Day 41.
This is a not-very-interesting post about my stomach. You have been warned.
Every morning, at least an hour before I eat breakfast, I have to take medication. I have to take it first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach. I’ve had to do this for several years, and even before I got pregnant, this sucked, because for some reason, cold water on an empty stomach makes me want to puke. It’s like I can feel the water go down my esophagus and hit my stomach, and my stomach says, “Look kid, that is not what I was looking for, and you know it.” Now, truthfully, I suspect it is more temperature than it is the actual water, but the fact that I have to wait an extra hour before I can put something real in my stomach after that is a nuisance. After all, I’ve awakened feeling, for lack of a better description, hungover since about birth, and breakfast is the only cure for some reason. I’m not a morning person, and without breakfast, that only gets worse.
The great thing about pregnancy so far, though, is that I inevitably wake up at about 6:30 for a few minutes, and usually I’ve been able to raise myself to a level of consciousness to shovel the pill and some water into my mouth and fall back to sleep before my stomach gets pissed off. All good. When I wake up, I can eat right away, and all is well. Except when I don’t wake up and remember to choke down my meds. Then waking up is Hell. I wake up. Drink water on very empty stomach. Stay awake. Wait an hour. Hunger now making me feel sick. Bad news.
And my stomach has started to become strangely fussy. Normally, I try to get some grains, some protein, and some fruit into my breakfast, and that’s worked out pretty well so far. This morning, though, I wasn’t very hungry. So I had some strawberries and a yogurt, but skipped out on having one of the super-yummy pumpkin-oat muffins I made last week. And 20 minutes later, when the food hit my stomach, it was not happy. A glass of milk and a muffin later, it was fine. And damned if I know why.
So far, it’s not so much morning sickness, or even all day sickness. This could change tomorrow or next week, so I will enjoy it while I can. I’m not generally nauseous. I’ve been very careful to eat when I’m hungry, except when I forget to take my meds early, and all has gone well so far, though it’s early days yet. The problem is that I can get hungry at any time – it’s instantaneous – and if I don’t eat when my stomach calls, that’s when I start to feel really bad. Not just tired, but sick to my stomach. It’s not even that I need to eat all that much, but if I’m somewhere without food, my stomach seems to be hinting that in the very near future, it and I are going to have problems.
Really all I seem to be suffering, though, are cravings and aversions. Carrots sound horrible all the time, and I have to disguise their taste to get them down (normally, carrots are one of the few raw vegetables that I can happily chomp). Indian food sounds fantastic, always. And spinach. So I could pretty much subsist on palak paneer if I weren’t so crappy at making it and it weren’t so expensive to go out and eat constantly. Also, I’m not sure that counts as a balanced diet. Chocolate sounds awful. Tomatoes sound incredible, even though they put bumps on my tongue. But Campbell’s tomato soup sounds revolting – too sweet – and even worse if made the way my mom makes it (with milk). As a matter of fact, the only thing I can seem to stand much milk in lately is milk – I drink milk in my (now caffeine-free Rooibos) tea usually, but that thought makes me ill now. Inevitably about halfway through the cup I want to be sick and put it down. And yogurt… well… I can usually eat the yogurt, but sometimes about halfway through that too I want to yark (a particularly appropriate term for vomiting I attribute to Jenny Kriefall in high school – thanks, Jenny!). Sweets of all kinds sound really bad – I got us some German chocolate for easter and had about half a bar before I surrendered it all to my husband. But a cow? I could eat a cow. The smell of the potato pancakes I made the other day with garlic, though, made me want to lose my dinner before I’d eaten it. So it’s really unpredictable.
It’s iffy. And I hate being a slave to my stomach, even if it is keeping me from eating crap, for the most part.
In other news, we’re almost to 6 weeks! And this time, so far, no bleeding.
*fingers crossed*
Professional computer geek and linguist living in Germany, doing infosec stuff and being the freakiest mother ever.
