Don't call me Mama (2) - The time I felt like ripping my baby apart

My first trimester was a very rough and challenging one. I became someone I didn't recognize.

I found out that I was pregnant on February 9. The first wave of weakness hit me on February 14 when I went to my parents’ house to pack some items from my old office room. Things I would normally lift sent me to a realm of tiredness I couldn't come out of hours later. The sweet and sour Chinese sauce my husband ordered to celebrate valentines didn't go down well in my mouth and stomach.

It was like a downward descent from that day. Morning sickness hit me like Anthony Joshua’s punches. I could hardly climb the stairs without almost passing out. Sometimes climbing the stairs to the fourth floor rendered me immobile for 3 hours. My tiredness and weakness made me very unproductive. And the unproductiveness sent me into depression because I was... well, unproductive. I felt I was producing nothing and had nothing to show for my existence on earth. During this period, I resented the whole pregnancy thing, and almost felt like slashing my stomach open and ripping out the baby.

Spices irritated me. Cooking my breakfast for was left to my husband. I threw up a lot in the mornings. I threw up till my eyes bulged out, veins showed on my temples, and specks of blood came out sometimes.

I was so convinced that my tiredness was peculiar to me. Surely, pregnant women can't be feeling this way. I see them all around going strong with their business and other affairs. I was a novice, my husband was a novice so I pressured him to call doctors and find a solution to my problem immediately because I just couldn't continue life this way.


The two doctors we talked to said it was a normal situation for some pregnant women, while I kept arguing with them that mine wasn't normal, that mine was worse than other people’s own. How can I not be able to climb stairs because I'm pregnant. For God’s sake, my stomach was still as flat as anything.

It was during this first check-up that we found the fibroid!

I had been expecting twins since my husband is from a family of twins in abundance, but it was fibroid instead. Gosh!

Before this discovery, my knowledge about fibroid was pretty vague. It was those things that happened to older women, making their stomach bulge out, causes some blockage and eventually leading to infertility. Sometimes, it was life threatening, and they’d have to remove it. I definitely didn’t fit the profile. People like me don’t have fibroid, not after leading a perfectly healthy life, and having very nice flat stomach.

How ignorant of me?

Anyway, some weeks after I discovered the fibroid, I started having a condition called red degeneration of fibroid. It is a condition when the baby starts growing and start crushing the fibroid, leading to contractions. I experienced these contractions and I experienced pregnancy contractions. The contractions as a result of red degeneration of fibroid are 100 times worse than pregnancy contractions. In fact, I believe this experience was one of the reasons I didn’t flinch during my pregnancy contractions (I had seen worse), though I used an epidural to have the actual baby

This condition got me admitted into the hospital three times between April and May. Read more about the first admission here. The last time I was admitted, the contractions resonated from my lower abdomen to my right leg, and it is not something I pray for my enemy to experience. Those two months were my most challenging. After the last admission, I told myself I honestly didn’t have time for these useless ailments. I didn’t have the time to waste. I didn’t have the money to waste (it was taking a toll on my husband’s purse), and I didn’t have the emotional and mental energy to waste. The doctors really can’t do anything about it. They just manage the pain by pumping you with loads and loads of saline water, causing you to swell with water retention for about 2 weeks so that your joints will loosen a bit.

So I told my husband that we are not going to the hospital again. This red degeneration of fibroid ends right here. We made our confessions and prayed, and that was the end of it. We never got admitted again. The excruciating pain never came back, and everything became a thing of the past.

Have you ever gone through a terrible time at any of your trimesters? How did you handle it? Please, I need you all to comment whether you have been pregnant or not so I can be encouraged to finish this series, lol.

Next week, I'm going to talk about six things no one ever told me about pregnancy.