I have been pregnant nine times, including my five beautiful children and four pregnancy losses and I know from bitter experience that whoever invented the term "morning sickness" must never have been pregnant. For me, it was morning, noon and night. I couldn’t sleep at night because my stomach was churning too much. I couldn’t lie on my front in bed because that put too much pressure on my stomach. I was vomiting. I couldn’t go out anywhere for four months because I needed somewhere to be sick at a moment's notice. I couldn’t eat normal food. It had to be toast that had been cremated beyond recognition and polo mints. Malted milk drink was the only drink I could consume – even water came back up.
The weight dropped off me and I stumbled around with six packets of polo mints in my handbag and crumbs in my hair. I even fantasized about not being pregnant, because no matter how much I wanted my baby, I couldn’t see myself getting through nine months of that.
I tried all the usual cliched remedies: eating crackers before I got up, lemon tea, ginger tea, ginger biscuits (a very bad mistake). I even chewed ginger flavored gum in church while hoping the pastor didn’t think I was being insolent. The "eat little and often" rule would have made me laugh if I wasn’t feeling so ill. What did they mean? It would be a miracle to eat anything at all!
I tried deep breathing exercises, melissa homeopathic drops for upset stomach, positive thinking and massage. Nothing helped. The final straw happened when I answered the door to the postman and burst into uncontrollable tears, and all he’d come to do was give me a parcel. If only babies could be delivered that easily.
After showing myself up in front of a total stranger, I gave in and went to the doctor, something I had been avoiding because doctors always say that nothing can be done about morning sickness and a pregnant woman just has to put up with whatever ailment assails her.
After discovering that I’d lost weight, he gave me an anti-sickness drug. I took it a few times, expecting a miracle wonder drug cure, but was disappointed to find it only took the edge off it and did not stop the nausea altogether. I also read in the patient information leaflet that it had a very slight risk of giving my baby a heart defect. My doctor assured me it was safe. But if it was really 100 percent safe, why even print the heart warnings? I thought about thalidomide and started to panic, so I emailed a friend. He sent me back a medical paper on the ability of vitamin B6 to treat morning sickness. Apparently, pregnant women had an increased nutritional requirement for vitamin B6, something my doctor and midwives had never told me. If the woman was deficient in the vitamin, this could cause morning sickness.
I bought a bottle of B6 and started taking 100 mg a day. This was above the recommended daily amount, but I wasn’t worried as the studies I had read said it could only do damage in dosages of over 1,000 mg, and the recommended amounts were conservative estimates of what a person needs to stay healthy.
I was astounded by the immediate relief. Within half an hour of taking the first tablet, I didn’t feel sick anymore, and this was after four months of feeling sick 24 hours a day. This was my ninth pregnancy, and I had endured the same misery in all but one of my other pregnancies. If only a doctor had told me about vitamin B6, I could have been spared all those months, probably amounting to years, of suffering.
I took one tablet of vitamin B6 every morning for the rest of my pregnancy and never felt sick again.
My son was born, weighing a healthy 9lbs, 1oz, after a peaceful drug free home birth with only 1 hour, 45 minutes of contractions. He was perfect in every way.
Now I tell every pregnant woman I know about the miracle of vitamin B6.
Joanna is a freelance health writer for The Mother magazine and Suite 101 with a column on infertility, http://infertility.suite101.com/. She is author of the book, 'Breast Milk: A Natural Immunisation,' and co-author of an educational resource on disabled parenting, in addition to running a charity for people damaged by vaccines or medical mistakes.