The standard advice is to eat crackers or some similar carbohydrate that is bland before getting out of bed. Ginger ale, ginger tea and ginger candy are also often suggested. Nausea during the first trimester is more normal than not, and to the degree that it relates to outcomes, nausea is a good sign. Losing a little weight because it is so difficult to keep food down in the first trimester will almost certainly not harm your baby (it won’t grow very much for a while yet anyway) or you (assuming you didn’t start this pregnancy dangerously underweight). While exercise or physical activity might help with the nausea and is therefore worth a try, it may make it worse. Extra naps and more hours in bed at night will both feel good and be good for you.
The nausea I experienced during my first trimester was not quite like any other nausea I’d experienced. Given that I get motion sickness in cars, trains, planes and a lot of amusement rides, I figured I knew what nausea could be like. This was weird stuff. It wasn’t horrible, but it was unending and remarkably resistant to usual comfort measures. However, a quarter tab or half tab of Dramamine made it a lot less miserable and made napping even easier, with the beneficial effect of clearing up my allergies (which were giving me trouble, since I’d quit taking Claritin after reading about hypospadias, a precaution that was probably not necessary).
In between naps, I tried to do some research on what I should and shouldn’t be doing while pregnant and, rather belatedly, tried to figure out who I wanted to deliver my baby. I’d heard about the no-sushi rule, which has two components to it. First, it’s hard to be sure there are no parasites in raw fish. Second, some kinds of fish, cooked or otherwise, have a lot of mercury and that can do neurological damage in adults and even worse damage in a developing baby. I still eat sushi, but I usually have a salmon skin roll and unagi with a salad and look longingly at the spicy tuna and decide it won’t kill me to wait a few months. I also cut slightly back on my consumption of tuna fish sandwiches in favor of turkey.
While doing this research, I ran into a laundry list of other things that pregnant women can worry about, including toxoplasmosis (which you can get from changing litter boxes) and cytomegalovirus (which you won’t notice, but if you get it during the wrong weeks in your pregnancy, can do a lot of damage to the wee one). While you are pregnant would be an unfortunate time to get chickenpox. There are also warnings about overheating and cooking the baby, either through exercise (unlikely) or through hot tubs (possible if you’re inclined to submerge yourself relatively completely and raise your core temperature by more than a degree or two). You may or may not choose to pay any attention to these optional sources of worry. Very few books make very much out of the extremely real dangers of being in a car accident or being beaten up by a significant other. Some say to wear your seat belt (good advice, and the law in many areas anyway) in the first case. I’m not in a position to give you advice about what to do if you are in a physically abusive (or otherwise abusive) relationship, other than to note that pregnancy can cause these situations to get much, much worse; your own life could be in great danger. If you have people you can go to for advice and assistance, I would certainly encourage you to do so when you feel you can.
If you have to be premedicated when you go to the dentist (you know what this means if you do, otherwise, don’t worry about it), your dentist will probably refuse to see you once you are pregnant. Otherwise, regular cleanings are even more important now. Tell them you are pregnant if they want to do routine x-rays. They will almost certainly put them off until you are no longer pregnant. If the dentist thinks its important enough to do an x-ray anyway, talk to them about the tradeoffs and feel free to put it off for a day or so while you think about how you feel about it. Dental x-rays, in principle, are quite safe, assuming they're using the aprons and so forth. But that's right up there with microwaves are quite safe, unless they're old and the seal has broken down (in which case, simply standing back from the microwave removes the danger anyway). Pregnancy hormones tend to make gingivitis worse if you have it, and may start it if you don’t. An obvious corollary to this observation is that brushing at least twice a day, and flossing at least once a day will help keep the tender/bleeding gum problem somewhat under control.
X-rays used to be used quite cavalierly during pregnancy, to image the baby, and to assess the size of the mother's pelvis in the hopes of being able to tell if she had a large enough pelvis for a (or, ideally, this particular) baby to fit through. This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, increased leukemia rates in the babies later on in life, and didn't supply useful information anyway. The most basic understanding of women's anatomy told them the pelvis is remarkably flexible during birth and so cannot be accurately measured ahead of time. Further, their selection of postures (on back) for birth cuts the size of the pelvis down by 30% so the whole cephalo-pelvic disproportion (CPD) in the post-rickets era (a woman with rickets may have a very small pelvis with a weird shape to it) is pretty much a doctor-caused problem. And of course, position of the baby while it is being born matters a great deal. But when contemplating an x-ray for a much needed dental procedure, it pays to realize that far, far more dangerous uses of x-rays were routinely advocated in the past by doctors, and for much less of a payoff for mom.
Many, many, many of our mothers in the U.S. smoked and/or drank when they were pregnant with us. There was also a much more cavalier attitude towards medication during pregnancy. The assumption was that the placenta completely protected the unborn child. While we now know that is not the case, there is no cause to get all over anyone’s case about their smoking, drinking, food, medication or supplementation decisions. Advice is not without risks and each woman’s life is a difficult set of tradeoffs. Ordering a woman to engage in – or refrain from – a particular, legal action in the hypothetical interests of her as yet unborn and honestly, decently high-risk of being miscarried during the first trimester offspring can not be considered polite or compassionate. Please don’t do it.
Other than folic acid, there is little evidence to support recommending supplements for pregnant women in general. Consider carefully the larger issues around supplementation, and the rationale for whatever supplements others advise you to take.
The Difficulty of Finding Out Whether The Meds You Take Are Safe
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created May 20, 2005 Updated July 11, 2006