HG Awareness Day -- Our Journey

In the same way that HG seems to have completely taken over my blog for the last almost-year, it completely consumes your life. I still have not completed the PICC line series because I am editing pictures for it, a surprisingly long process, but I wanted to do this.  You see, today is Hyperemesis Gravidarum Awareness Day.

Didn't know there was such a thing? 

Yeah, me either, until this year anyway.  In fact, prior to this year I was completely and blissfully unaware of pretty much anything to do with HG.  Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

While I certainly shared a lot here on the blog about infusion pumps, IVs, and doctors appointments I feel like I never really talked about HG.  I know that sounds really contradictory, but I rarely touched on the emotions or described how sick I was, it was certainly implied but never explained.  This was largely because acknowledging hell, while you are walking through it, is incredibly hard to do.  I worked extremely hard at remaining positive, and admitting out loud how hard day to day survival was ... well, that made the reality, the depression, and the fear all that more real.  It was easier to just focus on the mechanics of day to day living -- how to use a Reglan Pump, how to sleep with an IV hooked up to you -- rather than begin to touch the explosive iceberg of how it made me FEEL.  

I think I will attempt to do that now.  Because this condition is horrible, and the only way we will ever be rid of it is to build awareness and hopefully a cure someday ...

The hardest part of HG, emotionally, is the isolation.  It is deeply, profoundly, cripplingly isolating.  

Showing off after my first IV.  I had over 40, not including
the 24/7 infusions with the PICC line.

I was bedridden at first, so I was away from my husband and children.  I couldn't go anywhere at all for the first several months, so I saw no one outside of my immediate family.  Even once I was a little better, actually socializing was pretty impossible.  I couldn't go anywhere with food for fear of getting sick.  

And no one gets it.  I had a lot of loving people around me, but I was the only one vomiting bile several times a day.  I wouldn't pretend to understand what it was like for those who love me to have to watch me deteriorate, either.

The time that is meant to be your happiest is also your most miserable.  You are robbed of the joy that pregnancy brings.  While no one is comfortable for ALL of their pregnancy, the very nature of it is physically a challenge for most women, there are still good days.  Still things to look forward to.  While the end result of an HG pregnancy is the same as that of a regular "fluffy" pregnancy -- you have a baby -- the joyful stuff is difficult, if not impossible, to just enjoy.  

How much medication will I have to take to not puke on my guests at the baby shower?  Will I even be able to sit up that long?

Every time the baby kicks you get more nauseated, its like motion sickness from the inside.

I don't marvel at my changing body, I weep as I see myself deteriorate.  

While I get to see my baby a lot at all these ultrasounds, I hold my breath for the first 10 seconds until I see that flash of a heartbeat is still there...

Small sample of medical supplies

My first trimester is a blur to me now.  Honestly, I don't know how we survived.  I barely made it out of bed most days, I hid under the covers, dry heaving and sobbing, while my husband cooked the kids dinner.  I started to loose weight, first only a few pounds, then twenty.  I could see that my legs had actually atrophied from being so bed-ridden.  Neither my husband nor I really told anyone.  At that point we were both really thinking this would lift soon, surely.  I shared much of my later trimesters on Facebook from my phone with friends and family who'd ask, but I couldn't even get to the computer in the beginning or stand the sight of my phone scrolling.  When I was able to, I had to stay away from Facebook and Pinterest because of all the food posted on both.  

At the end of that first trimester I was incredibly sick despite being on pills and my doctor panicked and began my home health care journey.  Any hope I had that I would be "normal" again was foolish, but I wasn't at death's door anymore.  Anti-nausea medication is poorly named because it does not, in fact, remove your nausea.  It makes it so you throw up less, if you are lucky.  Treatment for HG is more hope than science, the medications I was taking are not approved for use in pregnant women and are usually given to those undergoing chemotherapy.  

I eventually did get a reprieve from the actual throwing up, but I never stopped the nausea or dry heaving.  I actually wretched so bad the morning of my induction I was scared I would pull muscles again and it would hinder my ability to handle labor.  

While other pregnant women could look forward to things, I was surviving.  While other pregnant women could indulge in cravings I was avoiding food at all costs or identifying my "safe" foods (the ones I magically could keep down or were less punishing for me to throw up).  While other pregnant women were combing over baby name books, reveling in the exciting hope and plans that come with the addition of a new person to the world, I was vomiting thirty times a day.  I was hurting, everywhere.  I was dry heaving more times than I could count with such force I pulled muscles.  I burst blood vessels in my eyes and capillaries on my face with the force of my throwing up.  I didn't need to see or think about, or smell food to get sick, the way normal women with morning sickness do.  Speaking, the simple act of opening my mouth, would make me throw up.  I would whisper to my husband when he'd ask me something, because the vibration of my vocal chords would make me throw up.  I had the constant taste of death in my mouth.  I was so weak that moving at all, was just too much some days.  

Source: http://www.helpher.org/

My stomach was covered in bruises and welts from my infusion pump and my bad reactions to it.  My arms were littered with puncture marks from IV sticks, at least half of them failures.  My veins were so scared they were palpable to even my untrained hands because they were so hard.  My lips were permanently chapped from the near constant state of dehydration.  My gums would bleed because of how much I was puking and because I could barely brush my teeth because the toothbrush made me gag -- a sick irony if you ask me.  I have scars from both of my PICC lines.  Our house was taken over by medical supplies, boxes arrived each week and my husband moved furniture based on how easy it would be to drag an IV cart around.  

I wanted desperately to not be pregnant, but was simultaneously terrified of my pregnancy ending.  I was supremely guilty for thinking of myself.  I wanted relief, and the only way I'd get it was to survive until my due date. I was terrified that I wouldn't get better, that we wouldn't make it, that there would be some horrible lasting impact on my baby from lack of nutrition or the countless medications I was taking.  Some women with HG suffer from organ failure.  Some women lose their baby.  Some have even died themselves.  

It was hell.  And few people can begin to approach understanding it because we all have our own experiences ... and we all have our own challenges and crosses to bear.

At three years old, the Beans drew me with an
IV and infusion pump because it
became normal

HG was undoubtedly the most challenging thing I have ever lived through.  It changed me as a person on a level few things can.  Honestly, I cannot think of an element of my life it did not change.  The experience taught me a lot about myself as a person, a lot about my incredible husband, a lot about my closest family and friends.  I took refuge in my faith because I had little else.  I watched both of my existing children mature in a way that was both painful for me and warmed my heart.  

I read somewhere that women who's mothers battled HG have a higher risk of developing it themselves.  This saddens me more than I can express.  My daughter is already an HG survivor and if she chooses to become a mother she may have to face it in a different way.

This means I have to do my part in raising awareness over the next twenty some odd years.
This means we need to find a cure, or at least a reasonable means of treatment.

Now.