a little over a year ago i found out i was pregnant with our first child. it was a planned pregnancy and we were very excited. dh and i had gone through some hard times the last two years, with him (he's australian) moving to a new country, learning the language and looking for work, and we were really ready for something good to happen to us. but things didn't turn out that way..
week 6: i started to feel a little nauseous. at that point i was still hoping i'd be spared the regular morning sickness, but i took it as it came.
week 7: nausea got worse every day.
week 8: i couldn't believe how sick i was feeling! i basically stopped eating
week 9: very sick, very thirsty, very tired, lost 2 kgs incredulously wondering how so many woman could stand to live through morning sickness. felt like an absolute failure. got an appointment with the doctor who gave me some meds and the instructions to just eat whatever i felt like and try to drink as much as possible. 'coke usually goes down quite well'.
week 11: the meds had helped some at first, but things got worse anyhow. lost 2 more kgs. asked for new meds, tried one, they made me go CRAZY. after that bad experience i just went back to the old meds. i was so wasted i couldn't think or take care of myself.
week 13: the nausea let up a little! i stopped taking the meds (they were doing funny things to my moods and i was so glad to be rid of them). i thought i'd passed the magic 12wk mark. however, things never got all the way better like they were supposed to. around this time i realized that my 'morning sickness' was probably quite a bit worse than the regular stuff.
week 14-22: this was probably the worst time for me, emotionally. i wasn't as sick anymore, as i had been at first, i was off the meds, and eating some and eventually gaining. but, it wasn't enough to recuperate. i was very fatigued and spent all those weeks in bed just trying to eat. every week i'd hope that next week would be better, but it never was. i was going in circles, eating, puking, sleeping.
week 23: we moved to a bigger apartment. people around me had started asking if we'd gotten all the baby things we needed (haha, very funny, i'd love to go shopping now, just stick me in wheelchair and cart me around while i sleep/eat/puke). however, that week, i miraculously did start feeling better. i went shopping once! my clothes didn't fit anymore, i started wearing dh's pants and jacket. i was showing and i was proud. my head started clearing a little and i was able to think a bit more clearly.
that week: we had our 2nd ultrasound appt. no heart-beat. i was sent to the hospital, they gave me pills to ready my body for the induction the next day and sent me home. my whole family (parents, 3bros, 2SILs, 3 nephews) came over that evening and cried with us. one of my SILs was pregnant too, about a month behind me. she sobbed. it was so good to have them there..
march 3rd 2006: i was induced in the morning and our precious baby was born in the afternoon. a girl, as we then found out. dh had been hoping we'd have the first girl in the family, and we did. we called her Jessica Heath. we had her cremated and put her ashes in with a potted japanese maple that we bought in memory of her.
since then, i have spent many many hours crying and grieving my child. i am a mother now, and i will never forget my firstborn child. i miss her terribly. but, i have also grown very much since then. i have gone through terrible pain (both HG and loss count as that) and i am still alive and breathing. i still have hope. i don't know where all of this is going, but as a christian i believe God will use my pain and experience to do good, somewhere, sometime.
i found that in dealing with all of this, i actually had a harder time at first facing the HG aspect. i knew about death and knew of ways of dealing with loss, but i had never experienced any sickness as debilitating and life-robbing as hg. it's not until i came here that i found out my 'bad morning-sickness' had a name and a description, and knowing this has helped me tremendously.
we still want to have children and will ttc when we are ready. this time, i will be prepared...
(by the way, SIL went on to have another healthy BOY. i was so glad.. there still is hope for us to have the girls in the family
)