Morning Sickness

Early pregnancy can be affected by nausea and vomiting, or “morning sickness”. Some women’s “morning sickness” is in the evening and some women are lucky enough not to have it at all. Regardless, if you are feeling sick, one good tip is to never have your stomach too empty and never have your stomach too full. Try to eat a variety of foods, but if one in particular turns you off, it’s fine to wait until this phase of pregnancy passes. Many women have good luck with light or bland foods like crackers, cooked fruit, broiled meats, carrots, apples, popcorn, cereal, dry toast, or flavored gelatin.
Some women find relief from ginger (either real ginger in foods like cookies, ginger ale, etc. or ginger capsules), vitamin B6 (25mg three times a day), or SeaBands (acupressure wrist bands designed for motion sickness). Other women find relief by nibbling on a few saltines before getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes peppermint can help, too, either as aromatherapy or in candies or gum. Again, real peppermint is better than an artificial flavoring.
If natural therapies aren’t helping, there are also some medications that can help. Nestrex and Emetrol are over-the-counter and safe in pregnancy. There are also prescription medications available that your doctor or midwife should be able to offer you.
Often, prenatal vitamins can aggravate the nausea or even prevent women from taking their vitamins at all. One way to manage this is to take your vitamins at night before bed or with food. If that still doesn’t work, taking just folic acid may be better tolerated. Those pills are often much smaller than the regular prenatal vitamins. A goal should be 800-1000mcg of folic acid a day. Some women can’t even tolerate that, and so skipping a few days or weeks of prenatal vitamins might be the only answer to keep from throwing up.
The good news is that this usually passes after the first trimester. If it doesn’t or it is so severe that you are losing weight, you should talk to your doctor.