Lost At Sea
During my pregnancy, I literally threw up all day long.
by Kris Malone Grossman
November 30, 2006
When I got knocked up around Valentine's Day several years ago, I was relieved when morning sickness hit: nausea indicated a strong "take" — and, so said the doc and veteran mommies, would last only the first trimester. Then bam: at eight weeks, I really began to hurl. So much so that I got horizontal on my puffy-cushioned family room couch, where, for the next few months, I would live — and vomit, so much I christened my hardcore morning sickness XMS, a new extreme sport.The nausea crescendoed in hourly bouts of seasickness that inspired me to greet my husband from the "Good Ship Couch" with a weak "Ahoy."
Though my case of XMS combined action, endurance, and danger, its intensity alone qualified it for X status. To understand what I mean by intensity, take your average case of morning sickness, or, if you've never been pregnant, your most violent stomach bug, or else your most crippling hangover (or, of course, if you're prone to seasickness, a tumultuous bay cruise). Then imagine it lasting all day and all night (morning sickness? — a woeful misnomer) — for months. And it's not just eating, or thinking about eating, or thinking about thinking about eating, that gags you: light, sound, abrupt movement, water, breath (even your own) — living — makes you heave. It keeps you vomiting, often bile and blood, until you're certain what's coming up is your entire GI tract and possibly your nascent pregnancy, too. It's the kind of sickness that, if left untreated, could actually kill you, and that, even when aggressively treated, feels like it may kill you anyway.
It didn't kill me, no small thanks to a thrice-daily stunt I practiced early on, ingesting Zofran, an anti-emetic often prescribed to chemotherapy patients. This drug, like my prenatal vitamins (which incidentally smelled of Canal Street in late August), not only came in a supersized capsule version, but in a spectacular irony I actually had to dissolve the awful thing under my tongue, an arduous endeavor, considering. In the event I didn't throw up during this task, and actually absorbed the medication, it only sometimes eradicated vomiting, and rarely quelled nausea itself. In my case, the nausea crescendoed in hourly bouts of enervating seasickness that inspired me to greet my husband, Ed, from the "Good Ship Couch" as we called it, with a weak "Ahoy" — and, on better days, with a wink. The Good Ship was a nondescript, cream-colored sofa bequeathed to us by Ed's younger sister, which, though semi-threadbare, beat the sick-person feeling of a bed and also happened to be where we'd conceived. Back when we didn't know there was such a thing as XMS, or that I'd have it until the moment I gave birth (for good measure, I threw up throughout labor, too) to our first son.
The arduous nature of this pregnancy should have made us take extreme birth control measures before we boarded the Good Ship for another late-night-love cruise during a midnight screening of Jaws, just before our son's first birthday. "Just this once," we said — after all, I was still nursing. But we knew better. We just had a dual case of PND, or permanent nerve damage, resulting from the early stages of parenting when, sleep-deprived, beholden to the love hormone oxytocin and hence, severely demented, we believed we might want to issue another yummy-cheeked progeny from my still-recovering, semi-incontinent loins, hellpit pregnancy be damned. A few weeks post "just this once," after reading and rereading the positive result on the pregnancy dip stick, flashing through the seven stages of grief, and even briefly considering termination, I joked with Ed. "There are no accidents," I said. We had always wanted at least two kids, and, like a war veteran who inexplicably longs to return to the trench, I actually found myself thrilled by the idea of gestating another baby. If it meant a little nausea, so be it (a determination reached by yet another parenting-related syndrome, selective amnesia). Besides — call it hubris (or stupidity) — Ed and I didn't really believe XMS would hit twice.
©2006 Kris Malone Grossman and Nerve Media
About the Author
|
|
Related Articles
|
|
Kris Malone Grossman earned a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught writing at Hofstra University. Her work appears in the anthology The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change. She makes her home in Ridgefield, CT, with her husband and three sons. |
|
|
-
by Logan Hill
Why I'm happy to pay for help.
-
by Joel Schwartzberg
One night in the life of a custody arrangement.
-
by Sasha Brown-Worsham
Having a baby changed my stance on abortion.
|
