How Bad is Morning Sickness? or Should I Say – All Damn Day and Night Sickness
Let’s talk morning sickness!
I’m currently 21 weeks pregnant so I can definitely share the details of my current battle with morning sickness.
As you can tell by the title, don’t be fooled by ‘morning’ sickness. This sickness can strike all damn hours of the day AND night, 24 hours a day baby!
Stay to the end to hear nausea reducing tips! I’ll also let you know what my doctor recommended to try.
So what is morning sickness like?
Morning sickness is a sick feeling you experience that makes you want to gag or throw up or lay there in a ball feeling like shit.
It’s primarily described as feeling nausea, with or without vomiting. The severity can range from woman to woman and pregnancy to pregnancy.
This is my second pregnancy and let me tell you, my morning sickness is way worse in this pregnancy than compared to my first pregnancy.
What causes the nausea?
Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy might be due to the increase in human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG).
Pregnant women begin producing HCG shortly after conception.
Women with severe morning sickness (hyperemesis gravidarum) have higher HCG levels than other pregnant women do.
Let’s not forget about Estrogen, another hormone that increases during pregnancy and is associated with an increase in the severity of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy [1].
I try to remind myself that this can be an indicator that the pregnancy is progressing, so bittersweet 🙂
When does it start, peak, and end?
I started feeling sick around 7 weeks and had a hard hit of peak sickness between weeks 8 all the way through and week 19.
Like no joke, I was waking up 2-4 times throughout the night to throw up! I would run to the bathroom and throw up empty acid stomach stuff.
The worst part is I noticed I would get severe sickness whenever I got hungry. Which then led to me feeling nauseous. It’s like a cycle. Feeling hunger with my stomach feeling like an empty pit, made nausea the worst!! I would be nauseous and starving and disgusted at the sight of food all at the same time, many times throughout the day and night. Everything looks disgusting and I don’t want to eat it but I have to eat in order to feel better!! Ahhhh
To help my husband understand what morning sickness can feel like, I told him to imagine one of his worst party all night hangovers where he wakes up sick for most of the day – running to the bathroom vomiting. Where he had no appetite and all food and drink grossed him out. When you can’t function or do anything because all you feel is miserable and all you can do is lay there and hope to sleep it off. Yeah, to me, it really feels like a horrible hangover when it’s peak bad.
Imagine being stuck in a hangover for weeks or months!!! Not fun right?
Ideas to ease the nausea
- Preggo Pop Drops – It’s like a yummy fruity hard candy. I worked at Motherhood Maternity, a popular motherhood retail store, and I learned all about different products being offered to help ease morning sickness and these Prego pops were selling like hotcakes. Last I checked, these go for about $5-6 bucks.
- Preggo Pop Drops PLUS – These drops contain Vitamin B6 as well and help to put a better taste in your mouth so you don’t feel gross and want to throw up.
- Lemon water!! No joke, this has been a lifesaver. So simple and effective! Just slice up a lemon, Then squeeze and drop a slice or two in your glass of water. If you can’t get fresh lemons easily, then you could try adding real crystallized lemon packets to your water. Lemon has been the best to make my mouth feel neutral and less nauseous. Also, the smell of lemon and certain essential oils has helped me to not smell gross stuff and instead reenergize and shift focus.
- Ginger is also a natural ancient remedy for nausea. Check out these Ginger, Lemon, B6, and Mint drops created by Upspring.
My OBGYN (Preggo doc) recommended I use:
- Vitamin B6 – 10 to 25 mg, three times a day
- Unisom 25mg – it is said that this sleepy pill helps you to sleep through the night. Also, when you feel sleepy you tend to feel less nausea. You can take his at night to hopefully sleep better through the night or you could take this in the day time but you may fall asleep and then suffer from then have insomnia at night :/
- Zofran Prescription needed. Honestly, this made me constipated after two pills (a common side effect). I immediately stopped taking it, all I can say is proceed with caution and space your doses. Talk to your doctor as Zofran has been known to help women with severe nausea and we can all have different reactions to meds.
Hope this helps. I know morning sickness is the worst but this will soon be in the past, stay strong mama 🙂