Morning Sickness (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #1)

Recently, I’ve needed to take a lie down after every meal. This isn’t because I have a food baby – it’s because I’m having an actual baby, and that’s when morning sickness really hits me.

Numbers vary, but reports suggest two thirds or more women will experience some sort of morning sickness – which can include vomiting, nausea, food aversions, and feeling “under the weather”.

Most women get it between weeks 6 and 14 in the first trimester of pregnancy, but some get it earlier, have it fade sooner, or suffer it for most of the 9 months they are carrying. Some never get it. Some women suffer all hours of the night and day (I like to think the objectionable term “morning sickness” refers not to a propensity to suffer only in the mornings, but to the sickness as the “beginning” or “dawn” of pregnancy or motherhood), and some find it comes and goes throughout the day or even week to week. Some get it at specific times of day, or have it triggered by brushing their teeth, particular foods, or particular smells (I didn’t think smell affected me until someone walked past me on a train with one of those heavily processed Cornish pasties!). Unfortunately, we don’t know what causes morning sickness, nor why it varies so much woman to woman.

What causes morning sickness? Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Sleep Paralysis - A Ghost Story

I’ve just had my first sleep paralysis with shadows.

Champion of ghost stories, sleep paralysis is thought to lie behind hundreds and thousands of ghost stories and alien abductions every year.

It affects up to half of us during our lifetimes. It may even have happened to you.

We still have much to learn about how sleep works, how the brain works, and how our emotions guide understanding. One fascinating insight is this phenomenon. Rather like opening up the back of a watch, it spills its guts and opens up more scientific questions than it answers.

Shadow -  © TWDK

Sleep paralysis happens when the waking and sleeping parts of the brain become confused, usually just when you are about to drift off, or just as you awaken. When we’re in REM sleep, all of our muscles are frozen, except those in our eyes and diaphragm, to prevent us from acting out our dreams: when we suffer sleep paralysis, they remain frozen, even though our minds – our desperately trapped, struggling brains – are wide, wide awake.

It feels like you’re being held in place by invisible forces: unable to scream, unable to sit up. Worse, your paralysed torso forces you to breathe shallowly, and during the few seconds or minutes that sleep paralysis takes hold, it feels like a weight has been placed upon your chest, the ghost is sitting on you, squeezing out all the air… And, with air deficiency comes a real feeling of panic, and a powerful sense of impending doom.