Nausea and Desire

I have thrown up every day for the last 10 weeks. I’m 16 weeks pregnant, but it feels beside the point.

The puking has been a reprieve, actually. The challenge has been the constant nausea. For some reason, it’s important to me that you understand that I don’t mean the kind of nausea that you may feel after too much pasta or the stomach flip of going over a hill too quickly or right before you have to tell someone bad news. For some reason, I feel that I have to redefine it.

Nausea is both the only word I can use to singularly describe how I’ve felt and a word that fails to contain it. Save for the four or five hours I sleep at night, every moment of every day, I feel like I could or should throw up. I feel deeply unsettled. At risk. A constant and insatiable emptiness in my belly that is enormous and heavy. A gnawing uneasiness that feels like perhaps I’ve committed a murder and am on the run. The whole length of my limbs feels nauseous, like my blood is poisoned with something. Eating doesn’t resolve it. In fact, eating a piece of toast feels like I’ve eaten three Whoppers. I burp constantly. I’m also fatigued, which anyone who knows will tell you is different from being very tired; fatigue is not cured by rest. I’m grateful the word “fatigue” exists. I wish there were a word like that for nauseous. I don’t know how else to name it except to say it has swallowed me whole.

I’ve also taken Zofran every day, a prescription anti-nausea and anti-emetic drug. It allows me to eat Honey Nut Cheerios or a bagel about once a day before I go back under.

I oscillate between trying to drown out this feeling with as much TV as I can handle until I fall asleep and reading Radical Acceptance on my Kindle at 2 am to either do some core healing or to spiritually bypass it. I’ll take whatever I can get. Someone asked me if there were any mind-over-body practices I could do. Meditation, yoga, breathing? Is there a mind that has control over the body here? I think my mind is in my belly. I think my mind is nauseous, too. I won’t feel like this forever. I won’t feel like this forever, and I’ll have a new baby. I tell myself this a dozen times a day, my eyes closed, head heavy on the pillow.

You know when you get food poisoning, you have to take a break from that food for a long time, perhaps indefinitely? Like that, I have developed a distaste for almost everything I’ve encountered since becoming nauseous: songs, TV shows, baby names I thought about, shirts I’ve worn, smells, accents (I’m sorry, New York, I tried to fall asleep to The Booksellers one particularly tough night and did the rare close-the-laptop-while-the-movie’s-still-playing move because I hated it so much). This nausea has turned out to be less of a feeling I have and more of a filter I have no choice but to see the world through.

There’s one thing it hasn’t tainted. I can’t stop watching a woman eat lunch online.

The “ploughman’s lunch” woman: a teacher from Georgia who eats at her desk, her school lanyard draped around her neck. On a plate in front of her: two cold beets and a small potato, a chunk of crusty bread, pickled pearl onions, English cheddar, a British condiment called Branny P’s, a British condiment called Salad Cream, and slices of Granny Smith apples. She has a full tub of Kerrygold on the side. She crafts each bite: bread, knifed on butter, a bit of cheddar, a bit of Branny P’s, a bite that looks impossibly huge until she puts it in her mouth and it looks perfect. Her eyes roll back in her head, and she nods 5, 10 times. Mhm, Mhm, Mhm, she says. A deep approval. Everything about it looks perfect. I immediately understand her. This knowing what you want and getting it, it is exactly right, and I am absolutely desperate for it.

I have heard that the root of all suffering is desire. And this is wise, I think. How rarely what we desire is what we actually want, and even if it is, does the itch really get scratched? It is 2 am, and I am watching this person eat, and I am convinced that, actually, yes, this is a person knowing what they want and getting it, and she has figured it out. I believe in this. In my current state, I cling to it.

Attachment is the other source of suffering I hear. But being in a body that is telling me it needs something, that something is wrong, constantly? It is a salve to imagine that there can be a want completely fulfilled. All day, it feels like I am making the wrong choice over and over and over. To eat, not to eat. What to eat. How much water to drink. Lying on my left side or my right side. When to take my meds and my supplements so I have the least chance of throwing them up, so I won’t have to do the math of should I take them again? I am at the mercy of choice all day, knowing that no matter what I choose, it will probably not be correct. My body will say, nope, you don’t even know me, do you? I’ve settled for patting myself on the back when it doesn’t make me feel worse. Then I go lie down. But what if I could go sit at a desk with a plate full of things I know I will love, that will make me nod dozens of times in agreement with them? I’m happy for her, or I’m jealous of her, or I can’t wait to be in possession of my own desires again, just like her. I won’t feel this way forever.

Many people who’ve been pregnant can describe this feeling of nausea to you, to varying degrees. Especially on Reddit. I’ve discovered this at my 2 pm/4 am/6 pm/all day searches for remedies that have turned into, simply, searches for solace. I read that some people throw up once in the morning and go about their day. Some people throw up all day and have to be hospitalized for dehydration. Some people are begging to feel nauseous because it would prove to them that their pregnancy is healthy. And there are many, like me, who literally can’t believe (Is this for real? one user wrote) how bad they feel.

Sometimes the teacher takes suggestions from commenters on what to eat or how to eat something. She shoves a chunk of white cheddar into the center of an enormous, steaming, perfectly cooked, sweet potato. A spoonful of cottage cheese on top. She eats the potato like a sandwich, two-handed. She closes her eyes in pleasure. She creates each bite, leaving little to chance. She takes a sip of pickle brine directly from the jar. She raises her eyebrows and smirks. She tries something new: she dips a little pickled onion on a toothpick into Salad Cream. She kisses two pointed fingers together in approval. Yeah. Those go together. She crunches the white top off of a spring onion, spits it out, and eats the green part. She doesn’t care when people criticize her food choices. I have never let a hate comment upset me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m in my late 30s.

I’m in my late 30s. I am completely rocked, perhaps even upset, by her videos. Upset as in knocked over. One time, she accidentally drips some Coleman’s mustard on her scotch egg. Some things in life just happen on purpose, she says before she bites into it with another smile. In any other context, I would think that was a ridiculous thing to say. What does it even mean? Happen on purpose? But while I’m watching her, I’m trusting her, I’m believing this person. Not just believing her, but believing in her. She’s done it. She’s fucking cracked it.

I swipe to her next video, where she is eating something called onion cups, which appear to be layers of raw white onion filled with various dips. For a moment, I feel the hollowness, the wrongness, the aching need for something unattainable in my own belly. I can’t stop watching. She’s so happy, everything is right for her. I won’t stop watching. It is something like hope.