Learning she was pregnant, almost seven years ago, Charlotte Howden felt happy and excited. She even hoped for a touch of pregnancy nausea and sickness, “because we’re told if you’re sick it’s a good pregnancy.”
Today she can hardly believe she ever wished for that.
Her initial joy quickly melted away when she succumbed to hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), the condition of severe vomiting during pregnancy. Howden, then 32, was soon being sick 30 times a day, unable to keep anything down. So debilitating was it, she was unable to work, her mental health deteriorated and she was left wanting a termination and feeling suicidal. Yet according to those around her, it was just a bad case of “morning sickness” – a term that so badly fails to cover it that she’s now campaigning for its removal from the lexicon altogether.
“I was extremely depressed, I lost who I was and couldn’t talk to anyone,” recalls the filmmaker and women’s health campaigner from Southampton. “I couldn’t speak to my husband because even the smell of someone being in the room was unbearable.”
She asked her GP for help. “I was told: ‘It’s just morning sickness; try ginger, and eat little and often.’ There are multiple treatments that can be offered to women in my condition but they were denied to me.”
Howden became so malnourished and dehydrated, that she ended up in hospital multiple times. Here, she would be rehydrated and then sent home again to continue suffering. She wasn’t diagnosed with HG until about week 16 of her pregnancy – “far too late,” she says.
At the time she was working for a large insurance firm and her manager allowed her to work from home. But, she says, “I felt suicidal because I thought no one would help me [with the sickness]. I asked for a termination but luckily by then I was in the hands of a good consultant at the hospital, who said ‘give me 24 hours’.”
Howden was eventually prescribed anti-sickness medication taken by cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, after which she started to feel better physically, if not mentally.
Alongside Nicola Cutcher, another former sufferer of debilitating pregnancy sickness, she has now launched a campaign to change the language around the condition in the hope society starts to take it more seriously. The Not Morning Sickness campaign encourages brands, media, healthcare professionals and others to phase out a phrase the women say is a misnomer – one that is damaging expectant mothers by trivialising a condition that affects a huge proportion of them. While between one and three per cent are thought to suffer from HG – a condition many people hadn’t heard of until the Duchess of Cambridge was revealed to be suffering from it in 2012 – about 80 per cent suffer normal nausea, vomiting or both.
“I was constantly told ‘Oh, it will end,’” says Howden, who points out that even less severe cases of pregnancy sickness than hers can still affect a woman’s ability to work or indeed function normally.
This was the case for Cutcher, a 36-year-old mother of two from Hereford. “I wasn’t formally diagnosed with HG but I felt nauseous 24 hours a day for about three months,” she says of her first pregnancy, about four years ago. “It was like really awful motion sickness but you can’t get off the boat. I lay in bed a lot of the time, under a sheet, willing the hours away. If I forced myself to do an hour of emails I would throw up.”
