For years, whenever the topic of morning sickness came up, I would silently bargain with Heavenly Father…I’d give ANYTHING for morning sickness, I promise I’ll never complain, it would be worth every uncomfortable moment if I could just have a baby. Well…He took that to heart, apparently.

Morning sickness has been a BEAR. So incredibly hard. Yes, I am of course thrilled to be pregnant, and yes, it is still worth it–but wow. I was not prepared for this.  I really hoped that after all the troubles of getting pregnant that the actual pregnancy would be a walk in the park and I could be the rare pregnancy unicorn who had everything so easy. Not so.

Apparently, my desire to be unique and special did win out–just not as a happy unicorn.  Instead, I appear to fall in a 2% of pregnancies that experience Hyperemesis Gravidarum. What is that? It’s the mother of all morning sickness…x20. Yay.  This article  explains the difference between HG and regular morning sickness quite well, but essentially HG is it’s own category of pregnancy misery.

Now, before I go any further, I would like to preface this. Some of you may think it’s silly of me to finally get exactly what I’ve always wanted and still find something to complain about. That’s ok. I’m sure I would’ve felt the same way! But you know how I feel when it comes to honesty with this blog, so you get all the ugly too! Again, I am so grateful and so happy to be growing  my own two little babies but this is a lot harder than I expected.

For me, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight (not gaining weight is ok for the babies, but losing weight is a no-no), I throw up at least 5x a day, no exaggeration, I’m nauseous all day, and I’m constantly dehydrated. I can’t keep down anything, including water, gatorade, or other liquids. At my last ultrasound at UFC, Dr. Foulk was pretty concerned about all this and had me  get 2 liters of fluids via IV. That IV was miraculous!! Within a half hour, I felt better than I have in almost 2 months. The IV took about 3 hours total and I felt great for another 4 days.

We had hoped that once I got hydrated I would be able to sustain it, but unfortunately that hasn’t been the case. Despite trying everything under the sun to control the nausea and vomiting, from teas and herbal remedies, saltines and ginger ales, to all sorts of protocol and prescriptions from my doctors, I’ve still become very dehydrated and lost more weight. So far, Zofran has helped me to only vomit 2-3 times a day and keep the nausea manageable enough that I can work, but really only the IV has helped.  I’m probably getting another one on Friday and we’ll be discussing if a more long-term pic line would be better for me, since it seems likely I’ll need to get one every week or so.

I’m hitting 10 weeks on Sunday. Regular morning sickness usually subsides after the first trimester and I’m not giving up hope that I could start feeling better in a couple of weeks. However, a lot of people with HG deal with the symptoms throughout their whole pregnancy. I have some family members who have experienced this and for them it got much more manageable after 20 weeks…here’s hoping!

Right now my day to day revolves around dragging myself to work and then coming home and seeking refuge with my kitty and my bed, so blogging has been a low priority. I would still love to share how I got to surprise Jason with a pregnancy announcement and to share some more ultrasounds, so hopefully those will come along soon!