Care and Support for Pregnancy Sickness and Hyperemesis Gravidarum

The Layers of Complexity in Pregnancy Sickness and Hyperemesis Gravidarum

Pregnancy sickness can be gruelling, overwhelming and incredibly isolating. Apart from the symptoms themselves, what else is contributing?

Social norms suggest keeping your pregnancy hidden in the first trimester. In order to follow that norm and fly under the radar it becomes your job to appear ‘fine’ and ‘normal’.

Even when you’re not.

When you do announce your pregnancy, you’re swiftly met with the weight of a societal expectation to be grateful. Be radiant. Nothing less. And nothing else.

With pregnancy sickness and hyperemesis, your masked appearance (the performance) and your lived reality have split. As the gap widens, many women begin to fall through the cracks.

You’ll likely also encounter something you’ll have felt before if you’ve experienced things like period pain… A dismissal of how much your symptoms matter.

Well-meaning people around you may attempt to support you by normalising your pregnancy symptoms. Bids you make to ask for help in securing support and intervention can be met with hesitation and misunderstanding. This can cause you to second guess yourself and delaying help seeking.

Loved ones may try to motivate you out of your genuine suffering. But ‘you’re so strong and resilient’ and ‘you’ve got this’ doesn’t work. You cannot simply convince yourself into recovery and repair.

Your people can’t necessarily see your genuine need for intervention and care.

And even once you seek medical care, it’s entirely possible that medical professionals will dismiss the severity of your symptoms too.

What starts out as physical, ripples wider. Symptoms become more complex, and new ones appear. Medications create side effects. It goes on so long that it can begin to fold through your mental and emotional health too.

It feels like too much too soon. No time to plan. No time to find your feet. No capacity to think clearly through the fog of it all. There is no big picture when all your effort tunnels into just getting through this day, this hour, this minute.

The pregnancy you envisioned (were taught to envision) is in tatters. There can be grief, frustration, loneliness, despair, confusion and overwhelm.

If it’s your first time with pregnancy sickness, you’re entirely unprepared.

If you’ve got kiddo(s) at home, you’re likely under-resourced.

If it’s not your first time with pregnancy sickness, you’re likely haunted by the re-remembering the road ahead.

There’s so much complexity to the layers of the pregnancy sickness and hyperemesis experience.

Most Importantly: What Is Going To Help?

Finding and receiving genuine care and support. Gathering a team around you that will actively support you through this time and this huge transition.

It’s so important to be heard and held. To be met you where you are with honesty and compassion. To receive knowledge, tools, resources and care. To work to buffer long-term effects. So that you can find your way each day. So you can eventually close out your pregnancy, step up to birth and transition into motherhood. All from a place of strength.