Pills and Potions

I've been feeling crap today. Nauseous, headache, no energy - all for no apparent reason. I've taken some anti-emetics (which don't actually stop me throwing up if my body's determined, but do take the edge off the feeling of nausea); not taken any paracetamol because the thought of throwing it up is just too horrible - and there's not much else I can do.

Admittedly, life in general did get better when I realised that Gavsicon was a) nowhere near as revolting , and b) much more effective than the generic stuff which the hospital gave me. That tasted of aniseed - which is likely to make me retch even at the best of times, making it unsurprising that I was repeatedly throwing up lumps of inert pinkish looking gloop, which looked like it might have originated in a BBC special effects workshop in about 1978. Gaviscon does at least seem to deal with my intermittent 'stomach acid is making my throat burn' problem - but that doesn't seem to be it today, so there is no point in taking any. And it does still taste like particularly ferocious toothpaste (note to the makers of Gaviscon: why can't it taste like dolly mixtures?).

I can't help thinking that if men got pregnant, and felt this crap, this often, for this long, then there would have been a far bigger research effort to find ways of alleviating some of the symptoms. Clearly, after Thalidomide and the general Rise of The Lawyer, research was likely to be avoided as too risky - I'm therefore suffering because nobody thought it worth trying to fix before about 1960.

This doesn't make me feel any happier about it - especially after numerous interactions with members of the medical profession, many of whom actually seem to lose all interest in trying to make sure that I'm feeling OK the moment they discover that I'm pregnant. That seems to be meant to make me happy about feeling like death; which, oddly enough, I'm not.

To make matters worse, the BBC have just stuck something on their website which says that the Chelsea & Westminster has the highest caesarian rates in the country (they have agreed to redo the scan next week... but I'm still not feeling particularly confident about them). That might vaguely bother me, but what is really bothering me is that my mother will almost certainly feel the need to either email or call to make sure that I haven't missed it. Gah.

(Not Gaviscon. And still not my mother.)