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Illustration by Anna Parini
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Anna Russell
A contributing writer based in London
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Like millions of women before me, when I got pregnant I experienced run-of-the-mill so-called morning sickness, a low-level queasiness that persisted throughout the day and then disappeared almost completely after twelve weeks. Phew! It was unpleasant, but not debilitating, and I rarely thought about it after it passed. So, I was surprised when an expecting friend of mine stayed sick, puking multiple times a day, all the way up to the birth of her adorable baby. That’s almost nine months of the worst hangover of your life.
It got me thinking. Why do some women get extra sick during pregnancy? Why is the nausea relatively manageable for most and a medical emergency for others? It turns out there’s a name for extreme morning sickness: hyperemesis gravidarum, or H.G., which translates, roughly, to “excessive vomiting during pregnancy.” (My friend referred to her condition, with bleak humor, as “a touch of the Kate Middletons,” after its most famous sufferer.) In my reporting on H.G., for a piece published today, I learned that the illness has a long history. (Charlotte Brontë may have died from it.) Doctors believed that the illness was psychological, sometimes interpreting it as a rejection of motherhood or a bid for attention. I spoke to women who had undergone bizarre treatments, including days of “isolation therapy,” in which they were left alone in a hospital room, without visits from their partners or families, to come to terms with their pregnancy.
I also learned about the work of Marlena Fejzo, a tenacious geneticist at the University of Southern California, who has become a celebrity in the H.G. world. In the late nineties, Fejzo was horribly ill during her second pregnancy. She was unable to eat, or to move without vomiting, and she lost the baby at fifteen weeks. Since then, she has devoted her career to understanding H.G. A few years ago, Fejzo and her colleagues made an astonishing discovery about its root cause, upending assumptions and opening new pathways for treatment or a cure. What surprised me most in working on this story was the extraordinary resilience of H.G. sufferers—and, often, their willingness to do it all again.
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