The First Trimester

Look at Natural Remedies for Morning Sickness

Tracey — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:06:51 +0000

I could not stand the smell of frying meat. Or cold cuts. Or roasted meat depending on my baby’s mood; chicken was usually OK, but beef–oh no.

The first half of my pregnancy with my daughter was Queasy City. When the morning sickness got going, it was like the walls of my stomach would just quiver like jello on a train. It was not a pleasant feeling, especially when it would go off and on ALL DAY. That low-level nausea is annoying at first, then distracting, then just exhausting. Some days I would barely eat, afraid that I would hurl or I was just tired of a wavy stomach.

But the smell of many meat took my nausea to new levels…and to the toilet. Needless to say, cut down a lot on meat and my husband, bless him, did a lot of the cooking. But Thanksgiving at my sister-in-law’s was horrible. We traveled just under 2000 miles so it wasn’t like I could just go home. The aroma of the turkey and ham and gravy that Angie was cooking–things I normally love–sent me retching in the bathroom. Angie, her sister and her mother spent the evening trying to help me out. I tried to nibble crackers, sipped tea, iced the back of my neck, elevated my feet, everything they’d ever hear of to calm my stomach. Nothing worked. I ended up holing up in the basement bathroom, as far away from the ‘fumes’ as I could get, alternately dry heaving, crying and napping on the floor.

Eventually, Angie’s Aunt Georgia came over. Thank you Aunt Georgia. She came downstairs with a handkerchief bulging with something and said “Hold this over your nose and mouth, honey”. “What is it,” I asked. “Just lemon peelings. Just breathe through it and see if that stops the smells.” So I did.

My stomach was still quivering, but I ventured out of the bathroom. At the base of the stairs I got a little meat whiff and the stomach started to roll over. I mashed the lemon scarf against my face, breathed slow, and…the stomach stopped rolling. Eventually, it even stopped quivering, and we got it down to periodic trembling. I could live with that.

I kept that scarf smushed to my face all evening (as I watched TV laying in the den–there was no way I was going to risk sitting at the table), until I convinced my husband it was in his best interest that we stay in a motel that night.

My daughter is now 6 years old, so it’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with morning sickness. But I thought of this story when talking to my cousin who is pregnant with her first and having the worst time with nausea. She’s tried the teas and crackers too. She even tried the lemon I suggested, but that didn’t help. When she told me she was desperate and actually considering medication like Zofran, for help.

I showed her a book I found some time ago called End Morning Sickness Now with natural remedies for morning sickness for her to try. We both are of the mind that medication is good and well, but as a last resort, during pregnancy at least. And she found a remedy that worked for her, one that neither of us heard of or would have thought to try. But out of respect to the author, I have to leave it in the book.

Some natural morning sickness remedies are old wives tales of nonsense, but many others do work. And there is a reason why natural cures work. Sometimes we know the chemistry and anatomy behind why they work. For instance, some studies show that citrus scents like lemon, send completely different signals down the olfactory tract, a direct connection for sending smells to the brain and sympathetic nerves, nerves that respond to things like stress. Sometimes we don’t know exactly why a remedy works, we just know that is works for many women.

If you are suffering from morning sickness, if you can, try natural remedies first. They are not harmful for the baby, usually don’t have side effects for you, and are mostly cheaper than any prescription.

Technorati Tags: early pregnancy symptom, First Trimester, Morning Sickness, morning sickness remedies, morning sickness remedy, natural remedies morning sickness, nausea, nausea pregnancy, pregnancy

How long is a trimester?

Tracey — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:05:01 +0000

Back when pregnancies were considered 9 months long, “trimester” meant three months. A normal full-term pregnancy is now defined as about 40 weeks. Divide that into three you get trimesters of 13 and half weeks, just a little over 3 months.

Finding How Many Weeks Pregnant with Ultrasound

Tracey — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:12:07 +0000

You think you’re pregnant. You’re pretty sure you’re pregnant. You are pregnant. After getting through this stage, the next thing you want to know is–how far along am I?

If you know the first date of your last menstrual cycle (LMC), it is pretty easy to figure out your due date. (Heck, if you know the date of conception, you can figure out your due date even easier, but we all aren’t recording these things, are we?) But what if you aren’t sure about the date of your last cycle. Maybe yours is highly irregular or you just didn’t keep track.

In this case, you want to have an early ultrasound. Typically, a routine fetal ultrasound is done between 18 and 20 weeks of pregnancy when many anatomic details are visible. However, if there is some question of due date, you could ask your doctor about a scan in your first trimester, after 7 weeks or so.

How An Ultrasound Is Performed

If you haven’t had an ultrasound before, this is how a standard one goes.

You’ll be asked to arrive at the office with a full bladder. You may find this uncomfortable, but a full bladder eliminates pockets of air between your uterus and bladder, which helps create clear ultrasonic images.

When the technician brings you in the room (and in most places, your partner can come in with you), the tech will have you lie on an exam table. He or she will then apply a special gel to your abdomen (which may be a little cold–just what you need on a full bladder). However, the gel helps to conduct sound waves so the ultrasound sends and receives these waves clearly for a good picture.

The tech will then rub a transducer back and forth over your belly. The transducer looks like a handheld scanner that a cashier uses to check the price of that heavy bag of dog food you don’t want to lift from the bottom of the shopping cart. As the smooth end of the transducer is rubbed over your stomach, it bounces sound waves off of dense body parts like bone and muscle. Then, these sound waves are converted into black-and-white or gray images on a monitor.

There is no pain involved (other than that full bladder) and ultrasounds are perfectly safe for you and your baby.

The technician will take your baby’s measurements and explain what you see on the screen and point out the face, toes and what not. Don’t worry if you can’t “see” your baby. Ultrasound images can be hard to make out if you are not a trained technician. They print certain images for for your doctor and you will probably be given copies of some of the images as well.

How Can They Tell How Old My Baby Is?

Once your obstetrician sees your ultrasound, there are a few different ways he or she might interpret it to measure your baby.

a) The Crown-Rump Length – measures the baby from the top of her head to the bottom of her butt and and is very accurate method for estimating the due date based on the baby’s size. This type of measurement can be made somewhere between 7 to 13 weeks of pregnancy.

One important thing to know about this: once your doctor determines the baby’s due date based on the crown-rump length, this due date will not change, even if another ultrasound is done. For instance, if another scan done several weeks later says that one should have a new due date which is further away, one should not normally change the date but should rather interpret the finding as that the baby is not growing at the expected rate.

b) Head Size. This measurement, called the biparietal diameter, measures the diameter from one side of the head to the other. You have to have this measurement taken early in the pregnancy but after 13 weeks. However, taking the head measurement late in pregnancy is unreliable. Early in pregnancy, the size of healthy babies fall into a narrow range. As a baby gets closer to delivery, however, heads sizes of healthy babies vary a lot more.

c) Thigh Length. The doctor looks at the measurement of the longest bone in the body, called femur length, which reflects the growth of the fetus. The same criteria are used here as with a head size measurement: must be taken early in the pregnancy and is only really used to tell how old the baby is.

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