Pregnancy Struggles

I haven’t had that difficult of a time so far (although I’m only at 15 weeks), but here’s what I’ve experienced so far:

(All of the links I’ve posted are pills or things I use and are safe for people with food allergies – gluten, dairy, soy, sulphites, anything else you can think of probably. I’ve spent a long time trying to find these products and it’s been hard testing them out to make sure they’re safe. They’re affiliate links as well because why not? But they are exactly what I take. )

I’ll start with the reaction part –

Arthritis/mood/reactions to food:

• I was hoping that my immune system would relax a bit during the pregnancy, as I’ve read that some autoimmune disorders go into remission. This has not happened at all. If anything, it has picked up (I started being allergic to a dog I wasn’t allergic to before, that’s how it started).
• I started pre-natal vitamins as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I was pretty careful not to get ones with things that would make me react but I wasn’t careful enough. Turns out they had very small (minute) amounts of soy, as in something was derived from soy. That made me itchy, made my eyes swell, hit my mood fairly badly, started sweating at night.. etc. Turns out I couldn’t find any prenatal that didn’t make me react, so I just took the vitamins separately.
• I’m reacting to very small quantities of food/pills that didn’t used to bother me. For instance, I used to take Gravol to help me sleep through the night when I’m reacting. I started taking that during the prenatal reaction and a couple of days later I was itchy all over and my eyes swelled, it hit my mood, and made me sweat at night again.
• I tried to reintroduce squash and I reacted to it.
• I tried to reintroduce rice and I reacted to it (I’m not reintroducing anything else for the rest of the pregnancy, but I really thought rice and squash were safe… I mean, we feed them to babies). They made my whole body itchy, hit my mood, made my eyes swell, and I’m back to sweating at night.
• I’ve been arthritic from all four of these reactions, and I’m still in quite a bit of pain in the morning when I first wake up from the arthritis. Mostly in my hands.
• This is slowly clearing up, and if these reactions follow the same pattern as my other ones, I should be good as new in about 3 weeks, but it’s been difficult to control with things that didn’t used to bother me, bothering me.

Now onto the more normal stuff:

Morning sickness:

• I believe because of my diet, I haven’t had much morning sickness
• When I accidentally drank something with sulfites in it, it made me incredibly nauseous, so I stopped (I ended up reacting to it anyways)
• When I walked by anything that smelled like cheese or chocolate I’d gag
• I think foods that were making me sick would have made me throw up, but other than some fairly severe nausea during the sulfite reaction, my morning sickness was pretty easy to deal with
• It tapered off around 12 weeks

Weight gain:

• I’ve gained just under 5 pounds so far
• My underwear doesn’t fit, and it seems like my bum is growing as much as my belly

Back pain:

• I’m starting to experience some back pain at my sacroiliac joint. My physiotherapist told me about a serola belt to buy that’s supposed to help. I’ll update this if it does help, I just ordered it today. Realllyyy hoping it helps.
• It’s on my left side and it’s starting to affect my walking… so hopefully that doesn’t get worse (although I’ve googled it and apparently it does)

Baby feelings (not struggles):

• I can feel the baby flutter! I’ve felt it off and on since week 14

Fatigue:

• I’ve been sleeping a lot, and it seems like if I don’t go to bed early (10:30), I get pretty cranky. I’m usually a night owl so this is a little different.

Hunger/diet:

• I’ve been eating a lot
• I get hunger pangs! I’ve never got hunger pangs before. But I keep some food by the bed so I can snack early in the morning (early as in 8 am.. so not that early)
• I eat about a meal more than I used to! But it takes a lot of food to gain 5 pounds.
• I haven’t changed my diet at all, except for quantity, but after the failure with the prenatal vitamins, I did add fish oil (expensive but worth it.. most of them have some sort of soy involved), folic acid, vitamin D, and calcium citrate
• (I ended up cutting out the calcium because my urine got cloudy. My diet is high enough in calcium that I don’t need anymore. That problem fixed itself immediately.)

Hormones:

• I’m not sure if it’s hormones, but it’s definitely something.
• My focus as soon as I got pregnant was “keep the baby safe”.
• We weren’t sure if we were going to keep it but the thought of an abortion made me bawl every time someone mentioned it
• I’ve never had a problem with abortions so I was kind of surprised that this instinct was so strong.
• We’ve been looking to buy a house and I’ve been in nesting mode. I can tell you, pregnancy changes a lot, extremely quickly.
• My priorities have changed incredibly. I can’t stop googling baby things, reading books, it’s incredible. Evolution is strong here.