On another board that I visit they have a thread going about early pregnancy symptoms, And I wanted to get the doper perspective.
I see alot of women complain about sore breasts, and nausea. However, there was just such a wide spectrum of symptoms that made me wonder if they were all tied to pregnancy. I mean I have half the symptoms right now:eek:
So dopers, what was your pregnancy experience like? Did you throw up every morning? Cheesecake and dill pickles for lunch?
I had morning, noon and night sickness. I couldn’t drink water without throwing up. I did this with both of my pregnancies. Very, very sick. I couldn’t take any prenatal vitamins…they all made me sick.
This lasted all through my pregnancy until the very last few months. Then I had tons of energy and felt great.
I think everybody reacts differently on some level.
I’ve got two words for you: Knockers Nuclear. They never went away completely, much to Mr. Kalhoun’s delight.
Before I ever showed or even really knew I was pregnant, I had
WARNING TMI TMI TMI
A weird heaviness in my vaginal area. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that it felt like there was a lot of blood rushing to the area AT ALL TIMES. Weird.
Also, I grew MASSIVE breasts (38C) on my 5’1", 100lb frame. I looked freakish.
I only felt nausiated when I went too long without a meal. I’m not sure why, but if I got too hungry, I puked bile. Ewwwwwwwwww. :eek:
With my first pregnancy, hubby and I were actively using birth control, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on (my cycle was somewhat irregular in those days, and I wasn’t too good about tracking it, either). I had some low-grade nausea, and thought I had a little touch of flu that I couldn’t shake. I also had a water bed (there’s a reason for me telling you this), so I didn’t notice the breast tenderness until I spent the night at a friend’s house and slept on a firm mattress. When I woke up that morning, with my breasts in pretty serious pain, I put two and two together, and said “Ohmygodimpregnant!” Hubby and I weren’t married at the time, and I was seriously worried about his reaction to the pregnancy (but that’s for a different thread). With my second pregnancy, which was very much intentional, I knew what symptoms to look for, and noticed them early on. The low-grade nausea, breast tenderness, etc. BTW, I only actually threw up once in each of my first two pregnancies: the first was a result of really indiscreet eating (three pieces of fried dough and two large glasses of orange juice, yikes!), the secong the result of paint fumes.
Third pregnancy, totally different (this could be attributed to an age differential, since my thrid pregnancy was almost 8 years after my second one). We were consciously trying to have another baby, so I did a home test as soon as my period was a week late, and it came out positive. But I had no nausea, no tenderness, essentially no symptoms except no period. Then a friend showed me a magazine article that said morning sickness is a sign of a healthy placenta :eek: Well, the doctor didn’t want to see me til I was 14 weeks gestational, so I spent the next two months worried that my placenta was unhealthy! When the doctor finally saw me, he said he couldn’t listen to the hearbeat with a stethoscope because of all the scar tissue from previous C-sections, but he sent me for a sonogram. I was so relieved when the sonogram showed a huge (for its gestational age), healthy fetus with a steady heartbeat! 
About 25 weeks later, an 11 pound 14 oz. baby girl was delivered via C-section.
I never got morning sickness until about 6 weeks. The first symptoms were sore breasts, needing to pee a lot, and fatigue. When I was first pregnant with my daughter I remember coming home from teaching one afternoon and just having to collapse on the couch. I told my husband that either I was coming down with the flu or I was pregnant.
Heh. That’s how I looked. I went swimming once and everyone laughed because when I floated on my back, there were these two “islands in the stream”. My boobs qualified for their own zip code!
I didn’t have any symptoms before I got a positive test at 14 days past ovulation. In fact, I thought for sure I wasn’t pregnant because I didn’t have any symptoms, and the previous month I thought I was pregnant because of PMS symptoms that were stronger than usual. Early signs of pregnancy and PMS are very similar. Now I know that for me the absence of PMS = pregnant!
Around 5 weeks the sore breasts started and around 6-7 weeks the bloatedness and nausea started, along with fatigue. Those were the earliest signs.
My husband knew I was pregnant as soon as I started thinking the cat was cute instead of annoying. I guess it’s a hormonal thing. Not a whole lot of nausea, but I was tired all the time and just felt sort of full in my lower abdomen and had to pee even more than usual. Luckily, this time my boobs didn’t start to get sore until a couple of weeks ago–I’m eight weeks now–but they were sore the whole time the first pregnancy (I lost that one at four months). They’re rather swollen and heavy now. I don’t get cravings for anything weird, but I do get a hankering for very specific foods; luckily for my husband, they’ve always been things that he likes too, so he doesn’t mind indulging me.
The first time I thought I had mono. My periods have always been irregular so not getting one for a few months was not unusual. I was tired and had low grate nausea and just felt like crap. I also had swollen and tender breasts. I was very surprised to be pregnant since we had gone through a lot to get pregnant and failed.
The second time I said “gee this feels familiar I wonder if I am pregnant.”
There better not be a third time!
The nausea lasted pretty much all the way through both and I had horrible heartburn. I also spent some time on bedrest and can attest that Preeclampsia sucks. I also got sciatica and early like right at the month 3 threshold early because of how my uterus sat they told me… ouch!
I am currently 11 weeks pregnant, and have had no morning sickness, no fatigue, and no strange cravings. The only way I know I’m pregnant is that I’ve had an ultrasound done that proved it! My breasts were actually sore in the first few weeks. I have had a few more headaches than normal, dizziness, and I do go to the bathroom more frequently. That’s about it… I feel great otherwise.
In the first couple weeks my only symptoms were very very tender breasts but by the third week the fatigue had set in. I’m talking passing out on the couch at 5:00 after work and barely being able to drag myself back up the next morning. By then I knew something was up and was pretty sure what it was. I didn’t start puking until the fifth week but then I did it all day, every day, until the day I gave birth.
With my second it was pretty much the same except that the puking went away after the first trimester like it is supposed to. Thank the gods for that.
I didn’t have a minute’s morning sickness during my pregnancies; my first symptom, even before my period was due, was an insatiable hunger. I would pig out for breakfast, lunch and tea, and snack continuously during the day, and THEN wake up in the middle of the night and raid the fridge again. It got to the point in my later preganancies when that first ‘hunger pang’, not a missed period, would see me at the Chemist buying a Testing Kit. 
I would also get the heavy sore boobs but they generally followed the Hungries by about a week.
About a week after conception, we went out of town to celebrate our anniversary. And I HAD to have a pizza. Sure, I like pizza, but this was an emergency. Someone was gonna get hurt if I didn’t have some pizza.
Another early symptom was feeling “weird.” There’s no way I can explain the sensation but I just felt like I was in the wrong skin.
Third symptom was a craving for Doritos, which I normally don’t like.
Another craving I had early on was hamburgers. The night we got the blood test I ate an entire triple cheeseburger at Wendy’s. In my normal state I average about one or two small cheeseburgers a month but for a while there I was about 10% USDA beef.
I didn’t have morning sickness exactly. I would feel fine… UNTIL I ate. Then I would be nauseated for at least an hour, usually two. Add this to being on a diabetic diet where I was supposed to be eating every two to three hours, and I was just miserable. The nausea eventually went away, but I also had terrible fatigue which never went away. I’ll be 8 months on Sunday and I’m still wanting to sleep most of the time.
We were trying to conceive, but since all of the tests I took came up negative, I thought it didn’t happen that month. (Yeah, it only took us about a week of trying, talk about fertile.) I noticed that I started feeling very tired all of the time, and was really sick to my stomach, but I thought it was due to migraines, and didn’t think any more of it. When my husband came home for the third or fourth day in a row to find me still asleep at noon, he told me to take another test, and it finally came up positive.
For me it was mainly the nausea but on top of that I got dizzy and felt faint so easily (I passed out once at the mall while job hunting). My main craving was for orange juice, I drank more in my first couple months than I had in a long time. I didn’t realize I was pregnant until the end of the first month though and it took me nearly another month to have the doctor I was going to confirm, though I knew (I had taken a home test).
It really mucked up my job what with how I felt, but in retrospect I shoulda known sooner considering how I felt.
I’m right about ten weeks now. My very first symptoms were waking up at night drenched in sweat-but only around my tummy. Kinda unusual since I’m usually cold at night. I also had a slight “heaviness” in the abdomen and different sort of breast tenderness than before my period. After several days of all of the above, I had a positive pregnancy test (which was around the 3 week point. I had not yet missed a period).
Had a bit of spotting when I should have had my period and then felt pretty hot all the time, had some heartburn/indigestion (which I never get) and felt a little more tired than usual. And a bit foggyheaded but I put that down to thinking about the pregnancy. That lasted until the 6-7th week.
And then, literally from one day to the next, I developed “morning” sickness and developed the opposite of cravings. The only foods I’ve eaten are salads, sandwiches and fruit (except for the fruit, none of which I particularly like). And I have to eat every 2-3 hours or I throw up. Strong smells also send me running for the bathroom so the hubby and I are now eating separately most of the time. I also can’t eat as much at one meal as I used to or I’ll suffer bad indigestion or nausea. I have a strong aversion to chocolate (which I normally love), am not too fond of sweet foods either. I’ve also had some trouble sleeping and have had back pains-I’ve been told that both of those are caused by elevated levels of progesterone. And I’m exhausted all the time. Previous posters talked about sleeping ALL the time and still feeling tired-that’s where I’m at. Between the throwing up and fatigue- I feel horrible all the time. Oh yeah boobs have grown a bit more but they stopped hurting after the first couple of weeks.
The last few weeks have sucked tremendously and I’m just not keeping up with day to day stuff at all. I’ve been told that it passes around the 12th week-I’m counting down!
I’m carrying b/g twins, and I’m old and was already fat to begin with, so my symptoms are probably exaggerated (that’s what I’ve read anyway), but here’s what it’s been like (and we weren’t actively trying to conceive, so I wasn’t on the lookout for any of this):
About 6 days after conception, major fatigue set in. Could not drag myself out to party with friends as planned (and it was disco night, so I was very motivated to go). At the time this was quite puzzling.
Roughly 3 weeks after conception (which was 5 weeks from the first date of my last period), add a little dizziness and some flu-type symptoms. Figured I was either quite ill or pregnant so I peed on the stick - voila! When I went to see the OB they didn’t even do another pregnancy test - apparently false negatives on those home tests can happen, but false positives don’t.
A week or two later, major boob pain. Even the shower spray was too much. Forget even thinking of sleeping on the stomach!
Seven weeks in, nausea. No appetite. I lost five pounds one week - but strangely enough, developed stretch marks across my abdomen. So stuff was shifting.
Nausea lasted until about week 16. During that period there were times when I was ravenously hungry (although I never had any cravings for weird combinations). I remember making my Hubby pull over so I could dash into Walgreen’s for Nutter Butters and milk. Emetrol helped the nausea a bit, as did nibbling throughout the day. Backrubs helped me get my prenatal vitamins down (I agree, those things are nasty!).
And my sense of smell went through the ceiling - couldn’t stand being near the catfood or any raw meat. But ginger scented soap was delightful.
Plus I was exhausted, just incredibly tired. I had to quit working (was self-employed) because it was too strenuous, and it’s just as well since I napped all the time anyway.
And throughout my pregnancy I’ve had problems with heartburn. If your Dr. says it’s okay, buy a big bottle of Tums! I’m nearly through the 96-tablet size.
Forgetfulness became a major problem then - one day I got all the way out to my car before realizing I wasn’t wearing any shoes! Very daydreamy. In fact, trying to recall the details of last fall, I can’t! I cannot remember weeks 21 through 33 with any clarity! I’m sure there were some good days, though; I remember enjoying the baby showers & I did a lot of reading during that period.
I also developed really bad carpal tunnel, which I’d never had before. And at week 26 found out I had gestational diabetes (which I’ve been able to treat via diet changes).
I’m ready to deliver any minute - on Monday we’re going to schedule a C-Section because twins are considered full-term at 37 weeks & both of mine are breech (we like to think this means they’ll hit the ground running!). I’ll be so glad when this phase is over because I am just about ready to lose it! The holidays were a total bust for me, I wasn’t allowed to go shopping, couldn’t travel, and can’t eat anything fun! I’ve wanted to start about 19 threads with the header “Fessie’s losing it”, except I know that my first obligation is to be grateful for the apparent health of my babies & the fact that this pregnancy has lasted this long without major problems; I feel really awful for women who want to conceive but can’t.
Good luck w/your pregnancy! I’ve enjoyed the other message boards I’ve visited EXCEPT that negative outcomes & experiences are waaaaaay over-represented. You could have Marcus Welby and Peter Benton delivering the baby with Mother Teresa in attendance & there’d STILL be someone who knew someone whose baby’s head fell off!
Plus most of the grammar is abysmal.
I knew before my wife knew.
How could that be?
TMI - Last chance to run away!
Because she tastes very different when pregnant, sort of a ‘musky’ taste. I recognized the change from the last time, so knew immediately that bambino #2 was on the way (May 29! 
).
In both of her pregnancies, we knew the exact date of our first unprotected sex, so I know exactly how fast that change happens: Within two days. Also, within a week, she gets horrible heartburn and her sinuses go completely haywire. Within two weeks, she’s sleepy all the time. These will stick with her pretty much the whole way, if she follows form from her last pregnancy.