Morning sickness 2

Here is one of the things I forgot to write about morning sickness.

I hugged this fact closely for a while, and proudly offered it up to people, because it is about science and therefore made me feel valid.

We had a private scan at nine weeks, because I was beginning to think that feeling so intensely nauseous and ill meant there was either something wrong, or it was twins. And, frankly, I was going a bit mental.

Having mentioned to the sonographer that the morning sickness was bad she pointed out that I had an ‘active’ corpus luteum. Which either causes or at least correlates with above-average nausea. Something to do with hormones, and the lining around the follicle that produced the egg being thick. Look, the details aren’t important. What mattered was, I had PROOF! That I wasn’t making it up.

A little bit of science is a dangerous thing to a hypochondriac. I felt so pleased, I bravely managed to go with Jon to Pizza Express afterwards and eat three courses, which was unusual and foolish.

Even better, when I googled it, I found some article that said bad nausea was usually associated with an active corpus luteum (I’m going to abbreviate this to ACL, because I’m going to mention it again, and because we love initialising things down in our family) on the right hand side, as opposed to the left. Guess which mine was on! Happy days.

Sadly it didn’t disappear for good then and there, which disproves the Lorraine Kelly theory. But it is substantially better now, at 13 weeks, which backs up the ACL theory. Once you get into your second trimester, the placenta takes over making the progesterone and all the busy stuff, so your ACL can relax, slim down and watch a bit of X Factor on Sky+, whizzing through all the blah bits.

The Lorraine Kelly theory was told to me, by Lorraine Kelly, by coincidence, when I was first pregnant. Apparently some study has shown that lots of women find their morning sickness disappears after they’ve had their first scan. Something about seeing the foetus is reassuring. Obviously this was never very appealing to me as a theory, because I don’t like any sort of ‘all in the mind’ inferences, and I wasn’t nauseous last time. But as Lorraine is officially the nicest and most sensible woman on telly I would repeat it. Also because I got to mention in passing that I’d had breakfast with Lorraine Kelly (porridge, toast and marmite, since you ask).

Anyway, we have now had the regular 12-week scan too, where the bean gave us a big wave, and things have been perking up ever since. But I think the timing is just a coincidence. I only tend to get the quease in the afternoons or evenings, which is partly why I am making the bol for our lasagne this morning. Such early prep makes me feel like quite the little housewife.

The other reason I am doing it now is because the carpet and sofa-cleaning man has been here for over two hours making The Most deafening noise, so I can’t do any work. It’s so bad that I just spelt deafening wrong twice, and had to think hard before working out how to correct it.

I have just been into the sitting room to have a pointless conversation. He wanted to show off his handiwork at removing some of the stains from the cream sofa (yes we have a toddler and we both tend to spill whatever we eat, but it’s a really nice sofa and it came from the Harrods sale, and my mother even haggled for it, while I hid in the loo) and to ask me what the dark brown marks are that wouldn’t come off. We ruled out chocolate, because he was pretty sure he’d got some of that off elsewhere on the cushions. With hindsight, I realise the point of this conversation was to shift some of the blame back on to me, rather than it being his fault he couldn’t remove some stains, at great expense, off a sofa he had previously scotchguarded to prevent marks staining permanently, at great expense.

Oh god, this is dull. This is a really bad post. I’m sure I used to be funnier. I heard this woman on the radio the other day, and her words have been ringing in my ears ever since. She basically said she went back to work after having a baby, because it was a choice between that and staying at home and writing a blog about poo.

It’s because of this noise. The industrial hoovering is taking place on an epic scale. It is audible nausea.

 I have now assembled the entire lasagne, because I can’t concentrate on anything, and to prevent me from eating the component parts. I’m quite pleased with how it looks, and the possibility that my culinary ability may have returned – last week I muffed up roast chicken, which shouldn’t really be possible at my age.

But noise is better than nausea, and cooking is better than feeling too sick to contemplate it. Moreover, I am jolly lucky to be pregnant. So it’s time I shut up.

Morning sickness

Sometimes, food takes on extra significance, that bears no relation to its quality or how hungry you are.

On planes, for example. Why is the trolley starting at that end? Will they run out of the chicken? Can I have your bread roll?

At weddings. We’re standing in the wrong place for the canapés – we must ditch these people and get over by the door, in the direct flightpath of the waiters. Mm hmm, uh huh, you met the bride’s mother on a cruise around Canada – why aren’t they coming over here, don’t they realise we’ve been here almost an hour and only had two? Oh god, those prawns look really nice, we’ve only had honeyed sausages so far, will there be enough left, don’t give them any more they’ve had loads, THAT MAN’S TAKEN TWO!

Logie has formed a habit of having a banana in the car on the way home from nursery. It gets him into the car more quickly, it’s pretty healthy, and it’s one of the few words where I am confident we are describing the same thing.

I peel it down two-thirds of the way, so he can eat it like a monkey. Sometimes there is a lot of shouting from the back when he needs the rest peeling, and it’s a tense few minutes til we can get to a red light (okay, sometimes just a traffic jam, surely policemen with children would understand) and I can turn around.

Sometimes he just sticks his snout into the bottom and manages to slurp the rest out using purely the pressure of his hand. Sometimes he continues to be so hungry that he starts nibbling the peel – though that might be because it gets a good reaction from me.

On Monday, disaster struck. There was a brown bit two-thirds of the way down and the banana snapped. He was inconsolable. This was tragedy like no other. His life was basically ruined.

I explained that it would taste just the same. I gouged out the brown bit with my fingers, despite not having checked I had something to wipe them on first. He wailed “NANAAAAAA!” all the way home at top volume, like someone outside a courtroom. Tears coursed down his face. Interestingly, when we got back, he had actually eaten most of it, which is puzzling and impressive as I don’t recall the noise dropping below a constant ten decibels at any point.

My relationship with food has had a new light shone on it in recent months because I am pregnant, and have been suffering from dire nausea. Morning sickness isn’t entirely accurate because it was pretty much all day, and I didn’t vomit – unless dramatic retching in the streets counts.

Happily, it is beginning to subside. Life is returning to normal. But it’s been very hard not writing about it, because it’s been so overwhelmingly the biggest deal in my life, and I am not good at keeping my own secrets. But I didn’t want to jinx things.

So basically, every post in the last 13 weeks has felt like a sham. When I started this blog, it was meant to be about how one’s baby seemed ill all the time, and then you got it too. With a shocking but moving personal twist about depression and ECT. But then the pregnancy nausea started and the thing seemed tailor-made. And I couldn’t write about it.

In fact, I couldn’t do pretty much anything. Like be cheerful, or do any effective work, or anything that didn’t involve staying perfectly still.

I went to the GP. She gave me some anti-histamine pills. I felt like a complete wimp – everyone else seemed to have had it (usually much worse, they pointed out graphically) but they coped with it much better. Permanent nausea began to feel like anxiety. I slept badly. I did a couple of near faints.

I saved up lots of funny things to say about it, and anecdotes to recount, when I was safely in my second trimester and could write about it. I have forgotten them all. Apart from the nice foreign man whose wife made him give me his free vitamin water on the way to watch Olympic tennis at Wimbledon. I’d been doing the retching. I said thank you so much, it’s because I’m pregnant. He shrugged and said something unintelligible that I nonetheless understood perfectly to mean ‘I know. It’s obvious. My wife was a complete drama queen too and if I don’t give you this bottle I’ll never hear the end of it.’

But food-wise it was very interesting. Because obviously when you feel sick you don’t want to eat. So for a few weeks, I didn’t, and lost a few pounds. And then I realised that eating something did sometimes make me feel better, albeit briefly. Either because of the blood sugar, or the distraction, or the way gluttony is hardwired into me.

So I have been on carbfest like no other. Biscuits, toast, pasta, pizza, baked potatoes. Thinking about food, and putting lots of it in my mouth, was strange when I felt so sick. But somehow I managed.

But, thank the Lord, it is fading, and I am getting my mojo back. In the scheme of things, it is just a broken banana incident. The important thing to remember is that we are incredibly lucky to have got pregnant again so quickly – if at all – and the new bean is due in March. And an excuse to eat for two.

Night sweats

Some embarrassing things have happened recently. Things that make you ransack your brain, just quickly, to double-check whether a way of winding back the last 15 minutes has recently been invented.

You know, like when you were at school and you realise you have just called the teacher ‘mummy’ in front of the whole class.

1)      I put my phone in the washing machine. This is more of an annoyance, and inconvenience. And STUPID.

I heard a faint ringing sound whilst standing in the kitchen, as I rang it from the landline. I thought it must be in another room. I noted that the washing machine was on and ruled it out. In a things-aren’t-quite-that-bad way that 15 years ago I would sometimes rule out someone quite spotty in a nightclub, only to be found wearily snogging them several hours later.

2)      I drafted a blog trying to pin the blame for this on Jon, then deleted it because it contained too many embarrassing details.

Okay, I didn’t delete it all, here’s an edited bit. I was washing the sheets when I put the phone in the machine because Jon’s night sweats have got worse. Generally, they are due to his reflux. But lately they have become drenching.

Hopefully this is due to an infection he picked up in Scotland on a work thing last week (the infection was a Prince Philip thing, and it really was a work thing, not a Prince Harry thing). Or the fact that he forgot to take his omeprazole. And not any of the scary things that feature night sweats as a symptom on the internet.

(That wasn’t too embarrassing was it? I mean, I didn’t mention the bit about the GP having to ask him if he’d had any new sexual partners recently.)

3)      Logie’s new word is ‘murder’. Said with a rolling Scottish accent, for some reason.

Two of our teenage neighbours took him to the park yesterday. (Oh how I love them. He adores them and all the attention, they think he is amusing and cute, and take pictures of him pulling funny faces on their phones. I go to bed for an hour.)

On the way back he apparently yelled “Murder! Murder!” and then started making a choking noise. Which I imagine was fairly embarrassing.

4)      As I came out of the osteo yesterday, Jon and Logie were waiting in reception. The osteo said to Logie, who was crab-clawing me to pick him up, “Daddy has taped up Mummy’s back to make it better, so she can’t pick you up”.

He swiftly correctly himself, and made a sort of joke out of it. I think I went pretty red.

Then I made the clearly insane decision to point it out to Jon once we were in the car, because I wasn’t sure whether he’d heard. He hadn’t. We both laughed, didn’t feel embarrassed at all, and then didn’t spend a few minutes in silence thinking about it.

5)      This hardly counts, as it didn’t happen to my family, and it’s more funny and feel-good than embarrassing. Newsreaders Charlotte Green and Harriet Cass are leaving Radio 4, and on the Today programme this morning they played some clips of Charlotte corpsing. I had to stay in the car to listen to the end, because they are just so irresistible.

 It is physically impossible not to laugh when you hear them. I defy you. Try them here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19486182. They are the best medicine.

Speaking of which, I am feeling a bit better on the anxiety front. Or least not any worse. Which is A Very Good Thing. And laughing helps a lot.

As does listening to a song called Celestine by a band called Spector very loudly in the car, whilst driving quite fast and singing aggressively. I recommend you try that too. But on your own, so you won’t be embarrassed.