The Time I Almost Puked on My Cat & Other Pregnancy Adventures

A survivor's guide with no solutions

Let's start out with a few disclaimers. What you are about to read is not for our beloved brothers and sisters with weaker stomachs and gag reflexes. This is an honest take on the physical rollercoaster many pregnant women ride to bring these beautiful babies into the world. And while I am filled with so much gratitude to grow life within me that I am on my face prostrate at Jesus' feet in praise when I think about it, I also have at times peered up at Him like, "Really Jesus? Do I have a parasite or a baby?"

[Also, "pregnancy glow"? What a scam. Big Thank Yous to everyone who has told me that I have one these last nine months, but let's be real. Most days I look like a Victorian child with the plague, pale, baggy eyes sunken within dark circles, acne rampant on every visible and nonvisible inch of my skin like a newly pubescent teenager. Imagine Gollum from Lord of the Rings but more feminine. But I digress.

Actually, I don't. Let's continue.]

Chapter One: "P-spice, You're in the Splash Zone!" & the Time I Projectile Vomited on a Love Note

Like many pregnant women, by week 6 (out of a standard 40 week pregnancy timeline) I found myself in the throws of "morning sickness". But let's be real, it should be called "all day sickness" or "morning and afternoon and night and also middle of the night wake you up from slumber you can't even make it to the bathroom to throw up...sickness".

But unlike most women, my nausea and vomiting persisted until whopping week 27. I'll save you time at your calculator. That's FIVE months and ONE week of feeling like I'm going to hurl from the moment my eyeballs opened in the morning until they closed to sleep at night. And then actually hurling up to six times a day. No, I am not being dramatic. You can ask my clients who allowed me to eat crackers and drink ginger ale during their therapy sessions for nearly half a year. Or ask my husband, the true hero in this story who cleaned up more pukes than I can fathom off of every surface you can imagine. And not once did he complain, grimace, or cease to comfort me. A true angel. Now we just laugh about it. (From the bottom of my heart - and stomach - thank you Ryan!)

(For context just so you know how unfortunate that type of fate truly is, some pregnant women never or barely experience any morning sickness whatsoever, most feel better by weeks 10-14, a handful might persist until week 18-22, and then there's me. Even the staff at the OBGYN office take a breath with wide eyes whenever that fun fact about my pregnancy pops up. But actually, if you're in the small percentage of pregnant women who have been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, you can be sick the entire length of your pregnancy and to those women, I salute you. You poor, poor nutrient-deficient survivors.)

Which leads us to just two pukes out of the dozens that win the trophies for most memorable.

Picture this. You, bed ridden, various nausea remedies peppering the nightstand, none of them work, a glass of chocolate milk by your side, not for the sweet nostalgic flavor but to help calm the burning in your throat and sinuses from puking up stomach acid, your orange tabby cat pacing leisurely on the floor. And then there's your husband, who inconveniently has COVID, six feet from you, ill himself yet keeping you company before he retires to the other bedroom in classic quarantine fashion. When suddenly that dreaded feeling rises up from the middle of your body to the top. You sit up as fast as you can, reaching over to the plastic bag your husband placed at your bedside for this very moment, except it's on the floor, and going down to grab it only encourages gravity to be your enemy. You see a flash of orange and fur. A tail and hind legs scrambling to flee the scene. And the last thing you hear, "P-spice you're in the splash zone!" shrieking from your husband, unable to come any closer lest he expose you. And just as the throw up leaves your body, soiling the ends of your freshly washed hair, P-spice escapes just barely with a "Reeeooowrrr!" echoing in his path.

Your husband tells you to go to the bathroom so he can clean it up. Once again, angel. He says you'll laugh about this night one day. He's right.

And then there's the infamous puke number two. Ryan always rolls out of bed first, he opens the curtains and blinds, begins making coffee and breakfast. This morning in particular, I made my way to the kitchen and saw a page of a notebook ripped out with some scribblings on it waiting for me to find. A warmth welled up inside me, my eyebrows raised in surprise, a sleepy smile stretching across my face.

Good morning beautiful was all I read when suddenly something else was noticeable inside me, my eyebrows curled back down toward each other, my smile turned to a full cheeked frown, and the most wretched sound bellowed out of my mouth. Water and whatever else was in my stomach flying at a 180 degree angle straight towards the countertop where the precious morning love note lay. I ran to the sink to finish the hurl only to look up, my eyes and sinuses full of fluid, and see Ryan with a pleasant smile on his face, wiping down the counter and salvaging the note. How many times do you have to see someone throw up to appear that content? I whimpered like a child, "I didn't even finished reading your love note!"

Chapter Two: The Time a Poop Almost Sent Me to the ER

Well, I suppose I must officially blow my cover. Fellas, girls poop. But many pregnant women come head-to-head with this fun symptom, they don't poop. And let me tell you, there are consequences to constipation. Extraordinary. Consequences.

One day my trips to the loo for a number two had ceased. I gave it a few days. Then a few more. My stomach and intestines were starting to ache so terribly they'd wake me up in the middle of the night and I'd find myself squirming and groaning in some pretty significant pain. Finally, after about seven days I thought I'd call the OBGYN office and ask an on-call provider about what to do. My 27th birthday was in a few days, and I wanted to see if the problem could be resolved before all the festivities.

"Hi! My name is Kathleen Donohue and I am a patient at your office. I'm just having some symptoms and I'd like to speak with someone about what I should do."

"Hi Kathleen! Okay what's the issue?"

I explained my situation, remaining calm and chipper, and then the woman on the other end of the line, though she remained chipper, was not calm.

"Okay Kathleen, that is not good. Yup, that is very, not good. I need you to go to the store today. And pick up this list of medications. Today, okay? And if you haven't had a bowel movement by tomorrow, I need you to call us right back. Okay, sweetie?"

She gave me the longest list of over-the-counter medicines for a gastrointestinal issue I had ever seen. And I was instructed to use them all. So I grabbed my newlywed husband and we headed for the pharmacy. Mind you, at this time we had been married and living together for only three and a half months. I'm not sure how long it took you in your marriage to feel comfortable discussing anything related to your bowel movements with your husband, but this felt a little soon for me.

That evening, I decided to brave the bathroom, understanding now that what might come would not be pretty.

The pain was unthinkable. Again, I am not being dramatic. I write this to you now with a full-term baby still cooking in my uterus and if childbirth is anything more painful than this fateful night, I will be surprised. Pardon my language, but I now understand the term "to sh** bricks".

I sat there, screeching in pain like a woman giving birth. Was I bleeding? Yes. Were my bowels moving? No. The panic was threatening to seep in. Do I need to go to the hospital? I can't do this. I think I have to go to the hospital. They're going to have to cut it out of me. Naturally, I fell into prayer. Except every ounce of my energy was being used to push, to endure the pain, and to not panic, so I had nothing left for a conversational prayer with Jesus. What came out of my mouth then? My good old fashion Catholic roots. The default setting of my software apparently. I began praying out loud Our Fathers, Hail Mary's, and Glory Be's like a martyr from the 15th century, making my way around an invisible rosary like my life depended on it. Poor Ryan, raised in the Baptist church, probably thought I was giving myself an exorcism.

He sat on the other side of the bathroom door and started audibly praying for me too.

"My love! Do you need me to come in there and hold your hand?"

"No!" was all I could breathe out. Leave me with my dignity! I thought to myself. Some things just need to be done alone. Pooping bricks, for me, is one of them. "Can you call my mom?"

My mom had been an emergency room nurse for most of my life. The only question that I 100% trust her with is, "Do I need to go to the ER for x?" Within a couple minutes I heard her on speaker with Ryan. She wanted to talk to me, but since I refused to let him in, I saw Ryan's stocky fingers start to push his phone under the crack of the door.

"Just breathe!" she said as I cried, "You don't have to go to the ER, just breathe!"

With one more loud yell, quite literally blood, sweat, and tears, I completed the task at hand and after hopping in the shower, hobbled like a penguin to the living room, each step sending pain signals to the heart of my butt. I had a hemorrhoid the size of a cashew, large enough that I once again was concerned enough to call the on-call provider the next day.

Dr. Wollenshlaeger, or Dr. W as he calls himself, was on the line, listening intently to the saga of my previous evening.

"Dr. W, I am not a weak woman. But this was the worst physical pain I have ever experienced in my life. Should I have gone to the hospital?"

"They would've only been able to make you comfortable. Give you something for the pain but that's about it."

Um, well that would've been NICE.

He prescribed me something for the hemorrhoid and gave instructions on how to nurture it down to size. Needing to email him some paperwork I said, "And Dr. W, how do you spell your last name on your email address?"

"Honestly, just go on the website and copy and paste it. It's a pain in the ass. Sorry, too soon?"

It took months for my bottom to fully heal. I've taken a look down there and let's just say, she's never quite looked the same since.

Chapter Three: B.O. Flashes & Other Unpleasantries of Pregnancy Symptoms

There are some women who will tell you they loved being pregnant, that they didn't have much or any symptoms. One of my best friends has reminded me not to hit these women when I encounter them.

Pregnancy is truly a beautiful thing, a miraculous moment of being an image bearer of God in the creation of life, and I would do it over and over if it meant receiving the gift and blessing of a baby at the end, but let's get really real for a moment. It ain't easy. (And no one tells you that until you're already pregnant. Again, scam.)

With couch-binding headaches, extreme fatigue, shortness of breath/breathlessness, nausea, vomiting, constipation, hemorrhoids, bloating, moodiness, decreased immune system but not being allowed to take cold/flu medicine, frequent urination day and night, acne, back pain, hip pain, round ligament pain, belly pain, groin pain, sciatica, lack of abdominal muscles, urinary incontinence, yeast infection, bleeding gums, dizziness, lightheadedness, fainting, swelling of hands/feet/face/all of the above, leg cramps/Charlie horses, sleep discomfort, sleep problems, nipple changes, acid reflux, brain fog, Braxton Hicks contractions, hyperpigmentation, and for some women, losing teeth, congestion, varicose veins, stretch marks, insomnia, heartburn, skin tags, bruised/cracked ribs from baby kicks, it's a wonder the human race has chosen to continue at all. My dad has said that if men were the ones charged with bearing life, we would have gone extinct. And these are all symptoms you can have in a perfectly healthy, low-risk pregnancy. I actually left a few symptoms out that I consider, if you could believe it, TMI (too much information).

Oh, and the peculiar B.O. flashes. A strange phenomenon Ryan and I learned where the body decides for 10 seconds only to emit a strange odor from an unknown source leaving you wanting to flee social situations lest someone realizes it's you.

So with this, I leave you. With education, with insight, with understanding, with disgust, who knows! Happy baby making!

Katie Donohue Tona

If you liked this, you might also like:

My Baby Projectile Pooped on the Window & Other Surprises of Early Motherhood

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