My experience with hyperemesis

My cancer diagnosis is the second time I have felt betrayed by my body. The first time was when I was pregnant. I had HG, hyperemesis gravidarum, or severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, and it was absolutely debilitating.

At just six weeks pregnant I wrote in my journal: 

Someone turned the morning sickness knob up to 11 a couple of days ago.

Last night they turned it up to 25. It's still there. :(

This photo was taken at Thanksgiving, which was perhaps one of the most miserable Thansgivings of my life. I remember feeling like absolute hell when this photo was taken. I look at the woman in this photo and I feel so awful for her because it's about to get even worse.

After we returned from our Thanksgiving holiday in California at my grandmother's house, I was 8 weeks pregnant and couldn't keep anything down. Not even water. Dehydrated, drained, and desperate, we finally went in to the ER over a weekend. I will never forget feeling absolutely miserable while I sat in the waiting area with a trash can on my lap trying not to wretch. They got me into an alcove and gave me two bags of fluids and a shot of Zofran and told me to follow up with my doctor on Monday, which I did. I was basically dismissed by the nurse and then by the doctor. Just morning sickness, I would be fine. I would go away. Eat some crackers or ginger or whatever. I was distraught.

I immediately found a new doctor, got an appointment and got some meds. Zofran (anti-nausea med) was my lifeline and I joined a group online of women with HG. I wasn't the only one that had been dismissed and written off by their doc. I had hoped it would go away at the end of the first trimester but it never did. I had severe nausea until the day I gave birth. Zofran kept the vomiting at bay for the most part but the constant nausea was unrelenting and incredibly draining. I lived almost 9 months of my life with 24 hour nausea. I tried multiple times to go off the Zofran, but it went badly every single time and took me days to recover every time I tried it. I still keep a cache of Zofran on hand. I've had a stomach virus or food poisoning a couple of times since then and each time it an emotional experience as I remember what that was like. 

A few days ago, a friend I had met online who also suffered from HG sent me an article from the NY Times (and yeah, the NYT is on my shit-list right now, but I made an exception for this). As I read through the article, a chill literally went down my spine. There's a gene. With a mutation. That codes for a protein. That's linked. It's all real. I mean, I knew it was real. I lived it. I experienced it. But if you read the article, my experience with my first doctor was hardly unique. And not just the doctor. So many people shrugged off my experience. "Just eat some crackers." "Have you tried some of those pregnancy lozenges?" "Maybe you just need some ginger-ale." "Have you tried_________?" (Insert thing I definitely already tried.) 

The people in the HG forums called people that made "helpful" suggestions "crackers." I experienced plenty of crackers. I know, they were only trying to help, but as any person with an illness/disease/health problem will tell you, they already tried it or it isn't relevant for one reason or another. 

I had actually been thinking about my HG lately as I go through this current physically challenging time in my life and it was pretty fortuitous that my friend (who also happens to be dealing with cancer, though for much longer and with a much more severe circumstance) sent the article to me.

Eventually, the hyperemesis ended and at the end of it, I got an amazing little person out of it. And it was all worth it. I wish there was some wonderful thing, some gift or reward at the end of this current trial. There isn't. There are just more trials that feel never ending. I will live with the fallout from this cancer for years and I get nothing out of it. Well, I suppose that's not entirely true. What I get out of it is the ability to bring awareness to other people that this can happen to anyone and that mammograms are important for early detection. And early detection saves lives. I don't want others to go through this, but if they can have the best chance, it needs to be caught the way mine was. So in that way, I can find some good out of this.

And I can bring the same awareness to HG and I hope that other women who experience it get help and that they know that it is NOT in their heads. It's real. It's not just morning sickness. 

To learn more about HG, visit the HER Foundation.