Take Two Crackers and Call Me in the Morning!

Nausea and vomiting affect 50-90% of all pregnant women to varying degrees, impacting not only nutritional status, emotional status, productivity and household economics.  This little book is the resource which provides tried-and-true suggestions to mitigate the severity of morning (noon and night time) sickness which can make the early pregnancy experience more enjoyable.  While many women are affected mostly in the first trimester, a small percentage (1.5-3%) suffer severely starting from the beginning which lead one prominent physician to declare "their suffering is bottomless".   

Once considered a psychological “woman’s” problem, severe morning sickness can rapidly progress to a life-threatening condition, missed too often because of the insidious nature of escalation and has claimed more than one life.  Historical treatments dispensed included the bizarre as well as the dangerous from use of leeches, injections of husbands’ blood, electro-shock treatments and removal of the vomit bucket to name but a handful of desperate measures concocted by frustrated physicians.   The list of unsuccessful remedies was so extensive it lead to a statement by S. Rosen in 1955, addressing the Upstate Inter Hospital Conference of New York’s Department of Mental Hygiene that the “number of successful treatments are even more numerous that those for warts”.

Severe morning sickness (called hyperemesis gravidarum) is serious stuff.  Dehydration, starvation/malnutrition, birth defects and fetal death/miscarriage are consequences all seen by the book's author during her long tenure as senior Registered Dietitian/Nutritionist on the high-risk obstetrical unit at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which at one point in time, delivered over 10,000 babies a year.