Pregnancy Nausea

On her 50th day of pregnancy Kate had thrown up so many times. There had been mild nausea and there had been persistent nausea. Leon had bought her a handheld video game player. Now there was a hard core of pregnancy nauseating her down in a tornado hot around her innards. There was nothing she could do except be sick. She threw up endlessly and without relief. She would choke and wretch miserably over a plastic yellow bowl and cough and then three final heaves would bring up some sort of awful yellow crap, and she’d go back under the blanket. There wasn’t reading or TV. There was a pretty blue chenille throw that weight about twenty pounds and there was the hot core of shaking, quaking orange grief. It was behind and around her teeth and down her sternum and into wherever it really was down in the belly. The baby, an orangely greasy, gruesome thing, was rolling like a larval sausage in its own fatty parts. A poisonous child, ugly insect, pulsating with hormones, ungendered, horrifying, oozing its garbagy TCH into her bloodstream. It was worse than seventeen tumors. She wanted death. She wanted to go back and not be pregnant anymore. There was no time of day, no position, for her, that was any better. The only time was in between heaves when she was collecting herself to expel another stream of the baby’s poison, that she felt any better. It was no way to live.

People said that it would go away in ten days, or twenty days, or that it would go away and come back later, or they would say they had spent their entire pregnancy in exactly the same situation and had published a newspaper at the same time and had had six kids. Most people thought she was urping up in the morning and then making a big deal about the rest of it. That was stupid and she hated those people. At least she hated them with everything she could muster while wearing the same pukey t-shirt for five days. She didn’t go out or talk on the phone mostly. She was waiting for something to happen that would change her situation.