Ice Ice Baby

Olivia Sudjic on the inability to eat during pregnancy – and one dish that brought her joy when she became able to eat again. Words and photo by Olivia Sudjic.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Olivia Sudjic writes about the sudden inability to eat due to extreme ‘morning’ sickness (hyperemesis gravidarum, or HG), and a dish that brought her joy when she became able to eat again.

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Ice Ice Baby

Olivia Sudjic on the inability to eat during pregnancy – and one dish that she became able to enjoy when she was able to eat again. Words and photo by Olivia Sudjic.

I didn’t fully appreciate how trying I’d found my first successful pregnancy until I finally met the enigmatic figure who’d been hiding in plain sight. Flooded with relief that the pregnancy was over, I also started to understand what it had cost me. Having never experienced any kind of disordered eating before, I had become someone whose life was dominated by food aversions and the fear of throwing up, especially in public. A couple of years later and pregnant for a second time, I was revolted by even the smell of my toddler’s nursery, by the normally delightful smell of my toddler, and became reluctant to leave the house in case I saw a wet leaf on the ground that made me think of lettuce.

Pregnancy is not a disease, but for the unlucky two per cent of us who suffer from extreme ‘morning’ sickness (hyperemesis gravidarum, or HG), it might as well be. HG is often misunderstood and met with little sympathy, blamed on diet or a woman’s psychological state. The real culprit is now known to be a hormone, GDF15, which is produced at high levels by the placenta during pregnancy. Not everyone reacts as badly to it, or at all, which is why some people feel like shiny, horny, goddesses for nine months and others are hospitalised with dehydration, unable to swallow even their own saliva without vomiting (somewhat unbelievably, clinicians use something called PUQE – pregnancy-unique quantification of emesis – as a tool to gauge severity). Thankfully, I’ve never been hospitalised during pregnancy. With my first child, I kept thinking it would improve, as the books all insisted that it would, and so I avoided taking medication, unconvinced of the safety. Thankfully, the medication I have been prescribed the second time round has actually helped (for many it does not), and has meant that, in my last trimester, I am able to function, although much of the time it simply puts me to sleep. Prior to taking it, however, I was debilitated by intense nausea, sickness and aversions, making it impossible, among other things, to be near food or any lingering evidence of it.

Supermarkets, cafes, my own kitchen, air vents from restaurants on the street: all became no-go areas. I had to be careful to avoid even looking at things that reminded me of something edible. Puking was in fact the best part of my day, since at least then I had a brief respite from nausea, and so the time to try and eat was right after. For someone who normally rejoices in food, losing the desire to eat – feeling, instead, revolted by the very suggestion – was disorienting and lonely. Nausea replaced my personality. It’s been worse with my second child: two years of sleepless nights has frayed my sanity, I have been racked with maternal guilt over being so incapacitated, and I have had the grim foreknowledge it would likely last way beyond the first trimester again. Remembering nausea is entirely different from experiencing it, day in day out, and doing so, this time, while caring for a toddler (and while also experiencing pelvic girdle pain, insomnia, heartburn, etc). Their dirty nappies still need changing, their food still needs preparing, and they’ll deposit a soggy mouthful of something in your lap or ask you to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar at the exact moment you need to barf.

Alongside nausea, guilt and depression, a fourth horseman arrived this second time around in the form of white-hot, hormonal rage – particularly when, in lieu of being able to do anything more sociable or productive, I came across ignorant comments on social media about a long-overdue breakthrough in research into HG, calling it ‘another big pharma scam.’ According to A Man, his Own Wife cured herself by making Simple Changes to Her Diet. Others insisted ginger was a miracle worker, unwittingly (?) reinforcing the notion that the problem is women and their food choices.

I had no choice in terms of my diet, because of how my body reacts to GDF15. It was impossible to keep most things down. My body, but also my brain, violently rejected objects it could recognise as food, or food-related, particularly anything you could categorise as healthy. My unscientific sense is that foods like fruit and vegetables – but also anything warm, moist or inconsistent in texture – triggered my lizard brain to think of decomposition, poison and mould, and perhaps it was, on some bizarre, self-defeating level, going into aversion-overdrive to protect me and the baby. But if certain foods exacerbated and others temporarily stemmed the nausea, they were both unique to me and not something I had control over. The things I put into my body had never felt more freighted with deliberation – and yet I’d never felt like I had less say over it. Some swear by spice, some by salt, others by sweet or sour. My own tolerance was for plain carbohydrates. Actually forcing myself to eat them was a small torture, but for a few minutes afterwards they might take the edge off. When I didn’t eat anything, the nausea would get worse, I guess due to low blood sugar and the demands of a placenta.

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Now at the end of my second pregnancy, with a little distance from the intensity of this period, I find it interesting what each individual with HG is relieved or repulsed by. In my case, the foods that seemed the ‘safest’ were often nostalgic ones I associated with my childhood diet. Foods I hadn’t thought of buying in decades, like Hula Hoops, suddenly occurred to me. Stuff that came from a packet and was mainly E numbers could fly under the radar more easily. I want to be careful about suggesting any of this is simply ‘in the mind’, but before I hit upon a useful medication, I did try hypnotherapy. I was willing to try anything to make the nausea more bearable, not just for my own comfort but for the health of everyone involved – I couldn’t even stomach the folic acid supplements I was meant to take for the baby. What I realised as I spoke to the hypnotherapist, other than that I couldn’t even say words like fennel without vomiting, was that the same imaginative, associative, allusive part of my brain that makes me a novelist, and that has in the past made me over-sensitive, prone to anxiety and hypervigilance, was making it harder to manage being pregnant.

One of the mental tricks the hypnotherapist taught me was to give the feeling of nausea a colour and to then imagine expelling it from my body with my breath. At the same time, I was told to imagine something that seemed safe, and to mentally breathe it into my body, or to hold it in my mind as a kind of psychic protection. The only comfortingly neutral thing I could think of was a cube of ice, but it helped. Realising I could tolerate the idea of ice, I developed strategies for what and how to eat – namely cold, solid, tasteless food with a uniform texture or consistency, eaten outdoors in the fresh air (ideally far from other people but close to somewhere I could throw up). I had to be careful not to have any food or drink that went on the ‘safe’ list too frequently, as then it could become associated with my brain’s nausea force field, and I would suddenly find I could no longer tolerate it.

I feel quite alienated from the version of myself I am describing here, not least because a healthy baby is such excellent compensation, but I also look back with gratitude. To the GP who prescribed the medication that eased my symptoms, to the creators of Bluey who raised my firstborn while I held on to a bucket for dear life, to the ‘safe’ processed foods that were not on the BDS list, and to my partner who agreed to bag up cloves of garlic and store them outside our back door.

A tiny part of me wonders what another experience of pregnancy would have been like. If, instead of being revolted by anything and everything I encountered, that sensitivity had translated into receptiveness to the world. And yet, when the medication started working, I remember having a glass of wine and bowl of spaghetti that made me weep with joy. The world expanded again. I remember taking in the warm, beeswax smell of my child’s skin, savouring it at last. Now I do it over and over again during our last weeks together before a new sibling arrives.

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Rachel Roddy’s Spaghetti with Tomato and Basil Sauce

Serves 4
Time 30 mins

Ingredients

800g tin of peeled plum tomatoes
6 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 small dried red chilli, crumbled
12 fresh basil leaves
salt
400g spaghetti
50g parmesan, grated

Method

1. Pulverise the tomatoes with a potato masher or a food mill.

2. Put the olive oil in a deep sauté pan (off the heat) and then add the clove of garlic. Cook over a medium-low heat for 3 mins.

3. Add the tomatoes, chilli, and basil. Bring the sauce almost, but not quite, to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 15 mins. Take off the lid and cook for 5 mins more, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens and oil is visible at the edges.

4. Boil the spaghetti until it’s about 1 min off al dente, then transfer it into the sauce to finish cooking. Add the parmesan, then swish the pan so that the spaghetti’s starch is released and the cheese melts and everything comes together.

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Credits

Olivia Sudjic was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023. She is the author of two novels (‘Asylum Road’ and ‘Sympathy’), and ‘Exposure’, a non-fiction exploration of art-making, feminism and anxiety in the digital age.

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