For starters, I am not pregnant. Don’t go getting excited. But despite not being pregnant, last Wednesday I was morning-sick.
It snuck up on me, where I realized as I stood in the kitchen that I was experiencing that five-times-familiar uneasy-queasy feeling, accompanied by the mental miasma that makes it nearly impossible to think.
I recognized it and thought, “Okay, that’s odd,” because, as I said, I’m not pregnant. At the time, in fact, I was experiencing proof that I was not pregnant, and I wondered if maybe the hormonal situation was behind the nausea. I thought it weird, then put it out of my head. Maybe I was getting a tummy bug or something.
Ten minutes later, I returned to the kitchen, and again, the nausea, the maddening inability to focus my thoughts. What was going on?
(By the way, if you came here via google searching for a cure for morning sickness, there are a ton of them over at the midwife archives. I heartily recommend the ginger ale made with real ginger, although with Kiddo#3 I discovered that if I ate a Jeno’s pizza at 10:00AM, I wouldn’t get sick again until 3pm.)
The periods of nausea/mental fog persisted all morning, and eventually I narrowed it down to the kitchen, at which point I started hunting for a cause. Because morning sickness is one thing, and pregnancy is another thing, but it’s impossible to be pregnant only in the kitchen.
Within an hour, I’d found the cause: the baby had found my packet of raspberry iced-tea bags and opened the inner packet to the air; I could smell the raspberry tea leaves. I’m not sure I had raspberry iced-tea last summer. Meaning the last time I would have had it was summer, 2007. When I was first pregnant with Kiddo#4.
I cured my morning sickness, therefore, by putting away the raspberry tea bags.
It’s funny. But at the same time, it’s amazing how my sense of smell could trigger physical memories of which I was barely aware, an unconscious mental connection not made explicit but real nevertheless.
We experienced proof that my wife was not pregnant only to find out it was “implantation spotting” … What prompted us to test? An intense desire for BBQ on behalf of my wife and a child of ours that asked her if she was expecting those twins they were praying for. 🙂
Sure enough … test positive.
I’ve only had implantation spotting once, and it happened at 8 dpo and tapered within 24 hours. So I knew this was actual proof.
One of the ways I knew I was pregnant with Kiddo#3 was that suddenly the coffee air freshener started smelling of coffee again, a year after it had stopped smelling of anything at all.
Did you get your twins? 🙂
Last fall, I was very nauseated in the mornings for over a week, and hoping the kids wouldn’t talk about it. Knew I didn’t need a test kit. Traced it down to new multi-vitamins I had with breakfast, but it took forever to figure it out.
The sense of smell is one of the most powerful tools in the brain’s abilities for storing and retrieving memories. Sometimes my dreams are infused with aromas associated with a long ago event that my mind is revisiting.
I associate the smell of propane gas with my grandparents whom I loved, and their old leaky homestead. So when we had a gas leak in our house, I didn’t react to it, I just found myself thinking a lot about Grandma and Grandpa. We were getting really sick and not knowing why (hubby has no sense of smell), and I was stuck on telling stories about my childhood, amidst going to the doctor with constant sore throats and rashes. We were saved by our plumber who came in to fix a broken water pipe and the first thing he said when he walked in the door was, “Hey Lady, you gotta get outta here, you gotta gas leak!!!!! and he ran out to his truck.
Yeah, he got my attention. We could’ve died. The gas company red tagged our house — we took cold showers for 4 days till all the lines were replaced.
Thank goodness that raspberry tea bags aren’t combustible. 🙂
(Your blog entries are always wonderful and such beautiful insights of life.)
Thank you.
Wow, that’s scary about the gas leak! Your senses were telling you something, and your brain was telling you something more important to your heart. Goodness… Thank God for the broken water pipe!
I didn’t have morning sickness when I was pregnant (*ducking*), but oh boy, did I have the bloodhound nose, and certain smells hit me a lot harder than normal. The week before last (and no, I’m not pregnant) someone burned a bag of microwave popcorn and all of a sudden, my bloodhound nose came back with a vengeance.
It’s amazing the memories smell brings us….:)