Fybogel is my friend

Image source: Poor Man's Feast

I thought it was about time I started with the odd photo, but apologies to any pregnant ladies reading for whom a photo of some lovely thin, silky folds of salty, piggy Parma ham is currently an image of the devil.

It's been a couple of weeks since I last bothered blogging because I basically properly HAD IT with being pregnant.  If things went horribly wrong and I lost the funny little thing now, I can tell you what, my husband would have a pretty f*cking hard time convincing me to do it again.  There's been serious repulsion to odours, firstly to olive oil (olive oil?!) but since then mainly those involving cleaning products, so I've been able to wear any clothes I've washed in the last month and after my husband's beautified himself in the mornings I can't go near him for a good half an hour.  There's been repulsion to various foodstuffs - I've had to hide the box of ginger tea I bought when I first found out I was up the duff, having heard all things ginger kicked the 24-hour ass of morning sickness.  That's some beautiful irony for you right there.  In fact, on the whole I'm still not on very good terms with food: I rarely want to cook anything, but broadly speaking by the time the first mouthful's in it is quite welcome after all.  But milky things and fatty things are out, because they make me feel sick, and anything that's famed for its ability to generate even the tiniest puff of wind is also out because JESUS CHRIST am I toxic.  I am having brief addictions to things though, too - last week tinned tomatoes, dear god, I couldn't get enough of them; and this week I've mostly been existing on various combinations of gluten-free bread and lovely, lovely Parma ham.  And Fybogel, obviously.

Fybogel is my friend, my dearest, dearest friend, but it's become a friend I totally resent.  I had enough trouble with my bowels before pregnancy - a gluten-free diet = trouble getting enough fibre as it - but despite the vast amounts of water I'm drinking and the huge quantities of high-fibre bread and brown rice and gawd knows what else I'm stuffing in, my daily attempts at emptying myself remain an ongoing trauma, the details of which are far too intimate to reveal here.  Well, today they are.  I might be persuaded to share them tomorrow.

Week 7: no f*cking improvement whatsoever

I am so utterly desperate for something to make me feel better that I think I've just made myself believe that some travel sickness wristbands have taken away my nausea.  Not entirely, because I still feel like shit, but I'm (literally) gagging to believe I feel ever so slightly better.  I would do virtually anything right now to put myself out of my self-indulgent misery, so if B6 supplements three times a day and two little lavender-coloured bands round my wrists that claim to apply pressure to some kind of magic points alleviate the nausea, I'm simply not going to argue.

I am of course hugely thankful that I'm not vomiting left, right and centre like so many other poor pregnant women, however I'm not very good at being ill and getting on for three weeks of feeling constantly carsick has really worn me thin.  The nausea has been compounded by a ridiculously heightened sense of smell, which I thought I was making up to begin with, until I was unable to kiss my husband goodbye one morning last week because the usually heavenly smell of him totally repelled me.  In addition, I'm now suffering from the worst bloating I think I've ever had (which is saying a lot for someone with a wheat intolerance).  The bloating, just to make things really exciting, results in the emission of the most ludicrous quantities of gas you can imagine from the two usually culpable cavities - top end, so much of it that I ended up dry heaving on my walk to the station this evening; bottom end, I have honestly never smelt anything so toxic in my life).  And this bloody anti-food thing is still going on: I can't hardly bring myself to think about food, let alone cook or eat it, look at it or smell it; thankfully the painful bouts of hunger have disappeared and so I'm just trying to focus on getting through 6 small meals a day, as the whole internet suggests.  But it's a struggle, and I hate it.

I'm in two minds about asking to get signed off work for a bit.  On the one hand, I discovered on Saturday that sitting in bed all day feeling sorry for myself was not the way forward.  I felt worse for it, and all the better for having a wander in the fresh air and sunshine the following day.  Not only does going to work get me out of the house but it also passes the time more quickly, and getting the next few awful weeks (hopefully not months) of morning sickness out of the way as quickly as possible is currently my sole goal.  However, having to get up in time to be at work for 9am is Not Good: I've discovered that a slow, leisurely start to the day, beginning with a banana in bed before I've even raised my head off the pillow, is the best way to introduce me to the day.  But being at work, though the day passes more quickly than if I was rolling around at home, is extremely painful.  Just having to pretend all day that I'm fine and focus sufficiently on the gazillion things I have to do is really, really bloody hard work.  I seem to be coming down with a cold today, so I was able to leave mid-afternoon, excusing myself for "feeling like shit" because I had obvious symptoms, and I suppose I might be able to wriggle out of tomorrow for the same reason.  I guess the best case scenario is if I can somehow wrangle working from home, though I can't really manage that without telling my boss what's going on, and I'm extremely reluctant to do that.

So, the plan is currently just to get through this week.  This coming Monday brings my 8 week appointment (I'll be 8+2) and perhaps my lovely doctor will be able to come up with some miracle way out of the situation.  Until then, COME ON RIDICULOUS LITTLE LAVENDER WRISTBANDS, YOU CAN DO IT!