Experiences of pregnancy

I had the morning sickness up until about 18 weeks, and that was pretty bad. And then second trimester was okay, third trimester I got sciatica really badly and I couldn’t walk very well, I had to have a special chair at work. I couldn’t even walk to the toilet up the stairs. When I talked to the midwife she basically just said, “Get crutches”, and I said [laughs], “This is hell on earth, I can’t walk to the toilet in my own house, I can’t even, I can’t walk without stabbing pains and I’ve got this continuous sciatica”. And they just seemed to brush it aside, ‘Oh it’s nothing’. So I felt a little bit let down. So it wasn’t a very positive experience from about the third trimester, I was in too much pain to enjoy anything. Even getting up at night time to go to the toilet, I had to hold on to the bed and then walk to the wall and hold on to the en suite wall, and it was only a few metres [laughs] from my bed to the en suite. It was hell that, that part.

I went to the physio but they couldn’t push it in, they just said, “It’s the position that the baby’s in, there’s nothing you can do about it and try not to move,” [laughs].

Second one was worse. So again was bad morning sickness until about 18 weeks, but I was much sicker, the effect, it was much worse the second time, and I was so tired. I remember falling asleep on the back step, watching my other one play in the sandpit; I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. And so second trimester I started to get pelvic separation and by third trimester I had such bad [laughs] pelvic separation I was wearing a brace to work.

So pregnancy, I had 24-hour-a-day nausea, which I just found really hard to cope with. It lowered my resilience I guess, and it felt very all-encompassing. It was really hard to focus or give attention to other things, particularly at work. And I remember in the movie ‘Look Who’s Talking’ Kirstie Alley is pregnant, and this is where all my perceptions come from, from what I see in movies, and she has nausea. And she goes to the bathroom and she throws up and then she comes back to her desk and she sits and she goes back to work, and that’s what I thought it would be like. You’d just, you know, you’d go and throw up if you need to and then you go back to work, and I couldn’t do it. I’d go and throw up in the toilets and then all I’d want to do is go home and climb into bed and just have to focus on that and not have to focus on getting work done.

I found it immensely difficult on the train of a morning going into town. My GP gave me this recommendation to carry a plastic bag in my handbag so I that I always had something to throw up into if I needed to. It just places this pressure on you that I had never felt before, and I remember feeling like I didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. If this is what being pregnant is like I don’t want it, you can have it back. And my mum said to me, “You know, it’s only six more weeks and then you should feel better”, and the thought of six more weeks felt like a lifetime. The thought of just getting through the day felt like a lifetime.

So it was very draining, just very difficult – and again it placed a strain on the relationship with my husband because on the weekends he’d say, “Do you want to go out, do you want to go to a café, would you like to do this, would you like to do that?” and I said, “I don’t want to do anything, I just want to be at home with a bucket in my tracksuit pants [laughs] doing nothing”, because I just felt rotten. And you inevitably compare yourself to other people and the very early pre-birthing classes that I went to, they were talking about the importance of healthy eating and exercise and other pregnant ladies would say, “I go swimming four times a week”, and “I’m walking and I’m doing this”, and I thought, ‘I’m lucky if I can make to the letterbox and back’.

So you start to feel perhaps a bit bad in yourself about how you’re managing the pregnancy and already that feeling of, ‘Am I doing the right thing by my child, you know, who’s growing in my belly, because I’m not exercising and I’m not eating properly because I’m only eating what I can manage to keep down?’ Cruskits were great for me, I could manage to keep down Cruskits, but fruit and vegetables were not great. So already you’re feeling like, ‘Am I being a good mother, am I doing the right thing?’. And inevitably you came to the conclusion that perhaps you weren’t but it was the only way that you could manage to cope, I think.

So that’s okay but generally I must say that the pregnancy really surprised me how physically demanding it is. Maybe having waited a little bit later in my life made a difference to that – it just feels heavier and it feels more exhausting than the younger glowing mothers that appear.

And I can see that it’s a sacrifice. I’ve got a newfound respect for pregnant women and I will from now on question when they tell you how happy they are whether that is true because that’s the perception I gained before falling pregnant that pregnancy is lovely and exciting and sure, on many levels it is but the physical changes that happen to you and the daily aches you have.

And how sleep gets disturbed to the point that for me going to bed is actually the least pleasant part of the day because I feel breathless and I feel dizzy and I don’t feel comfortable and I can’t sleep.

I feel like nobody told me that, as if they either kept it to themselves, surely I’m not the only one going through these symptoms.

And I feel like the pregnancy affects my productivity. I’m always very goal-oriented person so to come home and not having energy to do what I would have normally done. Or not being able to walk somewhere as fast as I would have liked or as far.

I find it very limiting and other women say to me that maybe that’s a lovely excuse, take it easy, you don’t have to have the house this clean. But I’m wired differently. I want to have things in order … And it is important for me so I’m giving up a part of myself even in that space, where that doesn’t make me happy.

I found it really difficult and I was supposed to be really excited when we got pregnant, we were both thrilled but I got really sick.

I felt good for like a week. I’m like, ‘I can totally do this pregnant thing,’ and I just had this feeling, I just had this ridiculous idea that I’d be a bump and I’d be rosy and glowing and I could still walk and I could wear those tops to show off the belly.

I put on 10 kilos within about 30 seconds of being pregnant. I now know that it’s because I developed a form of arthritis which messes with your metabolism, whatever. So I had ongoing health issues throughout the whole thing, but I had no idea. So I couldn’t do any exercise, I could hardly walk, I could definitely not run, and I was emotionally… I’ve really bad psoriasis and the type of arthritis that I get is psoriatic arthritis. So it’s connected to psoriasis. I’d never had it before, never been diagnosed before, but looking back I’ve had it since I was a kid, it just wasn’t that serious. So the flare-ups went sort of undetected in an arthritis context.

The type of psoriasis and arthritis that I get is triggered by an immune system overloaded stress on your body which is exactly what pregnancy is [laughs]. So looking back that started pretty much straightaway, that achiness and, yeah, that beached whale thing.

So it was a really awful pregnancy and I felt really conflicted through the whole thing because this is all I wanted my whole life, and not only is this what I wanted my whole life but I left a heterosexual relationship and a heterosexual identity to be true to myself and I still am managing to have this amazing gift and living my dream and I am hating every single second of it.

I feel awful, I don’t know who I am, my whole relationship with my body has changed, I can’t do anything, I feel like a lousy partner, what if I’m a terrible mother as well? It was awful, it was really awful. And you’re not supposed to be miserable when you’re pregnant.

I was not convinced about having a second child as much as my partner was, and then I came round to the idea of it and we conceived and that was great, and everyone in the family felt comfortable about it. My daughter was very excited, I was very excited, but as it got closer to having the child it felt like I was getting closer and closer to a cliff and I was going to fall into the abyss.

From my previous experience as a mental health worker, I started to spot warning signs that I needed to have some kind of communication. Because I think that the first step in anything, when you think that there’s something going wrong with your head, because that’s the first thing people spot, the first thing to do is to actually talk to people about it. So we’ve had a very open communication with my partner, and we’ve been able to talk a lot about the way that I’ve been feeling. And I’ve also been quite lucky, that I have quite a tight-knit group of male friends who are actually the partners of – my partner has a mum’s group, so there’s probably six mums who hang out every week with the kids, and they’ve all grown up together.

And the dads have actually got a tight bond now. And without trying to scare the males into having sort of bonding and talking sessions, that’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s been really useful. Because it’s not just me who’s been going through this, there’s been a couple of other guys who are in a similar situation of just stress, panic, fear, all of those sorts of things, coming out into the open. I think it’s the fear of the unknown, and wondering whether you can actually cope with having another child. There’s always an assumption that a guy can cope with everything that’s thrown at him and there’s not so much availability for support networks.

And there’s an assumption that a guy can get through this without any help. And yeah, I don’t feel strong enough to be able to do that. I’ve broken down a number of times. And by that I mean lots of crying and thinking that I can’t do it and I don’t have enough mental strength to get through the situation. But being able to express that has been very, very useful. As I got closer to the time of the birth I was much more excited about the birth.

I think because of having these sessions talking with my wife and talking with my friends, I came to realise that it was actually getting to the point more of excitement and more of an adventurous kind of spirit than a fear spirit. I think I described it as rather than just jumping off a cliff into the abyss more like actually going cliff jumping, which is something I used to do as a kid. Which was dangerous, scary, but ultimately rewarding and fun, and I think it was good to go in with that kind of mindset into the birth, rather than anything else.

Yeah this is a big thing. Because when I married my husband here I was in Afghanistan. Then I’m pregnant. Then they give me the visa to come here but my family don’t want me to come here because of my pregnancy and my husband wants me to come here because in Afghanistan not good, killing and these things.

When he heard about the twins then he say, ‘You come, birth must be here because here is very good’, the nurse and clinic and things and that’s why I came here and had the babies. I was eight months pregnant, then after one month my babies arrive.

Then I got sent home. And I was already anxious about going home as well because we had a lot of roadworks going on in the street so the street was blocked off and I’m thinking, ‘What if I need an ambulance and they can’t get through the street?’ and there was just so many things that were against me at the time, and my partner couldn’t take time off work either so the only option was to have someone come look after me.

So my mum came and looked after me while I was at home and that was really nice and in my mind I thought it was going to be a really nice time for us together because our relationship has always been a little bit strained I suppose. I thought that it would be a nice opportunity for us to come together and whatnot but, we had our moments but it was very stressful. It was hard on both of us, I think. She didn’t have a car, so she was coming up on the train and it all came to a head one day and we had a huge argument and she went off home, and then I found out that she actually had cancer. My sister told me that she had cancer and she was holding off telling me until I got further along in the pregnancy. And so, of course, I felt rotten [laughs]. So we patched things up – but I mean just because someone becomes ill it doesn’t mean that the past is all forgotten. And so then I was just having all these conflicting feelings of you know, ‘Oh my goodness my mum has cancer- but I still have a lot of unresolved issues from when I was young,’ and all that kind of thing. So I just felt mentally just even during my pregnancy I was just being pulled in so many different directions. You know, feelings of guilt, feelings of sadness, feelings of loss already.

It was an awful pregnancy. Basically I think the week I found out I was pregnant I had my first bleed and I thought, ‘This is a doomed pregnancy. This is not normal’. So I was quite reconciled that I would not carry this pregnancy to term. And the doctors got me in quite quickly. I think it’s a difference also when you go privately to the birth. Well, you get what you pay for, don’t you? So we went in for our first scan within that week, and they don’t normally scan you at five weeks.

So they could see that I had a sub-chorionic haematoma, which is like a blood sac next to the gestational sac. That was – it was bigger than the baby at that stage. And they said, “Prepare yourself for the worst, because the bleed could push the foetus out”. And there was nothing they could do really. It is what it is. So I was going on and I was just bleeding all the time and, you know, being pregnant and bleeding does your head. I know what it was like when I was bleeding when I had my fourth child. It was horrendous, you know. You just can’t relax. But, I mean, there was a break there. It wasn’t happening all the time, whereas this was constant bleeding and it was awful.

I couldn’t function. I just felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time. It was like, ‘Can you either just make up your mind, are you going to stay or are you going to go, but don’t have this constant’. Because going to the toilet was doing my head. It was a constant reminder that things were not normal. And there’d be days where all of a sudden it would just be a huge bleed, and I’d think, ‘Oh God, is this it’? You know, it was awful. So I could never relax. I was always just really tense, which is not a good thing to be when you’ve got five other kids to look after as well and life to continue.

I got scanned quite regularly and basically this haematoma was big and it just needed to just bleed out. And that’s what it did and it was either going to take the baby with it, or it wasn’t. As it was, it didn’t, which was fantastic, but it was horrible. That lasted for 22 weeks, where I just bled all the time, and then all of a sudden it just stopped [laughs]. And they did the scan and they found they could see that it had gone and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God, I can finally relax and enjoy this pregnancy’.

So the very first month we tried I got pregnant. And it ended up being an ectopic and it was horrendous and I had surgery and it was incredibly painful and I had three blood transfusions and I’m never, ever going back to [hospital name] for any reason.

So after that I had to heal and it was emotionally difficult, but it was just one more thing. We just kind of kept it aside – so that was pretty horrible. So we kept trying, once I’d recovered. It took a few months, because I was just so lacking in iron, and we started trying again and then just couldn’t, because I’d lost one fallopian tube. So, I really felt violated and brutalised and it was hard. But, you know, we really wanted to have children.

So my mother had said she would help us and she gave us some money so we would be able to afford to do IVF and we did three IUIs, which weren’t successful and even though my husband has this amazingly high, fantastic sperm count, it just didn’t work. So we had to try IVF and we only did two cycles and the first time we had two implanted and it didn’t work and at that point I thought we’ve got to give this all we could do. I’m always on the internet, so I’d known the statistics on how hard it was going to be at my age, because by then I was 41, 42, while we were doing this and anything over 35 can be very difficult. Over 40 you are incredibly lucky.

So I thought we’ve just got to go all out. We can’t keep affording to do this forever. So we found a woman, through a friend of mine, through word of mouth. Found this woman who was a Chinese herbalist and naturopath and I’d read that acupuncture is really good for IVF. So she had me on all these potions and things I had to drink, herbal remedies and, acupuncture quite a lot and – that cost us thousands too. But I think it really made the difference. So three months later, from the first IVF we went again.

We’re incredibly lucky and having gone through one pregnancy and one child, I don’t know that I would have had the second embryo put in and gone through it again a couple of years later. So I think we’re very lucky that we have both.