin of the #3 comment.  It’s a nasty, guilt inducing comment.  The implication being that I may not be clever enough or careful enough to do my research to understand the risks and benefits of what I am taking to deal with the HG.  It’s my doctor’s job to keep both myself and the baby safe.  Let’s let her do that.  And you know what?  At some point, when you’re as sick as HGers get, you reach a point where you just want the sickness to go away.  Let’s ask ourselves what is more dangerous to a baby: meds that have not been shown to have ill-effects on a fetus or a mother who is so sick and so desperate for relief that she will begin contemplating terminating a pregnancy.  This innocent-sounding question automatically gets a knee-jerk rage reaction from me.
5. “Should you really be eating that?” “Honey, if it stays down, I’m going to eat it.”  Yeah, I eat a whole lot of fast food when I’m pregnant.  McDonald’s and Taco Bell are my favorites right now.  I would love to be able to eat an organic, free-range diet, but that just ain’t happenin’.  If it hasn’t been processed to within an inch of being actual food, my tummy rejects it.  Sorry.  You can live on fast food.  It ain’t pretty but it’s better than starvation and malnutrition which absolutely will kill a fetus.
6. “You look good!  Have you lost weight?”  Or really any other comment about weight. “Ah, yes.  It’s this new diet I’m on called starvation.  You should totally try it!”  I think the thing about this comment that sets me off is the value US society puts on being thin at all cost.  Trust me, when this was said to me, I did not look healthy-thin.  I looked really and truly ill.  That thinness, despite the very obvious ill-health, seemed to be the be-all, end all, it just was deeply disturbing to me.  Let’s be happy with our bodies folks!  Let’s strive for health, not some number on the scale!
7. “I totally understand what you are going through.” “No.  You don’t.”  Not to put too fine a point on it, but unless you’ve actually lived through HG, you don’t understand.  You can’t understand.  Trust me, you don’t want to understand.

Phew!  I feel better!  Got a lot off my chest there!

Now, I’d like to mention a few of the really awesome things people have said to me that have helped me make it through.

1. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I think of you often.” I had a lot of friends in real-life and online make similar comments to this one.  Just knowing that someone is thinking of me is huge.  It means so much.  There is a certain family whose name starts with a B and rhymes with “miss” that were a huge rock of support.  I got regular emails from several members of the family, and getting those surprise emails periodically really got me through some rough patches.  You know who you are.  Thank you.
2. “I’m going to cook ____ for your family for dinner tonight.” Mom, bless you.  Feeding my family was a huge stressor.  Having some meals ready for them in the evenings was awesome.
3. “You CAN do this.”
4. “This will end.” In the thick of things, time stands still.  Being reminded that there will be an end is really valuable.
5. “Don’t let the redeemer’s fire burn you up.” Said to me by the man who does my yard.  I got so much strength from this simple statement.  It’s one that I repeat to myself often.  I don’t know him too awfully well, so I hope some day I get the courage to tell him what strength he gave me when he said that.
6. “You will never have to experience this week again.” Said to me by Dr. Awesome.  I loved her for that.  It was a good reminder that what had passed was over.  Progress was moving forward.
7. “You’ve made it to week _____!” My mom took the time to remind me often how far I’d come.  When time is standing still, being reminded that it’s not and there is a light that you are getting closer and closer to at the end of the tunnel is awesome.

What about you?  What hurtful and helpful things have people said to you?  I just have one request.  If you post a hurtful thing, please do your best to include a helpful thing, too.  Venting is wonderful and cathartic, and even better when you can get out the negative and replace it with a positive.

Love to you all!

I think I am a weird HGer.  For the most part food smells and thinking of foods are not triggers.  That doesn’t mean I can eat any old thing, but it does make life easier in that I don’t have to make my family cook in the garage.

It’s things like certain soaps, my husband’s deoderant, and the air itself.

I tried to explain this air thing to a friend of mine yesterday, and I think it’s worth explaining here.  Maybe this will give you all an insight into what I’m experiencing.  Maybe y’all will just think I’m nuts.

Let me start on something only tangentially related.  Raise your hands please if you are familiar with what a halocline is.  That’s okay.  I didn’t expect everyone to know this.  I know because I watch way too many Nat Geo documentaries.  Also, randomly, plate tectonics make me jump up and down with excitement.

At any rate, let me try to explain my understanding of haloclines.  Areas of water with different salinity have different densities.  Salt water is more dense than fresh water.  If you have still water (like in a cave), and the lower part is, say ocean water, and the upper, lighter portion is fresh water, the water will stratify.  It will remain separated with the fresh water floating on top of the sea water.  Like oil and vinegar.

In between those two layers you would see a blurry portion where the waters meet.  That’s the halocline.  Hold that image in your mind.

Okay, stay with me.  The air in my house does the same thing.  Instead of being stratified by salinity, the air is stratified by temperature.  The upstairs air is warmer and rests on the cooler downstairs air.

As I walk down the stairs, there is a point where I pass through that oil/vinegar/halocline barrier.  It is the smell that creates, the smell of the air mixing as my movement stirs it, that smells so horrifying.  I can’t describe the odor it creates, but it’s a very specific and awful smell.

Opening the doors and windows does the same thing.  The outside air doesn’t stink, and neither does the inside air.  However, as they mix they produce that awful and specific smell.

It is magnified by the refrigerator.  The temperature difference is so powerful that the smell of that mixing air rolls over me like a steam-roller.  I hate the refrigerator with the white hot passion of a hundred burning suns.

Am I crazy?  I can assure you that this smell is not something I am making up.  There’s no power of suggestion at play here.  I don’t see the refrigerator doors open and imagine the smell.  I can tell if someone opens the refrigerator even if I am upstairs in bed.  I can smell the air mixing.  I can smell the cooler air diffusing through the house.

It’s like I have a freakish super power.  I can smell the movement of the atoms.  Can I please trade this crappy super power in for something cooler like flight or invisibility or something?

Other fun things from the past couple of days?  More nausea, ptyalism, etc.  This sucks.  Stop the world.  I wanna get off.

I had such a great day yesterday.

It started out pretty rough.  I had an early AM appointment with Dr. Awesome, and I ended up crying during a good bit of the appointment.  I told her about how down I’ve been emotionally and how depressed and defeated I feel.  We ended up swapping war stories for a while.

I told her about how desperately I want to eat, and how a few weeks ago Juan got an order of buffalo wings and I had him put it on my plate so I could just smell it’s delicious deliciousness.  It smelled so good that I tried to lick it, which turned out to be a mistake.  She told me that she remembered dreaming about food.  She would be in a giant buffet filling up her plate, piling up the tray, but she would run out of room and get upset about it.

I talked to her about the refrigerator and how it is the bane of my existence with its horrifying smell.  She laughed and said she remembered thinking the refrigerator doors were like the gates of hell.  Exactly how I feel!

It just felt really good to talk to someone face-to-face about how hard this is.

She was very encouraging.  She did say that she preferred not to Rx any anti-depressants.  She said that the feelings of sadness and defeat are pretty normal considering the very special kind of hell I am dealing with.  Having her acknowledge the kind of suffering I feel was just…  hard to describe.  It feels like she took some of the weight from me somehow.  It’s amazing the power of validation can be.

Physically, she said that I am doing great.  I even gained a pound!  (Which I promptly lost after I pooped later that afternoon.)  She reminded me that I am deep in the thick of things.  Tomorrow I will be 11 weeks.  With that in mind, she had me up my Meclazine to 4x/day.  Home health had increased my Zofran dose on Tuesday.  I asked them to do that to help me stay ahead of the curve.  I think I’m approaching the max of what they are willing to let you have.

I felt well enough yesterday to go to Gabi’s first baseball practice in the afternoon.  And that evening, I sat at the table with my family and ate some of the dinner Juan made!

I’m not going to fool myself into thinking I’ve beaten HG.  I won’t start hoping for that until I am about 16 weeks or so.  But I have gotten a respite and I am enjoying it while I can!