Non-pregnant woman, sleeping peacefully. |
Haggard pregnant woman, roaming the night, hoping to pass out in exhaustion. |
Heartburn
Starting early in the first trimester I began to experience intense, fire breathing, life disturbing heartburn. It would particularly peak any time I made the mistake of lying down. Many women experience heartburn in their third trimester when the baby becomes big enough to press on the stomach. Others of us are lucky enough to start with it a lot earlier. (First trimester heartburn is caused by a hormone called "relaxin". As the name implies, relaxin is released throughout pregnancy to relax the muscles and make room for the baby to grow. However, it also has the unpleasant side effect of relaxing the muscles normally involved in keeping your stomach content where it belongs.)Pass the Tums |
Note: If you also have to take iron supplements at some point during your pregnancy, be aware that calcium interferes with iron absorption. This is unfortunate since iron supplements often exacerbate heartburn. If you fall into this situation, I recommend taking the iron mid-morning. That way you have something in your stomach so the iron is less likely to upset it, but you are hopefully far away in time from desperately needing the Tums to get some shut eye (the iron needs a 2-hour window to be absorbed fully).
Musculoskeletal pain
This is a gift that just keeps on giving in pregnancy. It is an extremely under-appreciated fact that a woman's spine literally shifts throughout her first pregnancy in order to accommodate the growing uterus (and never fully comes back to its original position). Couple that with the weight gain, the round ligament pain, and a million other things, back and hip pain are extremely common, especially towards the end. This can make getting comfortable in bed almost impossible. (I highly recommend prenatal yoga as a way to help your body cope with the changes.)Many people will recommend that you sleep on your side, place a pillow behind your back, another pillow under your belly, and then another one between your knees to get comfortable. Frankly those people are crazy because who sleeps perfectly still like that? I will admit to resisting the pregnancy pillow for a long time because it looked huge and I surely wasn't going to need it and what was I going to do with it when I was no longer pregnant? Then, somewhere around 6 months I broke down and got myself a Snoogle Total Body Pillow and haven't looked back.
The Snoogle makes sleeping without pain (at first), and later in your pregnancy with less pain, possible. Also, unlike the pillow construction described above, it allows you to roll over (assuming you are at a point in your pregnancy where you're still able to do that). I will admit that it is quite large (my husband referred to it as "the great barrier Snoogle" when it was in constant use). However, the Snoogle people undersell it as a purely pregnancy pillow. It comes with a handy sheet that tells you all the different ways you can use it for more than just sleeping while pregnant. As a frequent sufferer of colds and sinus infections, it has been a convenient way to prop myself up in bed in the years since. We keep it in a storage bin under the bed for easy access when someone is sick.