“I was one of the unlucky ones developing tokophobia and HG. I could not hold any food or water down, I lost a lot of weight, I felt terrible…“
Pregnancy. That all-natural state of being for young women with uteri. A time where a woman blooms into full flower, the climax of her existence. Or at least, these are the problematic messages teenage girls and young women receive about their place in the world, their bodies and their identity. So as a young woman I was eager to tick the boxes in the recipe of a fulfilled life of a woman.
I wanted children, oh I wanted them so badly!
Everything I had been exposed to told me that it was my obvious most natural destiny and that my healthy young female body was built for it. I saw images of pregnant women just glowing, with long soft hair angelically falling past their shoulders, wearing beautiful white and pastel dresses, looking down smiling with their hands on their baby bump. Can you see it? The calmest, most serene image of womanhood. Nothing prepared me for 9 months of living with my head in a variety of disgusting toilet bowls.
I understood what Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) was before I heard of it and certainly before I could spell it. HG is a severe form of morning sickness. WebMD classifies it as a pregnancy complication that effects less than 3% of pregnant women. It can lead to complications with your kidneys and blood pressure and makes you feel dizzy, weak and nauseated all the time. For many women it gets better around the second trimester, but for some unlucky ones, it can stay right till the end.
I was one of the unlucky ones developing tokophobia and HG. I could not hold any food or water down, I lost a lot of weight, I felt terrible every waking minute like I was dying very slowly of some disease.
I became afraid of leaving my home due to tokophobia and HG, because I knew I would throw up at least once every hour, and how do you plan for that? Smells made me nauseous and triggered the impulse to vomit. My dilemma often was ‘Can I bleach this toilet before I have to put my face in it or will the smell make me vomit before I’m done?’ And believe me, vomiting into a toilet bowl of bleach and God knows what else is not the best.
HG causes vomiting so severe, that you can end up dehydrated and hospitalized and that happened to me too. What the doctors don’t tell you (or screen for) is that it can also impact your mental health. Even though I worried everyday about the harm the dehydration, loss of weight and the bearing down to throw up could be causing to my unborn child, there were times I felt like I couldn’t go on and face another minute of this existence. I wondered if this is how cancer patients felt.
I thought of suicide. A lot.
Finally, the day of birth came and as I held the most perfect creation in my arms, I told myself that I would rather give birth every day for nine months than live another pregnant day in my life due to tokophobia. It traumatized me so bad that although I wanted more children, I decided I could not go through another pregnancy. The chances of getting HG again in subsequent pregnancies is high.
Although I felt a hundred times better, the fear of pregnancy really set in. So, when some years later I missed a period and found out I was pregnant, I cried for days. HG took away a moment in my life that should have been happy, exciting and cheerful.
I battled with guilt and couldn’t understand the mix of emotions because I so wanted my child, but I equally didn’t want to be pregnant due to tokophobia.
It was another 9 months of HG but I handled it a bit better, mentally at least, perhaps because I was prepared for the ugly reality of it. I don’t think those around me, including the obstetric team, could quite understand the limitations that tokophobia brought to my life during pregnancy. I couldn’t walk into the kitchen because it made me throw up, so on many days my first child had to rummage in the fridge and feed herself until a family member came home from work and made some food. Working was ultra-difficult and being absent on short notice made me seem unreliable. I slowly became dependent on those around me again. When my second child was born, I was so relieved that it was over and that I could hold my child in my arms finally.
The fear of pregnancy affected my intimacy with my husband at the time and the lack of trust was an element (of many) that contributed to the breakdown of my relationship with him. Later, I became aware of the hormone IUD and have used it now for over 11 years. I do not plan to have anymore children.
Young women and girls deserve the truth about contraception, fertility, pregnancy, birth, raising children and what all these (and their complications) do to their bodies and their minds. They deserve to choose what they want through receiving unbiased information. Only then will they not have to make choices through fear.
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