I didn’t want to conflate yesterday’s announcement with a long post, but truthfully, announcing the pregnancy was something I’ve been avoiding for quite some time.
I haven’t been on social media or the blog for the past four months because I’ve been going through one of the hardest times of my life dealing with a lot of illness. A couple of weeks ago it culminated with being admitted to hospital after an asthma attack where I couldn’t breath. If I can’t breath, my baby can’t breath, and it was terrifying.
It wasn’t the first doctor’s or hospital visit however, I’ve generally been sick since finding out I was pregnant. This has induced a huge amount of anxiety, and the only way I could deal with it was to walk away and turn inwards. I didn’t tell many of my friends I was either pregnant or sick, I shut off communication and stopped leaving the house.
According to instagram and Pinterest, pregnancy from an aesthetic point of view is joyous, fashionable and easy. And to an extent, my first pregnancy was all those things. The shock of realising your health is at risk, and maybe that of your baby, is terrifying and doesn’t fit any sort of narrative to do with what many people think pregnancy should look like.
Truthfully I’ve spent a lot of time being scared. I couldn’t get out of bed some days because I was so sick. One week I went to the hospital four times. Fashionable? Forget it.
I wanted to have a conversation about it however, because I know a lot of women don’t talk about the pain and fear around being pregnant, wanting to be pregnant, or losing a pregnancy. Most people consider themselves lucky to be pregnant in the first place, and see no place for ‘complaining’ about any sort of complications.
Pregnancy IS complicated however, it’s the most surreal and strange thing your body will ever do. In a recent study published in Science Advances, scientists studying the ultimate limit of human endurance found that being pregnant is akin to constantly running a marathon. I’m not kidding!
I’m now looking at ways I can help my body heal, rest and enjoy the rest of the pregnancy. I’ll be writing about some of the things I’ve discovered in future posts, but for now wanted to talk from the heart about what it’s really been like, not the instagram version.
