The first three months of pregnancy are believed to be the worst. Due to fast hormonal change, your body experiences all kinds of weird stuff. Obviously, everyone knows the most common ones such as nausea and vomiting, because when you tell someone that you're pregnant they immediately pop the question ”Are you feeling sick?”. Even people who never met pregnant women know that morning sickness is an early pregnancy symptom. Typical movie scene; a woman vomiting in the bathroom while her colleague, as well as the best friend, enters asking if she's alright, later they go to buy a pregnancy test and voila! it's positive. That's why we know that every woman vomits when she gets pregnant. I swear, I wish I could vomit...
It was a few days before I got my faint positive when I started feeling sick. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was at work, having a really hard day, my body hurting, my nose running and I felt like I was having the flu. Nothing special during the winter in Taiwan, although in October it was not that cold yet. I was also very sleepy, and I remember thinking for a second that it might be a sign of egg implantation. And it probably was because a few days later I felt way better.
There were not many things related to pregnancy I was terrified about. However, one of them was vomiting and morning sickness. You need to know, I almost never vomit, and I hate it. Even when I had the worst hangovers in my life and I tried to force myself it never happened. I knew it would help...but it didn't go...Haha.
My ALL-DAY sickness started slowly when I was about 5 weeks. Firstly, my sense of smell became stronger than before. One day, I was getting out of the train station, my husband was waiting outside at the parking lot eating fried chicken, and I smelled that chicken while I was still inside the station. At that point, I could work at the airport as a sniffing dog. The problem started when all those smells became very unpleasant to me. Living in Taiwan, with all the street foods and restaurants, was the worst thing at that moment. The smell of fried chicken, the smell of 7eleven, and the smell of every Taiwanese food were killing me and making me nauseous. Obviously, this baby is not Taiwanese.
Nausea got stronger at week 6. I was not throwing up but I always felt like I was about to. I was waking up every morning with a stomach ache. My body wanted food and at the same time hated everything we got in the fridge. Just opening the fridge made me so sick every time. I forced myself to eat every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I couldn't see any Asian food. Rice, vegetables, and tofu were my biggest enemies and I was basically living on crackers, pasta, bread, potatoes, and eggs. The baby wanted carbohydrates only.
Sometimes on the way from work, I would grab a bag of Doritos for dinner. I felt bad for that little baby who tried to get nutritions from all that nasty food. The only healthy stuff I was able to eat was fruit, fresh grapefruit juice was my favorite for the first few weeks.
I never experienced such strong food aversions in my life. I always loved to eat but at that moment, food was my nightmare. Actually some of these aversions last until now, I'm 18 weeks pregnant and if you bring me a certain type of Chinese dumplings, I'd probably get sick. Same story with Buddhist vegetarian soup with Chinese herbs....blaaah...
Funny thing is that I was not the only one suffering at the beginning of my pregnancy. My husband started being suspicious when I was cooking spaghetti with tomato sauce almost every day. He came to me and said that from now on he will make his own food. Fine for me, I hated being in the kitchen and inhaling all the bad smells anyway.
All of this started fading away around week 9. I was eating pasta only three days a week and felt more confident to try other foods as well.
There was another thing which followed me for the whole first trimester - total exhaustion. I could sleep at any time, anywhere. Every activity, physical or mental, was extremely tiring. I went to sleep early, I woke up late. I slept on the way to work and on the way back. Sleeping pregnant beauty.
There were days we went for long walks after I finished work. We walked for about 8 kilometers. In the beginning, it seemed like a great idea and I felt OK with that. After a few days of this routine, my body stopped cooperating. One day, almost at the end of the track, I had a breakdown and I started crying. "I can't do this! My back hurts, my legs hurt, I'm so tired!"
My husband who was telling me from the beginning that he feels like I'm glowing and having some kind of attractive energy coming out of me, told me: "You shouldn't be surprised that your body hurts. You're a caterpillar who is changing to a beautiful butterfly." Isn’t it cute when your man is trying to make you feel better?
Between 10 to 11 weeks my lower back started paining me badly anytime I was standing, sitting for too long or spending more time in the kitchen. I had bad scoliosis when I was a kid, I went through some treatment but because I wasn't following it well, my spine never got to the right position. I knew that when I get pregnant I will suffer from back pains. Also, our kitchen countertop is so low (obviously made for Taiwanese) that I always have to bend.
A few weeks before Christmas, I got a kidney infection. It was nothing serious, even though the doctor I went to see that day made it look very serious. I wasn't scared at all because this was not the first time I had it. He offered me to stay in the hospital for a few days and get an IV with antibiotics. I refused because the hospital would make me sick even more, or at least that's how I felt. So I got medicine and spent the whole weekend in bed. Everything was fine after that.
At the end of my first trimester, most of the symptoms faded away, just the back pain and mild exhaustion still lasted (and it lasts till now).
When we got to know that we were pregnant, we decided to keep it a secret until the end of the first trimester. However, I told the secret to my closest friends, including my two cousins. My husband was a little angry when he got to know and said that I wasn’t capable of keeping any secret. It was very difficult and I was too excited, I had to tell at least somebody. Haha. We didn't tell our families until Christmas when it was exactly week 12. It was the best Christmas gift we could ever give to them. On Christmas Eve, I was waiting until 3 am (time difference between Taiwan and Czech is 7 hours) for my parents and my brother to open a package we sent them. Inside, there was a card saying that they're invited to spend the holidays in Taiwan and to meet a new family member. My mum was crying and I was crying the whole day after that. It was beautiful.
Overall, I have to say that the first three months of my pregnancy were easy and I'm happy about that. I just hope that my second and third trimester will go as smoothly as the first one.
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