Nausea (Morning Sickness)

This should be one of the most exciting and memorable times of your life. There’s a new life inside you, but you may not want to tell anyone other than your partner until that first scan. Particularly if it’s your first baby, this is the biggest, most precious secret in the whole world.

Then you wake up one morning and . . . ugh! You can’t even think of getting your head off the pillow without feeling you’re going to be violently sick. You go to the bathroom and maybe you do vomit. Hardly the best way to start the day if you have a job to go to, other children to get ready for school and the prospect of preparing breakfast, which makes you even more queasy.

Some women are more susceptible to sickness during pregnancy – and for some it’s not just during the first two or three months; it can continue almost until the baby is born.

There are, however, natural remedies which normally help:

  • Keep a store of healthy snacks by your bed in case you wake up at night feeling hungry. Oatmeal biscuits, crisp-breads, raisins and sesame seeds are unlikely to make you feel nauseous. A bottle of mineral water will help if you’re thirsty
  • As soon as you wake up, get your partner to bring you a cup of peppermint or lime flower tea – you can buy commercially produced tea bags – sprinkled with a little grated Ginger. Obviously, if you don’t like the flavour of these teas anyway, there’s no point in drinking them if you’re feeling queasy, so ordinary weak tea without milk and sweetened with honey will do
  • Before you get out of bed, eat a plain, unsweetened biscuit
  • But the best remedy of all is ginger tea. You can buy tea bags at most supermarkets, but it’s best to make your own by grating half an inch of ginger into a mug of boiling water, leaving it to stand for five minutes, straining it and drinking when it cools slightly

    If you’re one of the unfortunate few whose nausea continues throughout the day, get some crystallised ginger – preferably not sugar-coated – cut it into dolly mixture sized pieces and have one or two every 15 minutes. You could also take ginger tea bags to have instead of coffee at work. Even ginger nut biscuits could help as ginger is the best spice to prevent any sort of sickness.

    It’s also worth trying the wristbands or special plasters sold in chemists to treat travel sickness. They have studs, which act on the acupuncture points to reduce the risk of nausea.
     
     
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