Hellobee

When my family first arrived in Austin, Texas, by way of camper adventure, our newfound friends would often ask us, “Where did you move from?”

“We moved from Kauai in Hawaii,” I’d tell them. Then, the next question would inevitably come: “Wait, what? Why the hell would you move from Hawaii to Texas?”

It boggled anyone’s mind that we would choose to leave Kauai’s lush jungles and beautiful beaches – ultimately quintessential paradise – to arrive in the flatlands of Texas.

What I didn’t often talk about was the fact that I suffered from hypermesis gravidarum so severe that it completely changed my association with the entire island. Rather than feeling like Kauai was a magical place I had dreamed of living all my life, it became a place where I could no longer stand to be. Given that I was perpetually nauseous for 38 weeks straight, even after I gave birth, the smell of a hibiscus flower or the feel of the sun on my skin would make me want to vomit all over again.

That’s how intense hypermesis gravidarum can be — it can make you want to move away from paradise.

While many women suffer from “morning sickness” in the first trimester, hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) is an intense pregnancy complication characterized by severe nausea, vomiting, weight loss, and possibly dehydration. Other symptoms may include vomiting many times a day and feeling faint.

For me, my first trimester officially ended on my birthday. I woke up that morning with all the hope in the world that what so many other mothers shared with me would prove right, “It’ll get better after your first trimester is over!” Much to my dismay, it didn’t.

In fact, it got much worse.

Within the first three months of pregnancy, I did everything I could to alleviate my nausea: essential oils, wrist bands for motion sickness, chewing gum, eating ginger, constantly snacking, drinking carbonated beverages, even apps that were supposed to rewire my brain chemistry. I tried anything and everything that had been written about online or shared with me from midwives and fellow mothers.

NOTHING HELPED.

Once, when I was taking a shower, I started throwing up the smoothie my then-husband made for me. A chunk of peach got caught in my throat and I literally could not breathe. I tried to cough it up over and over again. I started to make my way out of the shower as I realized I was officially choking. Feeling increasingly panicked, I thought, ‘I can’t ram my stomach against the edge of this sink; what will it do to my baby??’ 

I didn’t know if I could make it out of the room to the kitchen to get my husband’s attention. As I started to make my way there, naked and dripping with water, I finally coughed the piece up and out of my throat. I gasped for air. I finally stumbled to my husband and cried as I told him what happened.

Then, 15 minutes later, I got struck with a migraine. I could not believe that I had almost died and was now spending the next six hours bed-ridden in pain.

.  .  .  .  .

As the second trimester got underway, we simply made a makeshift bed on the bathroom floor for me, since there were days that I couldn’t even get up to make it back and forth between my bed and my bathroom. I would collapse in front of the open door of the refrigerator, sucking in the coolness and knowing I couldn’t eat anything that wouldn’t simply come up a few minutes later.

I did my best not to take medication to alleviate the nausea. This was my first pregnancy, and I wanted to do it as holistically and naturally as possible. Yet, after one particularly bad bout of nausea where I was continuously sick from 6am to 6pm, I finally relented and called the local doctor.

He prescribed anti-nausea medication that we picked up with a few minutes to spare before the pharmacy closed. After the medication kicked in, I could finally sit up, get to the couch, and have a bite of bread. Unfortunately, the doctor didn’t tell me the meds would cause constipation, which then exacerbated my nausea for the next 48 hours.

I went to see an acupuncturist, something other mothers on the island swore would help. Once the session was over, I got up, got into the passenger seat of the car, and after a minute on the road, I immediately asked my husband to pull-over. It took a monumental amount of effort to even get those words out, because there were times in the previous weeks, I couldn’t even lift my head to say so, and I’d just throw up out the window as we were driving.

This time, I projectile vomited the second he pulled over.

“Wow,” was all he could say.

There was something exhausting about continually getting my hopes up that I could finally find a remedy, only to realize whatever I tried didn’t work. I began to fall into a sense of hopelessness that only in retrospect did I wish I approached myself with much more self-compassion.

.  .  .  .  .

“Get whatever nutrients you can,” my midwives advised on a follow-up. “I don’t care if it’s a Coca Cola, you just need calories. Your baby will take all the nutrients it needs from whatever you’ve had on reserve.” It didn’t seem like Hot Cheetos were a viable food source, but they were one of the few things I could eat where the spicy and savory and salty could mitigate my need to throw up. I began to feel guilty that I was setting my baby up in the most unhealthy of ways until again and again, they reminded me that right now, I was simply in survival mode.

All I needed to focus on? Simply getting through each moment.

At one point, when I went into the local Hawaiian clinic to get an IV placed into my arm, the doctor suggested, “Have you thought of smoking weed?”

“What?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well,” he responded, “Have you heard that weed is used to alleviate nausea?”

“Yes,” I said, “but in cancer patients.”

He looked at me, “What do you think cancer is?”

“A foreign entity growing in your body?” I responded.

“What do you think pregnancy is?” he said.

“A foreign entity growing in my body?” I followed in quiet shock.

By the third trimester, I could finally get out of the house to go do simple things, like walking around an air-conditioned supermarket. It was a small feat, one that aimed to stave off the isolation I’d been experiencing. As I hobbled around the store, I’d look at everyone and think, ‘Do you know what it took to bring you into the world?!’ 

.  .  .  .  .

Some of the most challenging parts of HG goes beyond the physical sickness — it’s the mental, emotional, and even spiritual turmoil you can also go through.

One of the hardest elements of my HG was that I had been a yoga teacher and Reiki energy healing master for the better part of a decade, and I was angry at the Universe that nothing was working to get me through this ordeal. In a way, I also thought I was failing in some way by not “manifesting” a different reality until I realized that my physical body is a very real thing.

When I reached out to yogi friends to ask for their support, they also thought I could escape my physical circumstance by creating a different reality.

“Have you tried meditating?”

At this, I would get exceptionally angry. I wanted to shout, ‘Do you know that when I close my eyes, I’m dizzy and want to hurl more? I can’t sit up to meditate!’

What’s so challenging about HG is that so few people can know what it’s like. My best description of it to both men and women is: imagine it’s the worst hangover you’ve ever had for almost nine months straight.

After moving to Austin, I began to see a therapist who would later diagnose that the hyperemesis gravidarum I suffered from was actually a medical trauma. And, because of that, I experienced peri-partum depression, which would later become an intense post-partum depression that actually didn’t completely escalate until my daughter was two years old.

Now, my daughter is almost four and the experience with HG has made it so that I would never choose to get pregnant again. I know that so many people say each pregnancy is different, but it’s not an experience I want to have the chance of repeating at all.

The biggest blessing of this intense experience is that I actually reframed my relationship with my body entirely.

HG helped completely heal my eating disorder and body image issues which I had already spent a decade working through — by taking away the freedom to purge, I never wanted to do it again. And, after giving birth to our baby girl, I appreciated my body in profound ways I had never done before.

Less than nine months of my life were spent creating an epic little being who has opened up my heart and my eyes in ways I could never have anticipated. I would never give her up for anything. But, the experience with HG does give me pause on what it can take to create magic in your world.

And, that you can indeed get through it!