The 1st Trimester Woes.. Being Pregnant & Feeling Blah

The 1st Trimester Woes.. Being Pregnant & Feeling Blah

Yesterday I sat back and tried to remember my first trimester of pregnancy in the first quarter of 2014. I was miserable, in denial and possibly a little depressed too. Being pregnant was not working out the way I had thought it would. Maybe it was that I hadn't given it enough thought as to how it might play out for me. I did not know, for example, that you could start feeling sick from as early as 6 weeks pregnant. The illness and symptoms started that early for me. Another shocking discovery, was that I actually suffered morning (really, all day) sickness. I am very rarely down with the flu (or when I was in Lagos Malaria), and when I am it is even rarer that I be physically sick, so for that reason, I thought morning sickness would skip me - wrong. 

The magic 13 weeks turn, which was supposed to be when you felt better, came and went, and I still did not feel much of a change for the better. At that point, I was starting to think I would never feel normal, eat normally, be normal - 40 weeks felt like a loooong time. 

At some point, round about the 16 week mark, I think, but maybe even later,  I decided that I had to stop feeling sorry myself, dust myself up and be positive, as I was getting a much loved baby (such a huge privilege and blessing) out of the whole experience.

Plus, while styling my (nice and full) hair just now, I have thought of some wonderful benefits to being pregnant that you can look forward to:

• Full, longer, bouncier hair...    yes, please!
• Long, strong nails ...    great for nice manicures, if you're into that
• No period for 10 months (or more if you breastfeed)...    yipeeeeeee
• Excuses for the next, at least 3 years...    you're late - it's all that weight you're carrying. Gassy - the baby made you do it.
• Seats on the tube, on all journeys...    such a perk, if you live in London
• Eat whatever you like...     with moderation, but still, you can just blame the baby (he/she wants it)
• This full list of things to take your mind off being pregnant that I wrote about last year

And here's the run down on those first symptoms I felt, and how I tried to deal with them:

Being ill and Nausea 
I tried ginger biscuits, as I heard ginger worked, but let's just say that made things worse for me. A bitter lemon drink and sometimes very icy cold lemonade worked to ease of the feeling of the need to throw-up. I also tried cold water up un till the point where i could no longer bear the test of water. I have heard acupuncture can help but never tried it.

I felt that nauseating feeling all through my pregnancy, right up to the third trimester. It did have points where it got better, but night time was the worst. I dreaded the evening time. What eventually made me better was mint chewing gum. It actually worked like magic. So come 4/5pm everyday, I would start on my pack of Extra sugar free peppermint and literarily have work my way through pieces from the pack un till I went to bed. I would go to bed early, anyway because I was miserable and exhausted.

Feeling bloated
I felt like I was full all the time. I a very uncomfortable way and it was not linked to how much I had eaten that day. I also wasn't drinking water at this point as it made me ill, but I still had that bloated feeling. I didn't even try any remedies for this one - not sure what could have helped.

Food
The first sixteen weeks, I had to eat every two hours to keep the nausea at bay. Even if it was just something small. In fact it had to be something small, otherwise I felt uncomfortably full. I also had a packet of plain crackers beside the bed and reached for that first thing, before I got out of bed, because otherwise, I was dizzy. Plain boiled white rice with butter, made me feel the best nausea wise. But I craved rich, oily food and sometimes went right ahead and had it though it made me gassy, bloated and sometimes physically sick.

I had dinner pretty early because it took hours for my meal to digest.  I would then be on the gum, till I went to bed, which also aided digestion. On one occasion, I counted six hours after my dinner, and I still felt full, as though I had just had a meal.

Sometimes I would find a meal that worked perfectly well and stick to that for lunch religiously, e.g. soup, only to find that a few weeks later, I could no longer have that food and needed to switch things up. 

I was worried about my diet at a certain point, because although I was eating and trying to eat healthy, I wasn't sure how many nutrients I was actually getting from my odd meal choices. I remember the GP explaining that I should eat what I could and that the baby (and body) was intelligent and that the baby would get what she needed. I really needed to hear that to not feel guilty about my food choices and would remind MisterB or anyone else, who tried to lecture me about eating healthy for the baby. Yes I wanted too, but there was no point eating 'healthy', if it was all going to go down the toilet.

I enjoyed - eggs. I ate them for breakfast all through my pregnancy. Sometimes boiled or in the later months, fried, or with tomatoes and onions. I could always rely on eggs to fill me and not make me ill. I also ate a lot of toast with butter and jam, or with sardines, yoghurt, plain rice with a little bit of peppered sauce, pasta with tomato sauce and grated cheese.

Smell
I could not bear the smell of my own or anyone else's perfume, so I cut that out. I also had such a strong sense of smell, and could pick up what the neighbour's were cooking for dinner in the flat next door sometimes. MisterB was going through a health kick and would boil spinach and broccoli for lunch/dinner and the smell would seriously turn my stomach. Enough, that I would have to go lie down. I took to having to shut all the doors and open the windows in the kitchen and I would be in a separate room to be able to deal with that smell. I can't say that I have enjoyed broccoli, after that experience.

Pelvic pain
At some point, I had a clicking and discomfort over my pelvic bone. It went away by itself by the end of the second trimester.

Fatigue
So often I felt very tired. The lack of energy is apparently your body using up energy to create the placenta, so it is to be expected. It turns out that I was also iron deficient and this is apparently very common in pregnant women. I took the iron supplement tablets but only one a day, because I had read that it could also make you constipated. I had been lucky to escape that all through pregnancy and was keen to not add another problem to my list of symptoms.

Just thinking back to it all now, those first few weeks were difficult. But time is such a wonderful thing and it did pass by rather quickly. 37 weeks came and passed, baby was born and those tough days are pretty much forgotten, taken over by lack of sleep problems haha. 

If you're pregnant just now, how are you feeling, are you one of the lucky ones with little or no symptoms? As the weeks progress what differences have you noticed?

Happy Thursday.

x

The 1st Trimester Woes.. Being Pregnant & Feeling Blah