What It’s Really Like
to Have HG!
So the media described Princess Kate’s
Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) as “acute
morning sickness”.
Please. This is what she is going through.
This is what it really feels like to have HG …
A week or so before your period, waves of
nausea interrupt your day. One evening
you start to vomit. By the time you take a
pregnancy test, you have been vomiting a
couple of times a day – you know you’re
pregnant before that little blue line tells
you. Instead of joyfully celebrating your
much longed-for baby, the moment is
fraught with fear. How will you cope with
this level of nausea and vomiting for the
predicted 12 weeks? Little do you know
that Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) often
bypasses this magic number, lasting for at
least half the pregnancy, or sometimes,
the whole nine months.
Nausea keeps you up at night – no position
you lay in eases it. Rolling over ever-so
gently causes you to vomit. The only thing
you can do is cry. This is not even the
morning … morning is much worse. You try
to get out of bed and carry on with your
life as normal, but it causes violent
vomiting every time. You are in both
disbelief and fear after you vomit for the
seventh time in an hour.
3
A week later, you realize the devastating
nausea never leaves, and the incessant
vomiting goes on all day and night. You
are crippled with sickness, rendered
bedridden 24 hours a day. You’re
desperately worried about your baby
because you have not been able to eat a
morsel of food, and the thought of
drinking any kind of fluid brings on a
swell of nausea and more vomiting. Yet
you’re so thirsty – you’re hot, you feel
dry and arid inside, and all you want to
do is gulp great glassfuls of some sort of
liquid. You shiver as if with a fever, but
it’s your body responding to
dehydration.
You haven’t showered in days because
the one time you tried, the raining drops
were enough to make your weakened
body so faint you had to lie on the floor
tiles. Reaching up to turn off the tap was
all you could manage until someone
came and dressed you and carried you
back to bed.
Written by: Felicity Lenehan
Continued on page 4