My first trimester was honestly very difficult for me, from the moment I realized I was pregnant and through to my second trimester.

We had started trying to conceive but almost immediately paused because I went to a new physician for my annual physical and wanted to ask (again, after being dismissed about it by previous doctors) about getting my chicken pox vaccine. I have never had chicken pox, I knew I had gotten my last varicella vaccine more than 10 years ago, and I thought maybe bringing it up while talking about getting pregnant would get the conversation taken more seriously. It did! And I was able to immediately schedule a vaccine appointment. When I asked if I needed to wait longer to make sure I wasn’t pregnant, the doctor said probably not, so I went in later that week after a blood test confirmed I didn’t have the antibodies and would benefit from the booster, since babies can be at high risk when it comes to chicken pox.

Fast forward one more week, my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. We went to a Korean-style spa where we enjoyed different hot tubs and saunas, and where I eyed the many signs reading “Please do not enter if there is any chance you are pregnant”. Seeing those after being asked a few times when I was receiving my vaccine was unnerving, as I had never in my life been asked this many times in a short period if I was pregnant, but these were unusual circumstances — I had been unable to get someone to listen to my request for a chicken pox vaccine for something like 6 years and this was my first time at a Korean spa in a really long time. We enjoyed a really nice time at the spa (minus the lingering wildfire smoke that meant I felt more comfortable wearing a mask even to enjoy the outdoor hot tubs…) and then went on to treat ourselves to a fancy omakase sushi dinner, another treat that we usually don’t enjoy. The very next day, I dyed my hair purple, a trying ordeal for me physically as I only had some toast before the nearly 7-hour appointment, found my neck straining under the weight of all the aluminum foil on my head, and got very hot from the foil tenting my face to trap all my humid breaths and maybe some fumes or at the very least the chemical smell.

That was Friday.
On Monday, I woke up feeling extremely nauseous, so nauseous I could barely bring myself to get out of bed. My husband urged me to try to vomit, maybe I had food poisoning (was it the sushi? was it the hair chemical fumes?) and I would feel better afterwards, but I was pretty adamant about not vomiting. I have never felt much relief after throwing up, and I almost always did so with such force that a bunch would go up my nose and I’d end up having to smell vomit for the rest of the day. But that day, I was feeling so desperately sick that I did end up dragging myself to the bathroom and trying to make myself vomit, to no success. It was really frustrating, and I tried all the tricks to trigger my gag reflex, which usually kicks in when I brush the back of my tongue or get too ambitious with a popsicle that I want to get off its stick. Nothing was coming up, and I was too nauseous to eat anything to put in my stomach to try again later.

I wound up spending all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mostly lying in bed, doubled over from nausea, wondering how to make it go away, while a small voice at the back of my head started to say “remember all those signs you read asking if you were sure you’re not pregnant?? and you were sure you weren’t???” and my husband gently started asking me about my last period and if it usually came this late. (Sometimes…?) When he asked me this on Tuesday, I got quite frustrated because it would mean I had unknowingly endangered my unborn child by getting

1. a live vaccine
2. hot tub and sauna
3. sushi
4. exposure to hair dying chemicals

but by Wednesday, with how miserable I was feeling, I relented and asked him to bring home some pregnancy tests.

The first test came back positive so fast that I thought for sure I had done the test wrong. The instructions said to wait 30 seconds and the little plus showed up within about 3 seconds. So I immediately prepared a second test for the next time I needed to use the bathroom (since the instructions said not to drink a lot of water to make yourself pee for the test) and again, the test came back positive almost immediately even with a different method of taking it.

We were pregnant!

The excitement faded shortly after because ohmygosh what have I done, can a baby that’s not even a baby yet, can an embryo…?? even survive what I’ve just put it through??? I shared my joy and my fears with my partner and immediately wrote an email to my gynecologist and an online provider who was able to answer me sooner. They assured me that the likelihood of me having harmed the the baby was low but that if anything was to happen so early, the pregnancy would terminate, so I was at virtually zero risk of having a high-risk/high-complication pregnancy due to the circumstances of the past 2 weeks.

Because my mom had already been discussing babies with me (usually by suggesting good foods and habits that were good for reproductive health, etc. haha), I tried to ask as casually as I could if she experienced any difficult pregnancy symptoms, did you have any morning sickness by the way, Mom?
Oof. Did she.
Evidently, while she was pregnant with me, she vomited many times a day, more even than when she was carrying my younger brother, to the point where she tied plastic bags around her wrists so that she would always have them literally on hand, since she has always been sensitive to smells and they triggered nausea and vomiting for her during pregnancy. Since I was unable to vomit even if I wanted to, I considered myself fairly lucky (and apologized profusely to my mom 😓). My nausea manifested not only in the constant feeling of wanting to vomit but also in bouts of uncomfortable belching. I often had to ask my husband to help rub and pat my back so I could get a little bit of relief from the nausea, a bit of foreshadowing for the rubbing and patting we would be doing to burp my baby, I was sure.

The weekend after was actually very difficult because we visited my in-laws and attended a friend’s baby shower, so I really learned a lot about my willpower and tested how much nausea I could have without actually vomiting. (Apparently a lot, I only vomited twice during the entirety of the first trimester and neither of those times was during this first weekend.) I remember struggling on the bus ride down, feeling very carsick by the time we reached my in-laws’ home, and then feeling dread upon realizing my in-laws had prepared a lot of delicious and fragrant food for us upon our arrival. The baby shower was also a big struggle, especially as there were non-pregnancy-safe foods for guests and I was only about 5-6 weeks pregnant at that point. I managed to dodge suspicion by having my plate be so full of noodles and chicken wings that oops I didn’t leave any room for sushi or prosciutto! Did I need to take a nap between the baby shower and dinner, resulting in me actually completely missing dinner? Yes. Did I also struggle to actually eat dinner? Sure. The struggles were not going to end any time soon, as evidenced by my white-knuckled dim sum with my in-laws the next day, where I felt a lot of pressure since my voracious appetite was always something they liked about me and I hadn’t had dim sum in so long as well. But by this point, it had been about a week of me not eating much at all, so between the baby shower and dim sum, I could only start to make up for the lost nutrition of the week.

The day I confirmed the pregnancy at the ob/gyn was such a HUGE relief, because there it was, a heartbeat on a screen, beating healthily despite everything I threw at it when it was little more than a clump of cells fighting to be alive. I didn’t expect to, but I wept when I heard that heartbeat, because this was real, I had a real life inside of me, my life was forever changed and there was no going back because I had a little fighter that I was going to do anything and everything to protect. We waited until after this confirmation appointment to tell my family, and you best believe our parents were all thrilled! It felt good to finally be able to talk to my mom about being pregnant, to get her advice and tips, and to see how excited she was to get caught up on what has changed as far as what’s best for pregnancy and babies. She bought books to start learning about what is best for mom and baby, and even started preparing for the postpartum period because she planned to come help me during that time. My in-laws who had been not-so-subtly letting us know that we shouldn’t delay having children because they were getting older and didn’t want to be too old to hold their grandchildren were, of course, overjoyed.

It felt good to not shoulder this secret alone, because the nausea was truly agonizing, as was the complete exhaustion I felt. It was like my whole personality was just nausea and sleepiness at that point. I was sure that someone at work was going to notice that my productivity had plummeted because I spent my meetings struggling to hold it together and then the time between meetings lying down and napping, but I somehow skated by. There was a long stretch where I couldn’t see anyone because it was so difficult for me to leave home at all given how nauseous I was, let alone go out to eat with anyone. I’ll admit that at times, it was difficult to differentiate these symptoms from depression, because I had such low energy, I was either asleep or desperate to get back to sleep. And wouldn’t you know, not going anywhere or seeing anyone or eating much and sleeping most of the day not only doesn’t help you feel better but can really take a toll on your mental health. The first trimester was a blur, marked mostly by intense nausea and fatigue. I spent it sleeping and trying to will myself to eat a little bit of dry cereal (shout-out to Crispix) to sustain myself through my few waking hours. People, myself included, love to ask about pregnancy cravings but I only craved any kind of reprieve from nausea. Sometimes I would try to force myself to eat eggs in order to get that essential choline for baby, but I have days pre-pregnancy where I have a hard time stomaching eggs so it was a challenge, especially since I couldn’t eat undercooked eggs anymore. (I think this was the food I missed the most — runny eggs.)

I wish I had more to share about the first trimester but it was a really difficult time for me and I coped by sleeping as much as possible. Being asleep meant I didn’t have to deal with oppressive fatigue or brutal nausea. I would just deal with the consequences of sleeping so much later. Even so, I felt guilty for feeling so bad, given that I didn’t experience any real complications and we didn’t struggle to conceive. But it didn’t really matter if I felt guilty for a silly reason, my body felt bad. I lost weight during my first trimester because I was eating so little, and I spent so much time reading articles on Maven and The Bump and What To Expect and r/BabyBumps, or furiously sucking on sour or ginger hard candies to get through the hours I did manage to get myself out of bed and in society before being comfortable telling people I was expecting.

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Man, were you expecting me to start uploading pregnancy blogs because I wasn’t! Let’s hope the next one doesn’t take over a year to publish.