The pregnancy test came back positive, so IVF worked. I continued going to the fertility center about once a week for ultrasounds and blood work until I transferred over to my O.B. at week 9. We found out that the embryo split and we actually had twins up until week 5, when one of them stopped developing and eventually got reabsorbed. Around week 7 or 8 I got a hemorrhage that we had to keep an eye on. Luckily it was small and went away without causing any issues.

Normally when you transfer over to your O.B. you only have appointments once every four weeks until you’re further along, but because I was high risk she wanted to see me every two, which I appreciated. Everything was going so well with the baby, but I got hit with hyperemesis gravidarium so I was insanely sick 24/7.

The day I realized it was a bigger problem than I could handle, I was at work with a massive headache and I started getting dizzy. I hadn’t been able to eat breakfast that morning and I decided that I needed to at least make sure I was staying hydrated. I went to get a drink of water and the second I took a swallow, I immediately threw it up and somehow knew I had crossed over into new territory.

Up until that point I was managing to eat at least one thing a day and I could drink anything I wanted. But from that point on, my stomach rebelled at literally anything that I ate or drank. “Helpful” people always told me, “just eat toast or saltines”. I love you, but oh, my goodness, I have never had such a hard time not snapping at people. My whole world had turned into finding food I could eat. If I could have stomached something as simple and easy as that, I would have. It became a living nightmare for me. Food is my love language but I was now in a situation where I was spending every waking second thinking about it. It was exhausting.

From the moment I woke up, I would start thinking about any and all foods. Most of the time, just the thought of something would make me sick, so I knew I couldn’t eat it. Rare times I found something that didn’t instantly make me want to throw up, I would rush to cook or prepare it as fast as possible, but usually by the time I was done (whether it was two minutes or 2 hours), I couldn’t eat it anymore because the smell of the food while it was being prepared ruined it. Despite not really having the budget for it, eating out became one of the few ways I could get food down. We could go through the drive-through and either park somewhere and eat it in the car, or keep the bag closed and roll the windows down so I could make it home without smelling it. Either way, I could usually only get about three or four bites into something before I couldn’t eat it anymore, but that was more than normal. It was a really good day if I managed to get more than 200 calories for the whole day. It was depressing and I have never cried so much over something as seemingly silly as food in my life.

Because of all of this, I wound up losing 15 pounds in a two week period, at which point my doctor decided we had crossed into dangerous territory and something needed to be done. Her solution was a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter). It’s a catheter that’s placed into a vein in your upper arm that goes almost all the way to your heart. It stays in your arm until you don’t need it anymore and made it so I didn’t have to get poked with needles for IVs every single day. Because of the PICC line I was able to do two IV bags of fluid every day with some anti-nausea medication. That way, at the very least, I could stay hydrated. It did help me be able to eat a little more (though not much), but that’s where any good from it stopped.

Turns out, I’m allergic to adhesive. Ya know…the stuff band-aids and band-aid-like things have on them? Yep. At first I just thought my skin was itchy under the dressing because I wasn’t used to having something covering my skin 24/7, that only got removed once a week, for about 2-4 minutes, when the home health nurse would come and change the bandage. They always said the worst part was changing the bandage cause it hurt like the dickens, but I started looking forward to it because the pain was so much better than the incessant itching.

I felt like there had to be something wrong but the nurse said it was probably for the reason I originally thought. My skin just wasn’t used to having a bandage on it for such a long time. This went on for over a month, with the itching (and eventually pain) getting worse on a daily basis. Thankfully, we wound up switching home health companies for other reasons, and when I practically begged the new nurse to tell me ANYTHING that could help, her response was something along the lines of, “that’s not normal”, and when she took the bandage off, she told me it looked like I had an allergy. She was blown away that the previous home health nurse kept putting a bandage on the same way every time with how bad my skin had gotten. It looked like a had a bad burn. It was red and blistered, with open sores. It was disgusting and it hurt. Every time they’d take the bandage off, it would rip off a layer of skin and open the blisters and sores, but because of the PICC line, they couldn’t leave the site uncovered for very long, so a bandage was always immediately placed on top of the open wounds because there was no where else to place it. AKA, they never healed. We weren’t sure at first what was causing the allergy, so I had to go through a few weeks of testing. The first week we didn’t use the typical stuff they used to clean the site, only alcohol (which, shockingly enough, actually hurt less than the other stuff they used). It helped a little bit, but not enough, so the next week we did something else (I don’t remember what), but by the third week we decided it had to be the actual bandage.

Keep in mind, at this point, I was more close the crazy than I had ever been in my life. I had gotten to the point that the itching and the pain was all-consuming. I had to be very careful to keep the bandage sealed to my arm so air didn’t get into the site (with it being a literal direct line to my heart, they take that stuff seriously), but it got so bad that I would scratch it in my sleep. I sound like a crazy person, but I started pinching my arm hard enough to cause bruises because that would cause a temporary relief (like…5 seconds), but it wouldn’t pull the bandage off like scratching would. Those 5 seconds were heaven.

We switched the type of bandage and slowly my arm started to improve. It never fully healed, but it got the point where I could function like a normal human being again, which was a relief. With one very big future exception, I can easily say the whole PICC line and hyperemesis gravidarum experience was by far the worst part of my pregnancy. But the crazy part?

I would do it again.