If a person were being sick three, perhaps four times a day, we would consider that cause for concern. If they were nervous to leave the house, take public transport, attend work meetings or go into supermarkets in case they unexpectedly threw up into their own hands, we would think that a rather serious medical situation. If they could no longer drink water or eat fruit or stomach the smell of cooking for months at a time, we might perhaps urge them to seek some kind of treatment.
Unless, of course, that person is pregnant. At the grand old age of 39, I am delighted to be pregnant again. I feel purposeful, excited, lucky.
But I also feel queasy, a lot of the time. Since creating those two blue lines on a strip of litmus paper, I have been sick in the morning, evening, middle of the night, after lunch, once while actually cycling (it wasn’t demure). I have been sick on trains, on pavements, in bed, into mugs and just centimetres from a Morris Marina at an unexpected classic car show outside my local charity shop.
Weeks before I had actually told anyone that I was pregnant, I was sick while walking another friend’s child home from school; I had to stop in the middle of the park and throw up in a bush, while the man emptying the bins asked the two small children on the path if their mum was okay. He obviously worried I was drunk; my son, picking up on a private joke my husband has started making every time I retch, confidently told the waste disposal person that I’d been drinking out of puddles. I have been sick down alleyways in the early evening, in food markets on a Sunday morning and up against the walls of ancient colleges.
I have learnt a few things from this constant state of nausea. Firstly, that onions are absolutely disgusting and people who eat them smell like sweat. Secondly, that most fizzy drinks taste of aspartame and fruit vapes.
And finally, that we make extremely poor provision for people being sick in this country. I used to just assume that all the splatters across British pavements were the result of heavy drinking and, judging by appearances, an unfathomable British affection for diced carrots. But since I have been making daily use of drains, bins, bushes and gutters, I have been forced to reconsider.
Perhaps all these poor emetic messes are actually the result of pregnancy sickness? Or IBS? Or a reaction to medication? And what facilities do we actually offer for people suffering non-contagious bouts of digestive ejection? Now that most bins are covered, and public toilets are closing at the speed of sound, you’re often confronted with a choice of someone’s front garden or your own handbag. Being sick in public strips you bare, just as surely as lowering your knickers. Somehow there is something innately vulnerable about giving in to a base animal function under the gaze of strangers.
It makes you feel like a child, a goblin, a wretch. It’s also not helped by the fact that during early pregnancy your olfactory system seems to go into hyperdrive, meaning you can suddenly smell absolutely everything to the power of about four thousand. I can actually smell people before I see them.
I can smell a change in weather. I’m pretty sure I can smell thoughts. Of course, pregnancy sickness isn’t news.
Thousands of people will be feeling exactly the same queasiness as me right now; they will be dodging fish markets and cooking oil and dog poo bins like action heroes outrunning actual fire. And of course midwives and doctors are aware of the potentially debilitating effects of constant projectile vomiting. There is, I’m told, medication that can go some way to quelling the worst of it.
However, as my saintly midwife explained, if I could stomach any food at all then they would be reluctant to prescribe it. I didn’t ask why. Instead, on the way home from the appointment, I retched so loudly outside a butchers’ shop that I think they mistook me for a very tall Alsatian.
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