by Christine Howie
Photo credits: Dan Evans & Daniel Reche
Content Warning: contains swear words
Have a baby they said, you’ll glow they said. So I did but I didn’t. My glow was more a shade of pond green algae rather than the pregnant lady radiance I had hoped for. It’s amazing how you know early on when everything’s about to change and not just because your boobs are massive: it all proceeds with a puke then the darkness descends.
Jamaica Baby! Literally on our ‘oneymoon’. We’d made it a year and so decided to jet off to Montego Bay in celebration. A trip to Bob Marley’s birthplace in Nile Miles, and several undignified pee stops by the side of the road did make me wonder: the fuller chest, the spotting which I thought was a UTI (sorry for the TMI) and a pukey 10 hour flight home mistaking sickness for overindulgence and jet lag for what was about to become my hyperemesis hell. Except I didn’t have a bloody clue what hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) was or that it even existed! Little did I know I’d go on to become a ‘professional puker’.
I was pregnant, I just knew it. The second line appeared as I sat on the loo laughing nervously. I needed digital confirmation, 2-3 weeks it told me! Must inform the husband. He was working away so I rang him up (I never call him, he always calls me). He thought someone had died, and I did a little along the way.
Anyway he’s delighted, we did say we’d try. I can tell he’s gutted not to be trying more often, trying for longer, but he’s chuffed everything’s in good working order. Every macho cloud and all that. By the time he’s back home I must be about 6 or 7 weeks and we laugh at my first puke – ah that’s the morning sickness kicking in we chuckle, all pregnant and smug together. I look back at this memory and hate us both.
Then the fog descends, the nausea, the vomiting and not just in the morning but all the livelong day. It’s like the worst hangover known to woman (and I’ve had some belters) or think of food poisoning which lingers for nine whole months. I naively thought ‘this is how it must be’ until I couldn’t get off the bathroom floor, until my piss was the colour of petrol, until I couldn’t even sip water. Husband knew this was wrong, this was not normal morning sickness.
I lay across the blue plastic chairs of the A&E department with zero fucks to give. I looked like a homeless wreck, a drunk, a junkie even, but I’d lost the will to care. Anything would’ve been better than this. They tested my urine – ketone levels were high, I was seriously dehydrated. They were lucky I managed to produce any urine in the first place – it really was taking the piss, they got a dribble at best.
Next I was scanned for multiples, we were equally terrified and excited somehow at the prospect of this. Alas there was no multiples as the seven-week scan showed what I declared was a single prawn in my womb. I called it a ‘wee bugger’, the midwife called it a parasite (she was on my side). It was healthy, heartbeat visible on the screen and it was sucking the life out of me. There was love and relief but I still felt like I was dying. I can relate to Bella in Breaking Dawn (if there’s any twihards reading this you’ll get my meaning).
So I’m hooked up to IV fluids, I have a memory of sharing an IV stand with some other poor soul who just stepped out a lift. We looked like the walking dead. The stand was the only thing holding us up.
They gave me the cheap antiemetics first and they only made me sicker (the irony)! Zofran (or ondansetron) literally saved me – it’s an expensive antiemetic usually reserved for chemo patients as often the last resort. Those tiny yellow pills were priceless and now I had new sympathy for addicts.
Zofran helped reduce the puke sessions but the nausea never, ever let up, or the excessive spit (could fill a bucket) or the extreme sensitivity to smell. I couldn’t even stand the smell of my own skin. I sprayed perfume on myself before bed and I’d become allergic to husband. Poor guy!
I had my prawn pic to keep me company in hospital on my first admission and I looked at it closely trying to figure out what the hell it was. A fetus, a parasite, my vampire baby, my little love.
This was the standard chat that followed. ‘Get to twelve weeks and you’ll be fine.’ What lies. ‘Ok it’s got to be better at sixteen weeks.’ Nope. There is no sense of time when you’re in the HG zone: it’s timeless – minutes, hours, days mean nothing. I didn’t even bother to hope for better, I knew it wouldn’t come. I firmly believe HG is the biggest endurance test known to woman. I sat zombie-like for the duration.
I went off the grid with some people not knowing I was pregnant until after the baby arrived. Daytime TV proved to be a mild distraction. Murder She Wrote (which I’d never given the time of day) was a firm favourite. I could figure out a crime scene in less time than Jessica Fletcher — I was embarrassed for us both. It was my fate that I would endure HG for the whole nine months, although little love did make an appearance five days early which was a welcome relief of sorts.
Prawn baby was now affectionately named Hubble. Being the nosy bastards we are, husband and I paid for a gender scan. I’d always had a thing for Hubble Gardner (Robert Redford in The Way We Were) and Hubble rhymes with trouble, which prawn baby had been nothing but. You can’t resent your unborn child (actually you can, so don’t feel bad about that) but you can resent the situation you find yourself in. I didn’t know Hyperemesis Gravidarum existed until it was written on my notes, until a kindly doctor knew I wasn’t functioning the way a normal pregnant woman should.
The last few months passed by in much the same way, vomiting and nauseated. The nausea was worse than the puking. Husband said he could tell what stage I was at in the puke zone by the tone of my vomit groans. The nausea was all consuming, I gained great skill at staring into space, sometimes I didn’t want to talk, sometimes I wanted to maintain the art of silence forever. It’s a lonely place to be, even when you’re harbouring a tiny human life inside of you, when you’re puking for two instead of eating for two. Hyperemesis is a solitary affair; the isolation along with everything else going on hormonally contributed to many mental breakdowns and new-mama guilt.
March was the month of deliverance. I’d managed to practice the art of hypnobirthing and found the meditations quite soothing so I was ready. I had my birth plan in place and consultant-led care so I knew all would be well. I also knew the sickness and nausea had to go when baby arrived. I was so ready for this!
The labour was actually quite liberating. It was a Saturday and I’d had what husband and I later referred to as ‘the last supper’ — some delicious Italian food that I managed to keep down. It was the fuel I would need for getting through the next twenty four hours. Propped in my usual space on the sofa, which now had indentations the shape of my arse, I settled down to watch Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway (doesn’t everyone)? Then I felt pain which grew more intense, like how I imagine a concertina must feel when being squeezed in half. I made ‘the call’ to husband, who drove back from wherever he was in jig time. “Get the bloody tens out,” I screamed, managing the tens machine with one hand and my contraction app with the other, both a great distraction from the reality that I was going to have a baby and soon. With all my tech I felt I could rule the world: I was in control.
I was so agitated I couldn’t think straight. I was only comfortable laying bent over a chair (I must’ve looked so graceful). I know it’s time to ring the labour ward but midwife tells me I don’t sound like I’m in labour (I’ve always had a good telephone voice) so I soldier on. A trip to the loo and I have ‘a show’ – time to go! Suddenly realise the Husband only has a coupe and I literally can’t sit on my arse so I clamber into the back seat and kneel with my arms hugging the head-rest, face squished up against the tiny rear window. Some poor sod at the red lights thinks I’ve been trafficked. We made it to the hospital which was in the midst of a massive refurbishment so we have to walk round the back of the building to the labour ward. I recall this was not fun as I stop for a contraction to pass and to puke.
Midwife states she’ll need to examine me to see how many centimeters dilated I am and asks me to lay down. I’m adamant I cannot lay down, and ask ‘if we can do it standing up’. She doesn’t know how to take this request and I spy husband in a corner trying not to laugh.
I’m five centimeters! I’m off to deliver. Birth plan goes out the window – no water birth for me so I remain as I have done for hours, on my knees. I hear husband at the business end enquire to the midwife ‘what’s that?’. ‘Piles’ she casually replies. Classy to the end. Three hours of pushing and the threat of a c section under general anaesthetic, which I point-blank refuse, results in a forceps delivery but finally he is here. Hubble has entered our world. We didn’t actually name him Hubble but the thought did cross my mind. He lay on my chest and we marvel at our miracle. I have some tea and digestive biscuits and I don’t feel sick one little bit. I have third degree tears but no sickness or nausea. You can’t have it all.
The thing with hyperemesis is — physical illness aside — the mental torture is just as bad and no one can ever prepare for that. Have a baby they said, you’ll glow they said.
The only glow I ever emitted was a shade of puke green. To this day, I can vomit just brushing my teeth, my gag reflex is super sensitive (ask my dentist and my husband). When Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, was pregnant and hyperemesis made the media I physically threw up. I felt the nausea like it was happening to me. Smells, songs, places can trigger it. It’s puke PTSD and still people ask, ‘have you tried ginger’? Jesus Christ how I’d have punched these people if only I had the energy to make a fist. I tried the lot, all the cheap meds, travel sickness bands, two on each wrist, it was a fetching look – very Wimbledon. Mint humbugs helped for a bit: reduced the saliva output for a while but soon I was sick of them too.
I wanted the glow, to be on mat leave doing pre-natal pilates and lunching around town picking out things for the nursery, but no. I lay in bed, graduating to the sofa on a good day, permanently in pjs, makeup-less and mojo-less (saved a fortune on cosmetics). Sick pay had a whole new meaning. Ask anyone who’s had HG and they’ll tell you the same, they felt robbed. Robbed of the pregnancy they’d dreamt of — longed for — and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Today I am not the woman I once was. There is collateral damage. Yet five years down the line I find myself hankering for another, a sibling for my HG hero who I love with all my heart, who was worth every puke, every pill, every pile and who despite it all is pure perfection.
We endured it together, we were a team from the very start, we have a special bond, we made it. I’m still stunned that somehow during my HG hell I managed to keep him safe inside. Not only does he know the sound of my heart from the inside, he knows a good puke when he hears one.
So what now? Do I gamble, do I risk it all, my health, my sanity? Have a baby they say, You’ll glow they say. Maybe… I say.
Christine Howie
Officially on the wrong side of thirty, Christine lives with her husband and son (a wonderful and lively five year old) on the outskirts of Glasgow. After some time out to become ‘tinmum’ (titanium fused spine – Sia eat your heart out), she has been teaching Theology and Philosophy, volunteering for Pregnancy Sickness Support and writing whenever she can. At the end of 2017, Christine decided to make the leap creating a blog – tinmumblog.com writing about the minefield that is motherhood. She also tried where possible to help raise awareness of Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) – an illness she suffered throughout her pregnancy, which is still vastly misunderstood. You can also find Christine on Instagram @tin_mum documenting (almost) daily, life as she sees it.
