During her pregnancies, Catherine, Princess of Wales (Kate Middleton) suffered with hyperemesis gravidarum and was forced to announce her pregnancies early, due to being unwell from the condition.

In her first pregnancy, she copped flak for ‘acting like a princess’, but not so second time around. Her bouts of hyperemesis gravidarum brought the realities of the illness some much-needed publicity so for that, I thank Kate for sharing her story. The more people who know about this serious pregnancy condition, the more seriously it will be taken.

How hyperemesis gravidarum feels

Hyperemesis gravidarum is not just your run-of-the-mill ‘morning’ – or even all day – sickness. It can be extremely severe and a real concern to both the woman and baby. It’s not just ‘feeling queasy’, or the occasional vomit. It’s not simply waking up with that dizzy, sick feeling and eating some crackers to calm your stomach. It’s not even the fairly ‘normal’ first-trimester-long nausea that up to 85 per cent of pregnant women suffer through.

It’s more like walking around with that feeling all day long, for weeks on end, with no respite – if you can even get out of bed at all. I know how Kate felt, and it’s not pretty. I suffered with HG for two pregnancies – worse with my second, which saw me hospitalised for dehydration and exhaustion. This severe form of ‘morning sickness’ – oh, ha freaking ha – meant that my pregnancies became traumatic to cope with rather than the joyful time every woman wishes for.

The realities of hyperemesis gravidarum

For me, hyperemesis gravidarum was like a long, dark night in my memory.

It involved uncontrollable retching occurring regularly all day and night, with so many triggers that I became unable to go anywhere without something in which to catch the inevitable vomit. On one occasion before I had properly figured this out, I had to get off a bus a stop early to let loose into a public bin on the footpath. Not my best day, but still, not even my worst – at least I was up and about!

And you know how vomiting can tend to wrench your stomach and back muscles until it hurts to move? Imagine vomiting til there’s nothing left to vomit, then vomiting some more – and doing that Every. Single. Day. Those wrenched muscles lasted for 9 months straight, making every move a painful experience.

During my second pregnancy, when my daughter was 3 years of age, this was particularly debilitating. A child that age just wants her mum to pick her up sometimes, but I would need to walk her to somewhere I could sit down just to hold her. Even bending down to pick her up her left me at risk of keeling over with vertigo and nausea.

Being a naturally slender person, I lost weight instead of gaining it for my pregnancy, which brought about lots of concerned suggestions and remedies from well-meaning friends and family. But you’ll understand why I wasn’t too enthused … you can bet I had tried it all with no success. Even plain water made me retch. In fact, even my own spit did sometimes.

So many, many things made me want to vomit – here’s just some of the list:

• The smell of: cooking foods, raw meats, tree/flower blossoms, cleaning products, vehicle exhaust, air fresheners (particularly used in stores and cars), and basically the entire cleaning aisle in the supermarket.
• The taste of: coffee (imagine the devastation for this coffee-lover), anything spicy, anything too sweet.
• The texture of: bananas, kiwi fruit, tomatoes, and oddly – plain milk.
• Anything fizzy, anything milky, anything soft-but-lumpy like fruit yoghurts and porridge.
• Motion sickness was suddenly amplified by a million – going round corners or reversing in the car set me off every time, even bending over or rising from lying down to a seated position made me dizzy and queasy. Sometimes, just turning my head did it.
• Brushing my teeth.
• Cutlery and kebab or icypole sticks – anything that you held in your mouth for any reason.

I basically survived on what little avocado on toast I could keep down, and Frosty Fruit icypoles (avoiding any contact with the stick in case it made me gag). It was like I was wasting away. The circles under my eyes made me look like a zombie. My partner and daughter had to watch on as I struggled daily.

Lily, aged 3, would bring me a bucket and stroke my face as I lay on the bed, retching and hurting. I cried one morning when she said, “Are you feeling ‘crooked’ again today, Mummy?” She was so used to seeing me like this, it had become the norm for her. My poor partner felt powerless and confused – being unable to do anything to help me except sympathise and help with our daughter.

I was prescribed medication after medication to try and ease the quease – but nothing helped. Even the specialist medication that I could only buy from the hospital pharmacy and cost me over $100 (ouch!) failed to make a difference.

Not even hospitalisation really helped – though I felt less dehydrated after a few 4-hour fluid drips had passed through my system. There’s just really not much you can do for utter and complete exhaustion, besides rest. And we all know how THAT works for a mum.

Find more:

• Common pregnancy niggles and their treatments
• Pregnancy hormones