Episode 45: Hyper-(sweet)Mom | With Mushka Levi, mother of two, who dealt twice with Hyperemesis Gravidarum

00:00 Speaker 1 Have you ever heard the expression “Pregnancy isn’t an illness”? But pregnancy can bring with it many symptoms and related illnesses. If we know about them, we can be there for the women dealing with them, embrace them and help them. Because every woman is a hero, and every woman goes through something. Today we’ll meet Mushka, who, three months after standing under the chuppah, found herself hospitalized during pregnancy with a condition called hyperemesis. Mushka opens a window for us into a world of IV lines and physical, emotional and marital challenges. A lot of hardship, but a lot of hope and light, too. A reminder that you’re welcome to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify, and to share this episode with anyone you care about. My shlichus is to record; your shlichus is to share. Intro, and let’s begin. How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine, now continuing my shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. On this podcast we’ll meet different women who bring their shlichus to a range of fields. In their own ways, they’ll help each of us find and define our shlichus in the world. Because living the lives we were created to live is as good as it gets. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of the podcast Shlichus as a Way of Life. Today we have Mushka Levi with us.

01:23 Speaker 2 Hi.

01:24 Speaker 1 How are you?

01:24 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem. And you?

01:25 Speaker 1 I’m asking how you are as though we haven’t already been hanging out here for two hours.

01:28 Speaker 2 Two hours already. First she fed me breakfast. Stories.

01:31 Speaker 1 That’s how it goes. It’s standard procedure; what can you do?

01:33 Speaker 2 Perfect.

01:34 Speaker 1 Mushka, let’s go. Why are you here?

01:37 Speaker 2 Why am I here, really? Well, you should know that Chani is a very nice person. We met on WhatsApp—it’s a long story. One thing led to another, and Chani discovered that I have a story. We were laughing earlier that everyone has a story. If you find, uh, thirty women and put them all in one room—

01:54 Speaker 1 Remind me what the context was.

01:56 Speaker 2 Of what?

01:56 Speaker 1 I told you about the class. I was talking about holding a class at home and how it brings blessing into the home.

02:02 Speaker 2 Right.

02:03 Speaker 1 And then about a class on family purity, and women started sending me all kinds of stories: “Because of that class, I got pregnant.” “A friend of mine held a class at home, and because of it she got pregnant.” And then what did you write?

02:12 Speaker 2 I wrote to you, “Okay, good to know. Now I’ll know not to do that in my house.”

02:17 Speaker 1 And that got my attention.

02:19 Speaker 2 Who is this crazy woman who writes something like that?

02:21 Speaker 1 Yes. Tell us.

02:22 Speaker 2 So why am I here? Hi, my name is Mushka Levi. I’m a mother of two gorgeous, beautiful children.

02:26 Speaker 1 Sweet children. One of them is here, so we have proof.

02:29 Speaker 2 Luckily he’s asleep and letting us record. In both my pregnancies, I had a pregnancy condition called hyperemesis gravidarum. How did it all start?

02:41 Speaker 1 Wait, tell us what that means.

02:43 Speaker 2 So, hyperemesis gravidarum is a pregnancy condition that... How do I define it?

02:51 Speaker 1 But pregnancy isn’t an illness.

02:52 Speaker 2 Oh, we’ve heard that one. Anyone who says that to me gets punched in the face. Watch out.

02:57 Speaker 1 Good thing there’s an elbow between us.

03:00 Speaker 2 No, really, I don’t mean you.

03:01 Speaker 1 There are people who are more annoying. So it is an illness by definition. You go to a doctor, and the doctor diagnoses you.

03:06 Speaker 2 Yes, but it’s an invisible illness. I mean, it’s only in the last decade or two that it’s been defined as one. And even though it’s now recognized, diagnosed and included on the list of illnesses, there are still doctors—believe it or not—who dismiss it when they encounter a woman who has it. That’s why it’s called an invisible illness.

03:27 Speaker 1 In terms of the—

03:28 Speaker 2 In terms of how you feel.

03:30 Speaker 1 “You’re exaggerating.”

03:30 Speaker 2 “You’re exaggerating, you’re getting carried away,” or “Not everyone gets that sick.” People sometimes think you’re exaggerating. I’ll explain why in a moment, because the symptoms of this condition are hyper-emesis. “Hyper” means excessive vomiting.

03:48 Speaker 1 “Emesis” means vomiting?

03:49 Speaker 2 Vomiting and nausea, vomiting and nausea, something like that. I’m not good at Italian and—

03:53 Speaker 1 Latin.

03:53 Speaker 2 Ancient Latin isn’t really my thing. Yes, it’s a condition characterized by a lot of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. On the face of it—well, everyone throws up.

04:04 Speaker 1 Yes.

04:05 Speaker 2 So what counts as “a lot”?

04:07 Speaker 1 Or severe, or some kind of—

04:08 Speaker 2 Once it actually stops you from functioning, and you become dehydrated not just once during the pregnancy but several times—that’s hyperemesis gravidarum. The severity varies from woman to woman; there are different levels. A woman might have mild hyperemesis and be treated with pills, like Diclectin and Bonjesta, which everyone knows about today. They’re wonderful and help so, so many women. Or she might take some supposedly natural pills and they help her—though if natural pills help, then no, it isn’t hyperemesis. But she might take Bonjesta and feel significantly better. So that could be mild hyperemesis. Things start getting serious when pills don’t really help.

04:52 Speaker 1 But does it also have to do with how long it lasts? I mean—

04:56 Speaker 2 Actually, no. I mean—

04:57 Speaker 1 Past a certain week—

04:58 Speaker 2 No.

04:59 Speaker 1 How many times a day.

05:00 Speaker 2 Here’s the thing: it varies from woman to woman. That’s part of the problem, and one of the things that makes it invisible. Because the first time I was hospitalized, the doctor looked at me very sympathetically, sat down beside me and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll pass by week sixteen.”

05:14 Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

05:15 Speaker 2 No. It didn’t pass.

05:17 Speaker 1 Spoiler: it didn’t. When did it pass?

05:20 Speaker 2 Generally, it can pass at some point during pregnancy; it’s different for everyone. For me, there was improvement from month to month. There were also stretches when I’d suddenly have a nice day or two. That can happen, and then you’re sure it’s over, you’re completely fine, you go out feeling happy—and the next day you’re dehydrated and fainting and who knows what else. Basically, I took medication until delivery in both pregnancies. As for needing more than medication—fluids and things like that—in my most recent pregnancy, they took the catheter out of my arm at week thirty-five.

05:56 Speaker 1 Wow. So you spent basically the whole pregnancy with—

06:00 Speaker 2 An IV in my arm. Yes—

06:03 Speaker 1 Is that unusual, or is it just standard procedure?

06:06 Speaker 2 It’s standard procedure. I mean, at the beginning of pregnancy, in the first few months, I can’t eat or drink anything at all. Nothing. It also varies from one pregnancy to another. In my first pregnancy, once I got the medication intravenously—it didn’t work in pill form, but once I got the right medications intravenously... It took time for them to figure out the combination of two specific medications that would help me. It was really trial and error.

06:29 Speaker 1 Wow.

06:30 Speaker 2 So once I got them intravenously, I’d suddenly have a day or two when I felt a little better. But it only worked through an IV. So I just went around with an IV and received medication and fluids intravenously at home. Because even when I said I felt better, I still couldn’t drink normally at all. “Better” meant ice chips and things like that.

06:54 Speaker 1 Wow.

06:55 Speaker 2 Uh—

06:55 Speaker 1 Wait, give us the full picture for a moment.

06:58 Speaker 2 Yes, you got me back on track.

06:59 Speaker 1 You get married, you get pregnant, boruch Hashem.

07:02 Speaker 2 I get married—

07:03 Speaker 1 And then disaster strikes.

07:05 Speaker 2 Then, three months after the wedding, we find out I’m pregnant. We’re incredibly excited, happy and thrilled, and we excitedly schedule the first ultrasound. Then I start feeling unwell and nauseous. We laugh about it. Tears are coming to my eyes—

07:31 Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

07:32 Speaker 2 Just remembering that moment. We laughed about it, and my husband ran over to my parents’ house to get a lemon, because all we had was lemon juice. He went to get an actual lemon from them, as if that would— And we just sat out on the balcony—

07:41 Speaker 1 You looked it up on Google.

07:43 Speaker 2 Exactly. We sat on the balcony, and I sucked on a lemon and breathed in the air. That was the first evening. Then the nausea got even worse, and I couldn’t go to work. I just kept vomiting. At the time, I was working as a teacher in an after-school program, and I knew I wasn’t coming in because I didn’t feel well. My husband went and bought me every natural remedy he could find at Super-Pharm—all the ginger capsules and whatever else there was. I remember taking everything, and nothing helped. Day by day, it seemed to get worse. Suddenly I couldn’t eat anything or drink anything, and I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Then one day I got dehydrated. We went to an urgent care clinic that evening, and I got fluids. But the first time I got dehydrated and needed fluids, I really didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t understand what had gone wrong. It takes time to realize that this is something beyond the ordinary nausea you were told to expect. About a week after the nausea started, when I said I wasn’t coming in, the coordinator of the kindergarten after-school programs called me and said, “Mushka, this is too much. We’ve been looking for you for days.” Wait—I got dehydrated.

09:02 Speaker 3 You got dehydrated. I hope that’s not...

09:06 Speaker 2 No, I was just more the type to stay by the air conditioner. Anyway, she tells me, “Mushka, we’ve been looking for you for days. You have to come in. I have no one to replace you today. I don’t. There’s simply no one.” So I figure I have no choice, and I go in, because I’m just being spoiled. Like, get out of bed, pull yourself together. You’re really not behaving right. Other women are pregnant and go to work. Why can’t you? So I get out of bed, get dressed and ready, and say goodbye to my husband. I even have a morning coffee with him, then throw it up and tell myself, okay, that’s morning sickness, right? That’s what they call it. Then I go to work at the after-school program, and there I vomit and vomit. The aide realizes what’s going on, and there’s an older aide who keeps handing me ice pops and popsicles from the freezer—every kindergarten has a supply of them. She keeps giving them to me, and I take them, then run to the bathroom and throw up. The children are eating lunch, and the smell is about to make me faint. I sit there, just staring at the ceiling and trying to hold my nose. The aide does my job for me, and I’m just waiting for the day to end. Finally it does. I didn’t have money for a taxi; I hadn’t even thought I’d feel so weak. I thought, okay, I’ll get a ride with someone. I was in [unclear], but I didn’t see anyone I knew who lived in my neighborhood, and it didn’t occur to me to ask for a ride. So I walk in the heat to the bus stop, take the bus a few stops to my neighborhood, and from there it’s a ten-minute walk home. I get off the bus and immediately throw up by the side of the road. Then I walk home like that, barely managing the ten-minute walk. I open the door, go over to—no, sorry. Wow, that’s not yet. There’s more.

11:02 Speaker 2 While I’m on the bus, I remember it’s my husband’s birthday. We’d only been married three months, and I’d planned a big, wonderful surprise for him, but I wasn’t feeling well. So I tell myself, you don’t feel well, but you’re being spoiled. At least go to the store and buy him balloons. What’s wrong with you? It’s your husband’s first birthday since you got married. So I walk another two minutes to the nearest store that sells balloons—luckily it was close. I buy him a few helium balloons and ribbon. I go home, open the door and tie the balloons. I still manage to tie them to my violin stand in the living room, and then I collapse onto the couch. My husband comes home from kollel—

11:43 Speaker 3 Oh my goodness.

11:44 Speaker 2 —and finds me on the couch.

11:45 Speaker 3 How long was it between when you collapsed and when he got home?

11:48 Speaker 2 I don’t know. I don’t know.

11:51 Speaker 3 Wow. And you were still out?

11:54 Speaker 2 I don’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t a complete loss of consciousness. I just collapsed and couldn’t get myself up from there.

12:01 Speaker 3 Wow.

12:03 Speaker 2 And that was it. That was the first time I got fluids. The thing is, we still—

12:07 Speaker 3 Collapsed, with balloons.

12:08 Speaker 2 Yes, with balloons. Like, “Happy birthday, Mendy.”

12:11 Speaker 3 Oh my goodness.

12:13 Speaker 2 And you have to understand, we still didn’t call an ambulance. We didn’t think this was something you went to a hospital for. We thought, okay, we’ll go to the nearest clinic, either the women’s urgent care clinic or the general one. I arrive with my husband, and we explain that I’m pregnant and vomiting and have probably become dehydrated. My father drives us, pulling up as close to the entrance as possible; the two of them practically have to carry me. I’m dehydrated. “Okay, that’s normal. We’ll give you fluids.” This lovely doctor, a gynecologist, comes over with such a fatherly, reassuring look and says, “Oh, that’s really unpleasant. Yes, lots of women vomit during pregnancy. But listen, I’ll tell you a secret: every time you vomit, quickly drink a glass of water. Drink a glass of water right away, and that will maintain the fluid balance in your body.” Okay, we’ll try. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I tried it the next day. Every time I vomited, I drank a glass of water. The result was that I immediately threw it up.

13:13 Speaker 3 Did the water make you nauseous, or did anything you swallowed cause—

13:16 Speaker 2 Anything that goes in just comes back out. And when you’re already afraid to swallow anything because it’ll come back out, you vomit bile. Bile, digestive juices—you vomit all the fluids you don’t even have in your body. And when that’s over, you vomit blood.

13:29 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s crazy.

13:31 Speaker 2 So yes. You find yourself eating so that throwing up will be easier, and then you choose what to eat or drink based on what it’s like coming back up. For example, to this day I won’t touch flavored water. I can’t even look at a bottle of flavored water, because it was the easiest thing to throw up. When plain water goes in, because it’s natural and healthy, your body immediately starts processing it. When it comes back up, it’s diluted and burns your throat. Flavored water—which sounds so full of additives, speaking of your health program; add this to it—is so processed and full of sugar that, because the sugar hasn’t broken down, it comes back up still sweet. It’s disgusting, but it doesn’t burn—doesn’t burn your...

14:17 Speaker 3 Right.

14:17 Speaker 2 It doesn’t burn your throat when it comes back up.

14:19 Speaker 3 Wow, oh my goodness. So what do you live on?

14:22 Speaker 2 What do I live on? So basically—

14:24 Speaker 3 By that stage, do they hospitalize you?

14:26 Speaker 2 Not yet. You have to understand why they didn’t hospitalize me right away: I didn’t think it was something that called for hospitalization. Vomiting during pregnancy is normal. So okay, I got dehydrated. I probably hadn’t sucked on enough ice or taken enough natural remedies. My mother kept giving me lemon verbena tea because it settles the stomach, and I threw everything up. By then all my siblings had figured out I was pregnant, because on Shabbos morning I’d be lying on the couch at my parents’ house while my mother kept giving me crackers and lemon verbena tea, and then I’d run to the bathroom to throw them up. My brother came by to visit in the heat and was like, “Oh, mazel tov.” Everyone understood. And almost every other day, I’d go in, barely able to stay on my feet, and get fluids. Eventually—and I was only in week eleven, understand—the gynecologist at the women’s urgent care clinic said to me, “Listen, you’re coming here for fluids almost every day. I realize this is more serious than I thought. I’m sending you from here by ambulance to the women’s ward.” And I’m like, “By ambulance? Why? Me? An ambulance?” Those poor people they carry on stretchers—what does that have to do with me? He says, “Listen, if you really can’t nourish yourself or drink—yes, at first we say that the baby isn’t affected by the mother vomiting, because the baby takes everything it needs from her. But if there’s nothing left in your body, it could harm the baby too.” And that’s when the comments start that are very hard to hear. He sends me in an ambulance, and the first thing they say at the women’s ward is, “You have to have an ultrasound.” And I’m a good chassid of the Rebbe. So I say no. The Rebbe said not to have lots of tests

16:22 Speaker 2 Pregnant. So no, no, I don’t want to have an ultrasound. Why would I? I had one to check that there was a heartbeat. That’s enough. I’m not supposed to have another one now. Then they tell me, “To admit you, we need to know whether the fetus is alive.” What do you mean? Why wouldn’t it be? “Because you have severe hyperemesis.” And it suddenly clicks. For the first time, a doctor sits beside me and says, “You have a pregnancy-related illness. It’s called hyperemesis gravidarum.”

16:47 Speaker 4 It has a name.

16:48 Speaker 2 Wait, so I’m not being spoiled? I’m not just exaggerating? Maybe I have digestive problems and I’m more sensitive, and I just haven’t found the right time to eat crackers and pretzels yet? One doctor told me to eat cornflakes and popcorn because they’re light, and that didn’t help. So I’m not just exaggerating? What’s going on?

17:12 Speaker 4 At what point did you realize that? Was it while they were admitting you?

17:14 Speaker 2 In week eleven. And it had started in week six, mind you. Yes.

17:21 Speaker 4 You’re saying that the difference between someone who’s vomiting but doesn’t have hyperemesis—am I saying that right, hyperemesis?

17:29 Speaker 2 Hyperemesis, yes.

17:30 Speaker 4 Hyperemesis. And someone who does have it is basically whether the pills help and you’re able to function, as opposed to—

17:39 Speaker 2 Whether you’re getting dehydrated from it. If you’re getting dehydrated or losing weight—which isn’t always the case, because in my second pregnancy I also had gestational diabetes, so I gained weight. Not right at the beginning. At first I lost weight, but later I gained it, which seems completely contradictory.

17:55 Speaker 4 So what made you gain weight?

17:56 Speaker 2 The diabetes.

17:58 Speaker 4 Without really eating anything.

18:01 Speaker 2 Not in the first few months, when I ate absolutely nothing. But once the medications did start working, the first things I could eat were toast. So that’s when—

18:10 Speaker 4 Sugar.

18:11 Speaker 2 I gained much more than a normal person would from eating toast, right? I gained three kilos.

18:15 Speaker 4 Let’s go back to the hospital admission for a moment. They just took you to the gynecology ward, not—

18:20 Speaker 2 So, yes.

18:21 Speaker 4 A maternal-fetal ward or anything like that.

18:23 Speaker 2 There simply isn’t a maternal-fetal ward in Be’er Sheva. They didn’t think of it; they didn’t separate them. And yes, that’s one of the shocking things when you arrive and they admit you to the gynecology ward.

18:33 Speaker 4 I mean, what does that have to do with anything?

18:34 Speaker 2 First you get to the emergency room, and they have you give a urine sample while you’re weak and everything. Then the nurse says something very sympathetic: “What are you complaining about? The woman next to you miscarried.”

18:48 Speaker 4 No way.

18:49 Speaker 2 “Yes, you have ketones in your urine, but the woman next to you had blood in hers.” As if you don’t have enough anxiety during pregnancy without hearing that too.

19:00 Speaker 4 Oh, no.

19:01 Speaker 2 …

19:01 Speaker 4 Such incredible tact.

19:03 Speaker 2 There were so, so many tactless remarks like that throughout the pregnancy.

19:07 Speaker 4 Is that a Be’er Sheva thing?

19:08 Speaker 2 It’s mainly a women thing. I got much more sympathy from men, I have to say, because, again—

19:14 Speaker 4 Interesting.

19:15 Speaker 2 It’s an invisible illness. Once a woman has been pregnant herself, she’s had nausea too. So she says, “Oh, I had nausea too.”

19:25 Speaker 4 You know, it keeps reminding me how this comes from our natural tendency to always think about ourselves.

19:31 Speaker 2 Right.

19:32 Speaker 4 I mean, if someone sits down and really listens to you, within a second it’s clear as day that something different is going on here. But when you hear someone else’s story, you keep relating it back to your own experience. That’s what we do automatically—some more, some less.

19:45 Speaker 2 We immediately hold up a sort of mirror to ourselves.

19:47 Speaker 4 So yes, it’s like, “Well, compared to me…”

19:52 Speaker 2 “Maybe a bit more, but it’s not—”

19:54 Speaker 4 “I’ve been through things in my life too.”

19:56 Speaker 2 Yes. You’ve been through things in your life too, and you had this too. “I vomited during pregnancy too.” There are women who come up to you and say, “Oh, I used to vomit too. I had hyperemesis too.” And you’re not going to say, “No, you didn’t.”

20:09 Speaker 4 They probably didn’t. Do you think some women go through pregnancy with it and don’t know they have it?

20:16 Speaker 2 It’s possible no one gives it a name for them, the way I didn’t get one until week eleven.

20:20 Speaker 4 But the doctor did recognize it eventually, because—

20:22 Speaker 2 Because I got there—

20:23 Speaker 4 So there is some awareness—

20:24 Speaker 2 But a few years ago, it wasn’t there.

20:27 Speaker 4 So that means it’s new.

20:28 Speaker 2 Awareness has been growing in recent years. Whenever they hold conferences for doctors and nurses and so on, they bring more attention to it. But still. During my first pregnancy, I came back to the hospital for the—I don’t remember how many times. Each time they’d admit me, get me stable for a few days with medication and so on, and discharge me. Eventually I got to home hospitalization, where I didn’t need to be in the hospital. But even then, at first they didn’t get the right combination of medications until they figured it out. That’s why my condition kept deteriorating and I kept going back. I told them, “Something here isn’t right.”

20:59 Speaker 4 Wait, what’s home hospitalization?

21:00 Speaker 2 Hold on, I’ll explain in a second. I just mean that there was still something different between what I was getting at home and what I was getting in the hospital, so my condition deteriorated again. I went back to the hospital, and then a woman doctor came along. The day before, a doctor had told me, “We won’t discharge you until we know exactly what helps you and what will stabilize you. You’ll only leave here once you’re stable.” Then the next day, during morning rounds, this woman doctor comes in and says, “Wait, why have you been admitted here a thousand times already? Are you bored?” I’m like, “What? What did you just say?” And she says, “I don’t understand. Do you have problems at home? Well, fine. If you don’t want to be discharged, I’ll call a social worker.” First of all, a social worker isn’t a threat. If a woman is having trouble at home or, Hashem forbid, her husband is hitting her, that approach isn’t going to get her to talk. Not at all. Second, I have an IV in my arm. I’m not here because I decided on my own to be admitted. Someone decided to admit me. So you see what I mean.

22:05 Speaker 4 What did she think, that you felt like—

22:06 Speaker 2 She cut—

22:07 Speaker 4 That you had no medical reason, or—

22:08 Speaker 2 She signed my discharge papers. Because I just love being hospitalized, walking around in hospital pajamas and smelling that hospital smell. Yes, wonderful. And she discharged me like that, when I still wasn’t stable. That was a woman.

22:24 Speaker 4 How can that be? There’s no explanation.

22:27 Speaker 2 She’s a woman. She’s been pregnant, and I’m exaggerating.

22:32 Speaker 4 Wow. And haven’t there been enough cases like this? You were just telling me earlier how many—how many there are in Israel. Well, not how many there are in Israel, but how many there are specifically in—

22:41 Speaker 2 Generally, the estimate is that three percent of women worldwide experience hyperemesis to one degree or another. And I’m not the only one a woman doctor treated this way. I have a friend who, during her first hospital admission at a different hospital, was told she was being discharged while she was still dehydrated and shaking. Still dehydrated and shaking.

23:01 Speaker 4 How can that be?

23:03 Speaker 2 The doctor on that shift—the problem in hospitals is that the shifts keep changing, so it’s a different doctor. The doctor you saw yesterday isn’t the doctor you’ll see today.

23:10 Speaker 4 Right.

23:11 Speaker 2 So the doctor who admitted her through the emergency room wasn’t the doctor she met on the ward. He told her, “What are you doing here? Go home.” So she told him, “Okay, I refuse to be discharged.” She contacted me and said, “Mushka, what do I do? I’m dehydrated. He isn’t giving me anything, he isn’t giving me fluids, and he’s telling me to go home.” I told her, “In Israel, you can refuse discharge. Tell him you refuse to be discharged.” He told her, “No problem,” and called a security guard.

23:38 Speaker 4 Wow.

23:38 Speaker 2 They had a security guard escort her out of the hospital.

23:42 Speaker 4 So you’re saying there isn’t enough awareness. What do you mean, not enough awareness? Doctors don’t have enough awareness. We’re not even talking—

23:50 Speaker 2 In general, all over the world.

23:52 Speaker 4 So hospitals still don’t fully know how to diagnose it, catch it, recognize it.

23:58 Speaker 2 Apparently it isn’t something they teach in the first lesson of gynecology and obstetrics.

24:03 Speaker 4 It just didn’t make it into the syllabus.

24:05 Speaker 2 Maybe they do teach it, but there are a lot of doctors from an earlier generation, experienced doctors who still aren’t familiar with it or haven’t heard of it—or who have heard of it and still dismiss it. That’s possible.

24:16 Speaker 4 Oh, that’s awful.

24:18 Speaker 2 Or they look at a woman and she seems more alert than the next one. It’s like when you come in to give birth and they say, “Oh, she doesn’t look like she’s in pain.” Who are you to say what hurts me and what doesn’t?

24:25 Speaker 4 You don’t have just one delivery room, and then they say, “This one is more urgent.” The mother herself [unclear].

24:29 Speaker 2 Not every woman immediately looks like she’s in terrible shape. Maybe her skin is darker, so she doesn’t look as green when she’s about to faint. And then a doctor says, “Oh, she’s just exaggerating. Maybe she heard this is a thing, so she’s putting on a show,” or I don’t know what.

24:41 Speaker 4 Do you think that might be based on cases they’ve seen before?

24:45 Speaker 2 I don’t know.

24:46 Speaker 4 I remember coming in for one of my hospitalizations, and there was a woman there. It seemed like she’d already become a joke among the staff. She was, like—

24:56 Speaker 2 About to collapse at their feet.

24:57 Speaker 4 “Here she is again. She’s had one and a half contractions, she’s convinced she’s giving birth—it’s her first baby.” And everyone was already laughing about it.

25:03 Speaker 2 And in the end, she gives birth anyway.

25:04 Speaker 4 They send her home. No, they sent her home, and I have no idea whether she eventually had the baby, but she was there about twice a week. So I’m wondering whether it comes from something like that—whether they’ve encountered a lot of women who come in vomiting, but not to a degree that requires treatment.

25:21 Speaker 2 Very possibly.

25:23 Speaker 4 I’m trying to understand where something like this comes from. An illness is an illness.

25:26 Speaker 2 Look, with anything, some people will run straight to the doctor with a mild flu and immediately ask for antibiotics, and some people will wait until they’re practically at death’s door before they’re hospitalized.

25:38 Speaker 4 Yes.

25:39 Speaker 2 There are always people at both ends. And then it depends on the doctors’ approach. But when it’s an illness that’s even less visible, because it’s something everyone has—everyone vomits and everyone gets nauseous—it can be even harder to diagnose, and sometimes to tell who is really ill and who just has morning sickness. Only the woman herself can tell you that. The problem is when the doctor treating you doesn’t believe a word you say, because that happens a lot, and not only in this area.

26:04 Speaker 4 There should be a way to check whether the woman really needs your help, but not—

26:07 Speaker 2 Not only in this area. Doctors need to believe their patients.

26:10 Speaker 4 So what is home hospitalization? Tell me, I’m on the edge of my seat.

26:13 Speaker 2 How did I get home hospitalization, Chani? How did I even hear about it? Because nobody at the hospital told me it existed.

26:18 Speaker 4 Oh, so it’s like a privilege.

26:20 Speaker 2 It’s not a privilege, but I think it was still fairly new during my first pregnancy, at least. During the second, they told me about it right away on the ward.

26:30 Speaker 4 How interesting.

26:30 Speaker 2 Um, it could also come down to the staff’s awareness—how many women with hyperemesis they’ve encountered and whether they know that this is what you do in cases like these. But during my first pregnancy, there wasn’t that awareness yet. I was the one who went to the staff and said, “I’d like home hospitalization.” And how did I know to ask for it?

26:48 Speaker 4 From other women who had it?

26:50 Speaker 2 I met another woman on the ward. I saw her walking around with an IV pole. We looked at each other and said, “Do you have hyperemesis too?” Then we sat down to talk, and one thing led to another. She said, “Do you know there’s a support group?” I was like, “What?” First I find out this thing has a name and it’s an illness, and now there’s a support group too. I said, “Okay, what would I get from it? Is it on Facebook? I don’t have Facebook.” And she said, “Listen, it’s worth it. Open a Facebook account just for this. A lot of Haredi women do.” So I did, and I wrote there that I didn’t know what to do—I kept being discharged and then coming back to the hospital. What should I do? And they told me, “Ask the head nurse on the ward for home hospitalization.” What is home hospitalization? There’s a little procedure where they make an arrangement with the health fund and another outside company, and they bring all the medical supplies to your home: fluids, medications, whatever the doctor prescribes. That’s it—you get all the supplies at home. A nurse and doctor don’t come to your home like with Sarel’s home-hospitalization service, which I also went through during my second pregnancy, by the way.

28:03 Speaker 4 Wow.

28:04 Speaker 2 For about a week. But basically, you take care of yourself. Your family members take care of you. They check that someone else is at home with you so you aren’t looking after yourself all alone.

28:15 Speaker 4 So there are a few conditions you have to meet.

28:17 Speaker 2 You have to meet them, yes, to get it. For example, the woman there who told me about it, the one who told me about the group, didn’t qualify because she was a single mother and didn’t have anyone to support her. So she stayed in the hospital until the birth. They checked that I met all the criteria and made the arrangement with the health fund. Basically, once a week I had to go to the clinic to have the cannula changed—whatever you call it, the catheter they put in your hand to give you fluids. Except it wasn’t really once a week, because the more they stick needles into your veins, the more problems the veins develop. They get narrower and more fragile. They were putting in the little yellow catheters they use for babies, for premature babies, because there was nothing else they could do. My hands hurt so much. During my first pregnancy it was awful. They hurt so badly I couldn’t lift them. You know the song “Hands Up”? I couldn’t do it. I reached the point where I needed nursing care.

29:18 Speaker 4 The point of the hospitalization is—what is the point of it? At some stage they put something in you that they can keep using to—

29:25 Speaker 2 Give you the fluids and medications.

29:27 Speaker 4 Right, but until you reached week eleven, they kept sticking you with needles.

29:29 Speaker 2 They stuck me every time I came in. And even once you get it, there’s a protocol at first where they tell you it has to be changed every three days. Then later, at the clinic, they quietly tell you, “Listen, that’s not really practical. Try to make it last as long as you can.”

29:48 Speaker 4 So when they come to change it, they tell you, “A little longer, a little longer.”

29:51 Speaker 2 They don’t come to change it. You have to go yourself. The problem is that you can also get an infection that way, and all sorts of other complications. It’s very, very dangerous.

29:56 Speaker 4 Right, what did you say happened to you from all the— You said all those needle sticks caused—

30:01 Speaker 2 All those needle sticks gave me terrible pain in my hands. My hands were swollen. Both my arms were swollen. I couldn’t even put on my head covering myself.

30:13 Speaker 4 Wow.

30:14 Speaker 2 I couldn’t get dressed by myself or shower by myself. Actually, showering is an incredibly difficult task with hyperemesis. You can’t shower. The water itself makes you vomit. Every woman with hyperemesis I know says showering is torture.

30:26 Speaker 4 And all this was in your first year of marriage.

30:28 Speaker 2 Think about it: three months after the wedding, my husband became a live-in caregiver.

30:33 Speaker 4 Wow. That’s unbelievable.

30:36 Speaker 2 It’s surreal. And my husband wasn’t just another husband with a supportive family in Israel. He was a new immigrant. We met through a shidduch, of course. He had come especially from Argentina. Imagine someone whose wife is suddenly hospitalized every other day, for a week at a time, and men aren’t allowed to sleep on the women’s ward. So every night—

31:01 Speaker 4 He was left on his own, yes.

31:02 Speaker 2 He’d come from kollel to the hospital, visit me until they told him, “You have to leave the ward,” and then go to sleep in an empty home.

31:11 Speaker 4 Wow.

31:13 Speaker 2 But caught up in my illness, I didn’t see any of that. I only saw my own suffering, and I didn’t understand what he was going through. You’re in survival mode. I mean, it’s not... You’re hospitalized—not that anyone should ever experience it—but a woman going through this is simply hospitalized. She often reaches the point of fainting. And we went through a crisis. Each of us had our own crisis. He’d married a healthy woman, and suddenly he had no wife. He had no wife—that’s how I’d put it. He had no wife; he was just her caregiver. Instead of a normal marriage, you have a caregiver-patient relationship, and you just keep asking for things, because you’re in a state where you need things and you expect empathy. But how much can a person give when he gets almost nothing back?

32:06 Speaker 4 It’s like you have to rebuild a marriage you haven’t even had yet.

32:09 Speaker 2 Exactly. You haven’t even built it yet. You’ve only been married for three months, and you know, in our Haredi community, how well did we know each other beforehand?

32:18 Speaker 4 Yes. Wow.

32:19 Speaker 2 We had five meetings before we decided to get married.

32:22 Speaker 4 Yes.

32:23 Speaker 2 We found ourselves—and it’s important to me to say this. Some women will criticize me and say, “Wow, a woman tells people something like that?” It’s very important to me to say it. After I’d been hospitalized for the second or third time, we found ourselves making a special trip to a couples therapist. I don’t know how I managed it between hospitalizations; the same day I got back, I was hospitalized again.

32:46 Speaker 4 Wow. Good for you.

32:48 Speaker 2 It’s very important to me to say this. And women will say, “What? How can she share something so personal?” But that’s what I came here to share and get across: there’s no shame in going to couples therapy, especially when you’re going through a crisis.

33:02 Speaker 4 Not only is there no shame in it, it’s—

33:03 Speaker 2 It’s essential. You can push it into a corner, but you’re going through a crisis right now. This isn’t a normal situation for newlyweds. You’ve only just gotten married, and something has landed on you that’s several sizes too big for you. Come on.

33:17 Speaker 4 Wow.

33:18 Speaker 2 And then, suddenly, there with the couples counselor—I’d been thinking, “Wow, he’s so unsupportive. He doesn’t understand what’s going on here.” Then I get there, and for the first time I hear my husband open up and talk about how hard it is for him.

33:37 Speaker 4 Wow, that’s incredible.

33:39 Speaker 2 If you cry with me, this... won’t end here.

33:43 Speaker 4 What he was experiencing was an incredible loneliness.

33:46 Speaker 2 Yes.

33:47 Speaker 4 Because he probably also felt he wasn’t allowed to complain. Shabbos—were you hospitalized over Shabbos, for example?

33:53 Speaker 2 I was hospitalized over Shabbos, yes. Uh—

33:55 Speaker 4 And he managed on his own?

33:56 Speaker 2 No. He would come, then go back home at night to sleep. He would come all the way—

34:01 Speaker 4 Was it at least walking distance?

34:02 Speaker 2 Uh, about a half-hour walk. Yes, each way, every time. He would come, um, there’s a hospital—there’s a shul, sorry, inside the hospital. And there’s something called Moked Shabbat at the hospital in Be’er Sheva, at least. It’s a hospital that isn’t religious. It’s not a charedi hospital like Maayanei Hayeshua or Laniado, where you’ll have a Shabbos meal and everything. But they have this amazing project called Moked Shabbat, which provides that. You can take a meal to your room, but there’s also a place where you can actually come for a Shabbos meal. So despite all the nausea and everything, he would—sorry—he would find a wheelchair somewhere and take me there with my IV hanging from the wheelchair, because it was on the other side of the hospital. He would take me all the way there so we could experience Shabbos. Because in a hospital that isn’t run as a religious hospital, there’s no Shabbos; it’s an ordinary day. The woman next to you listens to music all night. She’s about to give birth, she’s having contractions, and she’s dancing with her husband. It doesn’t concern her.

35:05 Speaker 4 Yes.

35:05 Speaker 2 And the Arab woman next to you is listening to the muezzin.

35:09 Speaker 4 That reminds me of when I was hospitalized in a hospital that also didn’t follow religious procedures and all that. On Shabbos I went to the bathroom—thank you. I went to the bathroom and the light was off, so someone walked past behind me and said, “Oh, you keep Shabbos. Let me turn it on for you.”

35:25 Speaker 2 “Let me turn it on for you,” yes.

35:26 Speaker 4 I hadn’t even had a chance to say anything, and she’d already turned it on.

35:28 Speaker 2 And there really was one Shabbos—I remember a nurse came by, probably to check me or something, and turned on the light. Now, she was allowed to check me. We looked into that. She was allowed to check my blood pressure and everything. But whenever it wasn’t an emergency, I would ask them to call an Arab nurse. But apparently that—

35:51 Speaker 4 That’s what they have in places like Laniado, too.

35:54 Speaker 2 Yes, but there you don’t have to ask. They bring someone especially—a Jewish nurse comes in, and an Arab woman stands beside her. I gave birth there, so I can tell you.

36:04 Speaker 4 So did I.

36:05 Speaker 2 And she—

36:05 Speaker 4 I’ve given birth all over the country. No, not in Soroka yet. Not yet.

36:09 Speaker 2 You can skip that one.

36:10 Speaker 4 Uh, oh.

36:12 Speaker 2 I’ve heard they have wonderful midwives. I haven’t tried it, though, and I’m not going near it.

36:15 Speaker 4 Wait, so you didn’t end up giving birth in Soroka afterward?

36:17 Speaker 2 I didn’t give birth in Soroka. Both times I traveled somewhere else, because I realized—

36:21 Speaker 4 Neve Yador[?].

36:21 Speaker 2 I realized I couldn’t give birth in a place where I felt weak.

36:26 Speaker 4 Wow.

36:27 Speaker 2 Um, that’s one thing—

36:29 Speaker 4 Also—

36:29 Speaker 2 And it was the beginning of COVID then, and they had the craziest policies about those things.

36:35 Speaker 4 Anyway, so you went to the Shabbos meal.

36:37 Speaker 2 So we’d go with the—

36:38 Speaker 4 As romantic as it gets in that situation. Though you can’t really say that.

36:42 Speaker 2 Once, before Shabbos, my husband brought me flowers to my hospital room—

36:47 Speaker 4 Oh, wow.

36:47 Speaker 2 And all the nurses were saying, “Wow, how sweet,” and I spent the whole Shabbos trying not to throw up from the smell of the flowers.

36:52 Speaker 4 Oh, wow.

36:54 Speaker 2 Um...

36:54 Speaker 4 I hadn’t thought of that at all.

36:56 Speaker 2 Yes.

36:56 Speaker 4 What, the smell of flowers makes you nauseous? I hadn’t thought of that.

36:58 Speaker 2 And I didn’t say a word to him. To this day, he doesn’t know.

37:01 Speaker 4 Well, now he’ll know. He’ll hear this.

37:03 Speaker 2 Yes.

37:04 Speaker 4 What, uh, the smell of flowers makes you nauseous?

37:06 Speaker 2 Any smell from anything scented—floor cleaner, dish soap, hand soap, toothpaste, everything. Anything with a smell makes you nauseous. And each smell affects you differently. For example, during this pregnancy, I had sealed bottles—sealed—of Laline products and soap in the bathroom. You know, gifts I’d received as a kindergarten teacher. I was about to go into the bathroom, and I shouted to my husband, Mendy, “Come here, quick.” “What happened?” “I want you to take all these soaps out into the yard. Now.” “What? But these are expensive soaps. I’ll put them in the cupboard.” “No, get them out now. I can smell them through the sealed bottles.”

37:48 Speaker 4 Wow.

37:49 Speaker 2 I couldn’t go into the bathroom.

37:51 Speaker 4 Those are superpowers, I have to say.

37:53 Speaker 2 On the one hand, you could definitely use that for detection, but—

37:58 Speaker 4 You know there’s a special unit like that in the army.

38:00 Speaker 2 Absolutely. Definitely. But when it happens to you, it’s really, really unpleasant, because you can’t go anywhere. You can’t tolerate ordinary smells. Your child comes close to you after someone has washed his hair—not you, someone else, because you can’t manage it—and he wants a hug from his mother, and his mother has to hold her nose to hug him.

38:25 Speaker 4 Wow, that’s tough.

38:27 Speaker 2 And it’s such a strange thing. I mean, the difference between those pregnancies, too: the first pregnancy, when we were newlyweds who barely knew each other, and my second pregnancy, when we were already a couple who knew what we were facing. But this time there was a child in the picture too. Do you know how utterly helpless that feels? They take you from home in an ambulance after a week of... home hospitalization with a doctor and [unclear] that didn’t work, because this time, for some reason, the medications aren’t helping you. And paramedics arrive and stick needles into Mommy, and then they take Mommy away on a stretcher while the child screams and grabs onto it. Where are they taking Mommy?

39:07 Speaker 4 Because she’d already been absent for a week. Wow.

39:12 Speaker 2 Even though I tried very, very hard—with all the illness and all the difficulty, it was very important to me to make this as gentle as possible for him. Um, I have pictures and videos of him playing with my IV. We’d look at what colors things were, what color this button was, what color the butterfly was. And on the IV pole I had at home—I gave it away in the end—I stuck some memo notes I had at home. I drew a pair of eyes and a smile, stuck them on, and we called him Yechezkel.

39:45 Speaker 4 Oh, that’s sweet. So with the second pregnancy, you knew from the very beginning. I mean, you must have recognized it very early.

39:54 Speaker 2 I knew in advance it was going to happen to me, however much I tried to deny it. I prepared myself, prepared the people around me. The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly it would happen, because I’d been taking birth-control pills. I knew, you know, your body has to recover afterward, and so does your mind. And this is something else that’s very important to me to tell women: there are rabbis in this world, thank G-d, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu and the Torah have given them the authority to permit women to prevent pregnancy. That’s meant for precisely these situations—when your body or your mind can’t cope with a pregnancy right now, whatever the reason. In my case it was my pregnancy illness, but this option exists, and you’re allowed to use it. I spoke with a woman with hyperemesis, and she told me, “I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified of getting pregnant. I’m terrified.” So I said to her, “Ask a rabbi for permission.” “No, but we’re chassidim, and... it’s a mitzvah to have more children, and we’re supposed to, and my husband says...” And I said, “Stop there. Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave the Torah the authority to permit this precisely for you. What will it achieve if you get pregnant now, when your body or your mind isn’t ready for it? You could collapse. You could sink into a dark hole. Your body might not recover from it.” I’m talking about very serious medical consequences that can happen. Everyone has their own circumstances, and some cases can be very, very extreme.

41:24 Speaker 5 Basically, you finish a pregnancy with a depleted body.

41:27 Speaker 2 A completely depleted body. Right, no reserves, nothing. And what about your emotional well-being? Studies show that the risk of postpartum depression, or depression during pregnancy, goes up when a woman has hyperemesis. In other words, when a woman is sick throughout her pregnancy, there’s a much greater chance she’ll experience postpartum depression or won’t bond with the baby afterward, precisely because she’s been sick up until then.

41:56 Speaker 5 Wow, that’s crazy. At least giving birth brings relief from... Does it always go away when you give birth?

42:03 Speaker 2 It always goes away when you give birth.

42:05 Speaker 5 At least...

42:05 Speaker 2 Women joke that as soon as the placenta comes out, it’s over. A lot of women with hyperemesis say, “What’s the first thing you ask for right after giving birth?” A glass of water. Now, in my case, during my first pregnancy, and my second, I could at least drink a glass of water by the ninth month, before...

42:27 Speaker 5 What an upgrade.

42:28 Speaker 2 A significant upgrade. Still on three pills a day, mind you. Not without them.

42:33 Speaker 5 You know, I’m listening to you, and something in me is saying, “No way.”

42:39 Speaker 2 What do you mean?

42:39 Speaker 5 Like, how? I mean, you really can’t drink water for the entire pregnancy?

42:44 Speaker 2 You can’t drink water.

42:46 Speaker 5 It sounds unbelievable. It is unbelievable.

42:49 Speaker 2 You want to drink that water...

42:50 Speaker 5 I can feel my brain going, “What?”

42:52 Speaker 2 Listen, even when you’re given fluids and your body is supposedly hydrated, you’re still dying of thirst. You have no idea what that feels like. You’re dying of thirst. It doesn’t quench it. Your throat is dry. It hydrates your body to some extent. Of course your body gets the fluids it needs, but you’re dying of thirst. In the support group I mentioned, there are so many posts that just say, “I’m thirsty,” and everyone sends a hug and says, “We’re with you. We’re hugging you.” The woman wrote two words: “I’m thirsty.” In any other group, if someone wrote “I’m thirsty,” everyone would laugh. Only there does everyone understand what “I’m thirsty” means.

43:30 Speaker 5 How incredible that there’s an island of people who understand me.

43:35 Speaker 2 Where they understand you. Absolutely. So many people don’t understand, and often they’re the people closest to you—family, my husband. At first, my husband didn’t understand what was going on either. It was only in week eleven that someone stopped and explained to me that this had a name. No one had explained it until then, and even then it didn’t really sink in. Wait, what do you mean, an illness? So you’re sick? What? Okay, give her medicine and it’ll go away. But it doesn’t go away. The problem with hyperemesis is that the medication doesn’t cure the illness; it just helps you get through it. It doesn’t stop or eliminate the vomiting. It’s not like a stomach bug where they give you Zofran once and that’s it, it’s over. No. They give you things to help you cope. Fluids so you don’t die. And if, G-d forbid, it goes on for a long time and your reserves are really depleted, they also put you on artificial nutrition. If they see you can’t get anything into your mouth at all—they considered doing that for me during this pregnancy. Then, in the fourth month, just before they were going to do it, they tried another combination of two different medications. It worked, and I managed to eat very small amounts. But that was enough not to need the artificial nutrition. Because even though it sounds fantastic to women like me, it has risks: it can cause serious infections, and they want to avoid that during pregnancy as long as possible.

45:06 Speaker 6 Wow. What about the baby through all of this?

45:10 Speaker 2 The baby is doing just fine inside my womb, the safest place in the world. But in some cases, when the body’s reserves really plummet, the baby can be affected too.

45:20 Speaker 6 So they monitor the baby.

45:22 Speaker 2 They monitor the baby, all the time.

45:24 Speaker 6 Tell me, earlier you were talking about people understanding...

45:29 Speaker 2 Right.

45:29 Speaker 6 The whole reason we’re sitting here is to raise awareness. Now, “awareness” itself is a very grand-sounding word.

45:35 Speaker 2 Okay, I know hyperemesis during pregnancy exists. Bye, have a nice day.

45:38 Speaker 6 But—

45:39 Speaker 2 No.

45:39 Speaker 6 I think, first of all, it’s important that every woman listening to you understands that this exists, and that any woman she comes across might be... You know what? More generally, I always say—

45:54 Speaker 2 More generally, pregnancy isn’t such a simple thing.

45:56 Speaker 6 Even before pregnancy, even before pregnancy.

45:58 Speaker 2 You can never imagine what another person is experiencing.

46:00 Speaker 6 What another person is going through. Even outside pregnancy, people go through all sorts of things. You know, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out. Don’t judge.

46:10 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

46:10 Speaker 6 And showing compassion is always, always good. So is offering encouragement.

46:13 Speaker 2 During this pregnancy, someone came up to me and said, “How nice, I can see this pregnancy is easier for you.” I looked at her like, “Where did you get that idea?” What was different between this pregnancy and the second one? This time, I decided to leave the house despite being sick. Of course, that was on the better days, after taking all the medications. But you have no idea what leaving the house costs me, how I might faint afterward. I never left the house alone. If I had to go out alone, I took taxis everywhere. I couldn’t drive or do anything. I wasn’t fit to drive because of the medications, either. I could basically faint at any moment.

46:53 Speaker 6 Wow, that’s crazy.

46:56 Speaker 2 People have no idea what—

46:57 Speaker 6 What do you take with you?

46:58 Speaker 2 What I’m going through. What do I take with me when I leave the house? My phone.

47:03 Speaker 6 No, don’t you need to take something for emergencies? I don’t know.

47:06 Speaker 2 I hadn’t thought of that, but really, someone should make you an emergency button.

47:10 Speaker 6 Wow.

47:11 Speaker 2 I had—and by the way, even during a second pregnancy, when you see how little empathy people have, you still start telling yourself, “No, you can do more. You’re capable of more. Stop it, you’re just pampering yourself.”

47:24 Speaker 6 Like this feeling of being belittled.

47:25 Speaker 2 It’s still there. You do it to yourself too, because you judge yourself and say, “Enough, you’re already in such-and-such a month. You’re doing much better than you were at the beginning. Maybe you’re just pampering yourself now.” So you decide to make the Seder at home. I’m out of my mind, but—

47:41 Speaker 6 That doesn’t work.

47:42 Speaker 2 And I didn’t just make the Seder at home. I prepared for it five days in advance, sitting with a clothespin on my nose each time so I wouldn’t smell the food I was cooking. And I was saying, “Wow, you can cook.”

47:55 Speaker 6 Not in the second pregnancy.

47:55 Speaker 2 No, actually, that was in the second pregnancy.

47:56 Speaker 6 Oh, wow. You didn’t learn.

47:58 Speaker 2 I learned nothing. I just did a little bit each time, and my mother said, “Are you sure you’re okay? This could come back to bite you.” And I was like, “Enough, Mom, I’m fine. I guess it’s passing more quickly this time. I’m fine. I’m getting fluids, I’m taking the medication, I’m doing everything slowly. I put my feet up each time.” So the Seder goes ahead. We get to the maror, and then I faint. I made it to the maror. Right on cue. That’s where I ended up. That’s where my Seder ended.

48:32 Speaker 7 That makes a lot of sense to me, because there’s this pattern of wanting to get out of it.

48:38 Speaker 2 To get out of it. Yes.

48:39 Speaker 7 To get out of it—not just to get out of the illness, but to disconnect from it, to be involved in something else. When you’re preparing a Seder, you have twenty thousand tasks on your mind and no time to think about it. So in a way, that helps a little with—

48:53 Speaker 2 Yes, it may help a little not to think about your problem. But there’s an imbalance between that and the desire to keep living your life. Because it’s very important—that’s something I understood between my first and second pregnancies—to keep living your life and not stop it completely. Because this does stop your life. It stops your life completely. That’s nine months. In case anyone hasn’t understood that yet, it’s nine months of medical leave during pregnancy. And you can get pregnancy disability benefits from National Insurance for it. I didn’t know that during my first pregnancy. I received the benefits retroactively after giving birth.

49:23 Speaker 7 Wow, at least there’s that.

49:24 Speaker 2 After giving birth. Luckily, National Insurance recognizes it. And by the way, a gynecologist said to me, “Why would they approve you?”

49:31 Speaker 7 Why wouldn’t they?

49:33 Speaker 2 Because she didn’t think it met the criteria.

49:35 Speaker 7 Wow, that’s something.

49:36 Speaker 2 Just think how little awareness there is—and again, this was a woman.

49:39 Speaker 7 That’s something. Unbelievable.

49:42 Speaker 2 It’s nine months of medical leave during pregnancy. Nine months when your life stops. No work, nothing.

49:48 Speaker 7 And you’re constantly trying to find that balance between—

49:50 Speaker 2 There’s a balance between taking care of your emotional well-being by getting out and seeing people, and knowing when to stop—not telling yourself, “No, you can manage; you’re just pampering yourself.” You have to stop and rest, even if that means lying in bed all day with your feet up, so it doesn’t come back to hurt you.

50:13 Speaker 7 Tell me, how do we raise awareness? Okay, you’re raising awareness now on the podcast, but what do you suggest someone listening do with what she’s heard?

50:24 Speaker 2 With this wonderful information? First of all, if you notice a woman at work, in shul, a friend, whoever, who suddenly disappears from your lives, call her. Send a message. Ask if she’s okay. If she tells you she isn’t feeling well, whatever the reason, ask, “Do you need anything?” If you see it’s continuing, ask again, “Do you need anything?”

50:44 Speaker 7 I believe there’s—

50:45 Speaker 2 Of course.

50:46 Speaker 7 That balance of not prying and not—

50:47 Speaker 2 Of course. But I can say that—

50:50 Speaker 7 After a pregnancy, uh, there’s—

50:52 Speaker 2 So you don’t ask questions. You’re not supposed to ask, “What happened? Why? Why aren’t you feeling well?” But you can show the person that you remember her.

51:00 Speaker 7 Yes.

51:00 Speaker 2 And if it goes on, whatever the reason, you’re not supposed to ask what the reason is, because it’s none of your business. You’re not a busybody. Uh—

51:07 Speaker 7 Assuming you’re not—

51:08 Speaker 2 Assuming you’re not a busybody. Really understand that people may be going through things, and if a woman disappears from your life, it’s not just because she felt like it. Ask about her and offer help. Just tell her, “If you need anything, I’m here.” Maybe she’ll reach out to you; maybe you’ll be able to help her. And this is where I also want to speak to women who do have hyperemesis, or another problem during pregnancy, because it turns out there are so many problems you can have during pregnancy. In this particular pregnancy, I had three.

51:45 Speaker 7 You’re original.

51:45 Speaker 2 Two more besides hyperemesis. I—

51:47 Speaker 7 Quite the lady.

51:47 Speaker 2 When it comes to bargains. You know those two-plus-one, buy-one-get-one deals? I really love a bargain. My husband says, “You always end up in the statistics.” Like...

51:56 Speaker 7 Wow, you had hyper—hyperemesis?

51:59 Speaker 2 I had hyperemesis gravidarum, and symphysiolysis.

52:02 Speaker 7 Which is?

52:03 Speaker 2 Pain in the pelvis, legs, and lower back.

52:08 Speaker 7 The bones, right?

52:08 Speaker 2 Yes. It happens because the bones shift and the pelvis widens during pregnancy. I got to the point where I was using a walker, and there were days when I couldn’t lift my leg onto a step—even onto a curb.

52:22 Speaker 7 Oh, wow.

52:23 Speaker 2 Yes, but we didn’t come here to talk about that. I’m just mentioning it. Compared to hyperemesis, it’s minor, without a doubt. You can deal with it, including with supportive complementary treatments. That isn’t true of hyperemesis. And I had undetected gestational diabetes, which they simply didn’t catch because of the hyperemesis. Because what connection could there be? I wasn’t eating.

52:45 Speaker 7 Did you even have a glucose tolerance test? Could you have one?

52:46 Speaker 2 I didn’t have the glucose tolerance test. My doctor exempted me and told me to do something else instead, because by then I had reached a point where I could eat a very little bit. I only went to him at the last possible moment. I told him, “Listen, I haven’t done the test.” He said, “I’m not giving you the test. It’s dangerous for you. You definitely won’t get through it.” He immediately gave me a blood glucose meter. They taught me how to prick my finger each day, and he told me, “Just check your blood sugar twice a day. After a week, see the nurse, and she’ll tell you whether it’s normal.” Ouch. It wasn’t normal.

53:22 Speaker 7 Wow, what a story.

53:23 Speaker 2 That’s when they understood what the problem was and why I had swollen up so much. I had gained weight from the steroids they gave me, among other things. I gained weight from the steroids and from a lot of things; the fluid retention was part of it too. But gaining thirty kilos during pregnancy? That’s not normal. If a woman gains a lot of weight in a short time during pregnancy, she needs to realize there may be a problem and find out what it is. So I really wanted to speak to all the women going through this, or any other pregnancy-related problem that prevents them from functioning. Whether it’s hyperemesis gravidarum or something else, any problem that prevents you from functioning during pregnancy, there’s no shame in getting help. There’s no shame in saying, “I can’t function right now.” Take all the help you can get, whether you pay for it or it comes from the community. Yes, asking for help is awful. I remember the first phone call I made to ask for help. I hung up and started crying out of self-pity. Like, how awful—how completely incapable am I? I can’t take care of my own home. What kind of mother am I? But when the help actually started coming, it made things so much easier. And the women who helped me were angels, absolute angels.

54:37 Speaker 7 You have to know how to ask for help. And you have to offer help, too.

54:40 Speaker 2 You have to offer help, too.

54:41 Speaker 7 Offer to help.

54:42 Speaker 2 By the way, I have to mention two amazing initiatives that were set up. As far as I know, they’re only in the Chabad communities of Kfar Chabad and Charish. They put out a notice saying, “Women with hyperemesis gravidarum.” I was stunned when I saw it. It jumped out at me, and I said, “Wow, this is G-dliness.”

54:58 Speaker 7 Wow.

54:59 Speaker 2 What days of Moshiach! “Women experiencing hyperemesis gravidarum in early pregnancy are invited to contact Shifra and Puah on the confidential line and receive help.”

55:10 Speaker 7 How wonderful.

55:11 Speaker 2 Help at home. I was stunned. I said, “Wow, they see us. We’re not invisible.” But right now, I only know of this in two communities.

55:21 Speaker 7 That’s really moving. And listen, as you said, there are all kinds of other pregnancy-related illnesses and conditions, so many of them. That saying, “Pregnancy isn’t an illness”—I think, forgive me, it’s really that old-fashioned attitude of “Don’t pamper yourself.” We’re past that era.

55:41 Speaker 2 Completely.

55:41 Speaker 7 There are ways to get help; there are ways to make things easier. We don’t need to live in survival mode. We need to live well and be the best mothers we can be. And if we can get help—

55:53 Speaker 2 Within your abilities, cut back as much as you can on the physical work at home. Just take it off your plate, because it will give you so much strength for the other places where you need it. I brought in a cleaner once a week. It cost me a lot of money, because although there were amazing, amazing women I met during this pregnancy who helped as soon as they understood what was happening to me—and, by the way, this was a decision I made in this particular second pregnancy: I understood that I had to tell people from the start. First of all, you can’t hide it. Whenever someone asked how I was and noticed I’d disappeared, I decided I would tell her. It’s not as though I put up a sign or posted a status saying, “Hi, I’m pregnant with hyperemesis; help me.” No.

56:35 Speaker 8 Mushka’s pregnancy announcements.

56:36 Speaker 2 Pretty much, yes. But whenever someone noticed I was missing and checked in on me, I told her, “Yes, I’m not well. I’m in the hospital. I’m pregnant with hyperemesis again.” And I met angels. One woman looked for girls who would volunteer to come over, at least to take my child to the playground now and then so I could rest.

56:57 Speaker 8 Wonderful.

56:57 Speaker 2 So my husband could rest, more accurately. And another woman arranged lunch for the family twice a week—for my husband and child, and later for me as well.

57:11 Speaker 8 You must not have cooked throughout the pregnancy.

57:13 Speaker 2 I didn’t cook at all for almost the entire pregnancy. Toward the end, there were a few times, you know, like before Pesach, when... Yes. I didn’t cook, didn’t clean, didn’t do laundry.

57:26 Speaker 8 Wait, so did your husband learn to cook, or what? What did they eat?

57:30 Speaker 2 That’s a sensitive subject.

57:33 Speaker 8 Let’s put it this way...

57:35 Speaker 2 My husband learned to buy lots of frozen food.

57:37 Speaker 8 Oh, wow.

57:38 Speaker 2 And to make all that quick food that normally doesn’t come into my house.

57:43 Speaker 8 An IV line for them...

57:47 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

57:47 Speaker 8 With some kind of supplement.

57:49 Speaker 2 That’s it. Some people just aren’t into cooking.

57:53 Speaker 8 Wow.

57:53 Speaker 2 But in situations like this, you really do have to acknowledge that frozen food exists in this world, boruch Hashem.

57:58 Speaker 8 Right.

57:59 Speaker 2 You can live on it some of the time. And thanks to righteous women who made sure we had a proper cooked meal even once or twice a week. That reassured me so much, because of the guilt. Listen, with your husband, you tell yourself, “He’ll manage. I’ll make something; it’s fine.” But then you see him eating a sandwich because he’s come home from work exhausted, and he has to take care of the child and take care of you. How much can he do?

58:27 Speaker 8 Exactly.

58:27 Speaker 2 And these aren’t things everyone normally does, either. Usually you divide up the chores; they don’t all fall on one person. Here, suddenly, everything falls on him. So he makes do with a sandwich or buys himself something.

58:40 Speaker 8 You know why this is so... Okay, coming over to help clean is one thing. But sometimes, sending cooked food—you’re making dinner anyway—

58:50 Speaker 2 So you make a few extra portions.

58:52 Speaker 8 It’s so simple. But the help, the effect it has on someone who needs it...

58:56 Speaker 2 First of all, the feeling in your heart. That feeling when someone sends you food is just, wow, they care.

59:07 Speaker 8 You’re in her heart.

59:08 Speaker 2 Yes.

59:08 Speaker 8 It warms your heart so much.

59:09 Speaker 2 And she cares. And she even asks you. There was a woman who called me and said, “Mushka, I want to make you lunch. I need you to tell me: are there any smells you can’t stand? Is there anything I shouldn’t make?” I wanted to hug her through the phone. Such sensitivity.

59:28 Speaker 8 Beautiful.

59:28 Speaker 2 Such sensitivity. Yes, yes—if you make this or that, I’ll have to get away from it and leave the house.

59:35 Speaker 8 And here too, I think—I don’t know, personally, even at that point I’d feel a little uncomfortable starting to make special requests. But you have to get past that. Someone is offering you help.

59:45 Speaker 2 I took—I took everything. I simply accepted everything. Every bit of help anyone offered me, I accepted. But when she called and asked that, it was so... it warmed my heart so much, because she really understood the problem. She understood what my illness was and what it meant. She really saw me. She didn’t just see a notice saying they were looking for someone to prepare meals for a woman in the community and say, “Okay, fine, I’ll add a portion to my meal.” She actually thought about how to make me happy, how to give me help in a way that would really help. But I don’t expect everyone to be quite that angelic. I do want people to see that women can go through things during pregnancy that leave them unable to function, and to notice them. Not to say, “Oh, they have family, so their family will help.” How much can family help for nine months?

1:00:35 Speaker 9 I do think this is something that really gets overlooked—or can get overlooked—because we’re all busy and life is intense, and...

1:00:43 Speaker 2 Completely. And everyone has their own troubles.

1:00:45 Speaker 9 The feeling you had—

1:00:46 Speaker 2 By the way, there was also a woman who said to me outright, “Mushka, you talk too much about all your problems, and we don’t have the energy to listen. Not everyone has the energy to hear about other people’s problems. Every woman has troubles of her own.” Okay, I’m choosing my friends again. Thank you.

1:01:04 Speaker 9 Oh, that’s hard.

1:01:06 Speaker 2 But it happens. It happens. When you go through a real crisis of some kind, you suddenly learn who really is your friend and who—

1:01:13 Speaker 9 A filter.

1:01:13 Speaker 2 And who isn’t as much.

1:01:14 Speaker 9 A chance to filter.

1:01:16 Speaker 2 Absolutely. Filter them out—great.

1:01:17 Speaker 9 I think not everyone has the capacity to handle something like that.

1:01:22 Speaker 2 Right. Also, don’t send everyone a picture of your IV every five seconds. In general, women would rather not see that.

1:01:30 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:01:31 Speaker 2 Not everyone can look at medical things.

1:01:35 Speaker 9 I would sum it up this way: every woman needs one good friend who can take it all, who can hold it all.

1:01:41 Speaker 2 Like a sponge.

1:01:42 Speaker 9 A friend, a sister, a mother. It doesn’t matter.

1:01:45 Speaker 2 You need at least one person who will truly support you and understand and be there.

1:01:48 Speaker 9 Besides your husband, because he’s already got so much on his plate.

1:01:50 Speaker 2 How much can you put on him? I think he needs a friend like that too. Now, besides a friend—you said one friend who can absorb it all—it isn’t always fair to put that on your friends. And... during this pregnancy—first of all, before I got pregnant, so I could even bring myself to say the word “pregnancy” again, I went for NLP therapy. I realized I wanted to clear the trauma out of my mind. There are things, I understand, that will never go away. Even now, whenever I start talking about it, I tear up, you know. But you still want to go into a pregnancy with a clear head, and be able to think practically about another pregnancy, another child. So I went for therapy. And again, this is something I really like to raise awareness about: therapy is nothing to be ashamed of. Ladies, if you’ve been through any kind of trauma—even a difficult birth—you need help with it. Today there’s so much more awareness of these treatments. Yes, processing a birth experience. You don’t need to go into a pregnancy carrying trauma and fear. I think it only causes harm. This time, I also paid for therapy throughout the pregnancy. I had a Zoom session once a week with someone, even while I was hospitalized, through everything.

1:03:06 Speaker 9 Wow.

1:03:07 Speaker 2 She was the person I could unload everything onto. Everything.

1:03:13 Speaker 9 Wow, right.

1:03:13 Speaker 2 It helped me emotionally, because ultimately the body and mind affect each other. When someone said to me, “Wow, this pregnancy seems much easier than the last one,” it was easier for me emotionally. It was easier for me emotionally because, first of all, I had support. I’d prepared for it. This time I knew what I was heading into, and I had emotional support throughout the pregnancy. The people around me already knew what I had and what I was going through, and supported me. By “the people around me,” I mean those close to me—my family, my husband. I also came to understand that, despite the illness, I needed to get up, go out, get dressed, put on a sheitel. And this time, by the way, I could do that because we found a different solution. Instead of changing the catheter in my arm every week or every few days, they put in a permanent one in the operating room. Yes, it sounds terribly frightening. A catheter that goes all the way to the heart. With the slightest problem, you go to the hospital. But it stayed in until almost the end. I had it in my arm until week thirty-five. They put it in at week seven.

1:04:23 Speaker 9 Wow.

1:04:23 Speaker 2 But—

1:04:26 Speaker 9 That was unbelievable.

1:04:28 Speaker 2 Yes, but it saved me in terms of being able to function. For a change, I could use my hands. I could actually go out, put on a sheitel, get dressed, get ready, leave the house. If not every day, then once every few days. Go out, see the sun, see a few people. How did I get to that point? Because in my first pregnancy I was so completely in survival mode. The second pregnancy was survival mode too, in every sense, but... I came to the conclusion that it’s all about body and mind. Ultimately, you have to look after both and treat both. So okay, you’re getting medication, you’re getting fluids to keep your body going. What about your mind? If you stay in bed all day, that won’t help you. I thought about people with cancer—I don’t want to compare, G-d forbid—but people with that illness. You see them organizing camps and outings for children going through it, and the children are smiling. I said to myself, if they can smile... And by the way, they suffer from the same symptoms because of their radiation treatments, and the medications women with hyperemesis get during pregnancy are the same medications—medications developed for those side effects.

1:05:35 Speaker 9 Your emotional well-being has to help carry you through all of this.

1:05:37 Speaker 2 Completely. I said, if they get themselves out to go on a trip or to an amusement park to help themselves emotionally, then you can too. True, you might end up lying in bed even more afterward. You might vomit more afterward, get more dehydrated because of all the smells you encountered outside. But for your emotional well-being, it was worth it. It was worth it.

1:06:01 Speaker 9 Wow.

1:06:02 Speaker 2 And maybe you’ll go to a wedding and sit there, and it’ll happen to be a moment when you can eat. People will see you eating, and then you’ll go home and throw it all up. And maybe some people will raise an eyebrow and say to your face, “Oh, you don’t have hyperemesis.” And you’re just like, okay, I don’t have the energy for you. But that might happen. It might. People might lose a little faith in you, think you’re putting it on or something, or that you’re being fussy again—even if the consequences afterward are that you faint or who knows what. But to me, it was worth it.

1:06:38 Speaker 9 I guess that’s when you stop keeping track altogether of what people think and say—or do you still...?

1:06:46 Speaker 2 It takes time, it takes time to get past that. I think it changed from one pregnancy to the next. I remember one Shabbos during my first pregnancy—

1:06:52 Speaker 9 Because there’s no end to what people—

1:06:53 Speaker 2 There’s no end to what people will think and notice and say—

1:06:56 Speaker 9 “Do this, do that, do the opposite of...” Really.

1:06:58 Speaker 2 The hardest experience I had with this was one Shabbos morning during my first pregnancy, when I fainted at home. My mother had just come to check on me, because we still didn’t fully understand what was going on, or that I wasn’t allowed to be alone. My mother found me unconscious. No, I came to.

1:07:21 Speaker 9 In the meantime, he’s listening nicely.

1:07:22 Speaker 2 Yes. So she ran to shul to get everyone, and they asked the rabbi who was there what to do. A rabbi who happened to be standing on the stairs said, “Call an ambulance.” They were thinking, maybe we could take her in a stroller or something, carry her over there—but no. “Call an ambulance.” So they called one, and when it arrived they carried me out on a stretcher into the street. And all those families could see—you know, they were ground-floor apartments there, and all the...

1:07:57 Speaker 9 It’s the...

1:07:58 Speaker 2 Everyone comes out into the street to see who the ambulance was called for.

1:08:00 Speaker 9 Free entertainment.

1:08:02 Speaker 2 And I’m lying on the stretcher, shaking, and all I can think is, Why are you looking at me? Stop looking at me.

1:08:09 Speaker 9 That really is awful. On the one hand, you could say, let them look, but no, it’s—

1:08:13 Speaker 2 You feel so helpless. You feel so weak and fragile and vulnerable. Ever since that experience, whenever I see a person with a disability, I make such an effort to look at their face, not at their wheelchair. And if I see an ambulance, I act as though I don’t see it.

1:08:31 Speaker 9 Tell me, have you ever met a woman—or someone connected to a woman—who was vomiting and didn’t know she had this?

1:08:38 Speaker 2 And suddenly—

1:08:38 Speaker 9 She hears from you that she has an illness.

1:08:42 Speaker 2 More than once. But the situation I remember most is—

1:08:46 Speaker 9 You go around spreading awareness on the street.

1:08:48 Speaker 2 You walk down the street with an IV in your arm, and sometimes, you know, it shows. During this pregnancy it showed less, because it was under my sleeve. But people see you, and... The strangest case I remember was a taxi driver who often drove me to the clinic. At that moment my sleeve was covering the catheter properly, but then I adjusted it and he noticed the IV in my arm. He said, “Why do you keep going to the clinic? What’s wrong with you?” Now, taxi drivers are taxi drivers. So I thought, you know what, instead of telling him no and having him start pestering me—“No, but tell me—”

1:09:23 Speaker 9 “Tell me, let me hear.”

1:09:24 Speaker 2 “But tell me, what’s wrong with you?” Because that’s how taxi drivers are. So I decided to tell him. I started to say what I had, and he said, “But you look pregnant. So what’s wrong with you?” I told him, “I have a pregnancy illness called hyperemesis gravidarum. It causes a lot of vomiting, and I can barely drink or eat. I get fluids and medication through an IV.” Then he said, “What? All that just because you vomit and feel nauseous?” I said yes. So he said, “But my daughter’s pregnant too.” And he started telling me, “My daughter’s pregnant, and she really does vomit all day, but she won’t leave the house. She just lies in bed all day and doesn’t move. I tell her, ‘Get up, go out with your husband, go to a restaurant with him, sit with him. Why are you neglecting him? Cook for him.’ She stopped cooking,” he told me. “She stopped cleaning. It’s not normal. Everyone vomits during pregnancy.”

1:10:19 Speaker 9 You’re hearing this and...

1:10:20 Speaker 2 I’m hearing all this, and I ask him a few more questions. I say, “Wait, how many times a day does she vomit?” He says, “A lot. She vomits constantly, but it doesn’t make sense. She’s taking those pills too,” he says. “Bonjesta, I think.” I ask, “And she’s still vomiting?” “Yes, yes, yes, she’s still vomiting, and she still won’t get out of bed, and she still doesn’t cook or clean or do anything. What kind of woman is she? I tell her, ‘Listen, that’s not how I raised you.’” Now, you have to understand, he was a taxi driver, right? That’s a taxi-driver mentality. I don’t want to generalize about all of them, but there are plenty of people with that old-fashioned mindset. So I tell him, “If she’s taking those pills and she’s still vomiting so much and can’t function, I think she probably has what I have.” He says, “What do you mean?” I tell him, “I don’t think your daughter is pretending. She’s sick.” He says, “What?”

1:11:17 Speaker 9 Oh, wow.

1:11:18 Speaker 2 I told him, “Yes. It’s what I have. It’s called hyperemesis gravidarum. It’s a pregnancy illness. And the last thing”—I said it right to his face, because it felt as if someone had stuck a knife into me and twisted it—“the last thing a woman wants to hear when she feels like a rag lying in bed, can’t get up, and just wants a hug and some understanding, is ‘Get up. Why aren’t you being a good wife to your husband? Get up, clean, cook.’ She can’t.” I told him, “If she were sick—G-d forbid—with a well-known illness, would you also tell her to get up and cook and clean for her husband?” He said, “No.” I said, “But this is an illness too.” He was stunned. He was stunned, and I just—I asked him for a piece of paper and wrote down the name of a Facebook support group. I told him, “Tell her to join it.” He took it and thanked me. He actually said, “Wow, I never knew there was such an illness. I didn’t know.”

1:12:24 Speaker 9 That’s incredible.

1:12:25 Speaker 2 It finally clicked for him. I could just as easily have ended up with someone who said, “Oh, come on, you’re exaggerating. What do you know?” But I don’t know, maybe because he saw that I was pregnant and going through it myself, he listened to me? I—

1:12:40 Speaker 9 At least his daughter benefited from it.

1:12:42 Speaker 2 Absolutely. Maybe one day someone will write in the support group—

1:12:46 Speaker 9 “You won’t believe how I found this group.”

1:12:47 Speaker 2 “You won’t believe how I found you, but my father is a taxi driver, and one day a woman he drove—”

1:12:51 Speaker 9 We’ll have to find out if she’s among us.

1:12:53 Speaker 2 Absolutely. I’d love to know whether she really got the support she needed afterward.

1:12:56 Speaker 9 I hope so. Wow, Mushka, you’re just going around spreading aware— I think a lot of women with hyperemesis are involved in that to some extent, aren’t they?

1:13:06 Speaker 2 Because, yes—

1:13:06 Speaker 9 Because it’s such a big part of...

1:13:08 Speaker 2 It’s something you experience for nine months, and then when you finally come out into the light, you realize that... you’re invisible.

1:13:16 Speaker 9 There’s a day for it each year, right? All the—

1:13:17 Speaker 2 It has a day—

1:13:18 Speaker 9 What do you mean, a day? What kind of day?

1:13:18 Speaker 2 There’s one day a year. Yes, there’s a month for illnesses related to the digestive system, and somewhere in there they’ve given it one little day for—

1:13:25 Speaker 9 They generously gave us one.

1:13:26 Speaker 2 Yes, generously.

1:13:27 Speaker 9 Wow.

1:13:27 Speaker 2 For hyperemesis gravidarum. And suddenly you find all these women posting, and you see women putting up pictures of themselves that seem unbelievable. Why would you post a picture like that before experiencing hyperemesis? A picture of me in a headscarf, lying in bed with an IV? But then I did it myself, because I understood that it was necessary. I understood that it was necessary.

1:13:49 Speaker 9 What kind of responses did you get?

1:13:51 Speaker 2 I always get warm, encouraging responses, actually. People say, “Wow, what mesirus nefesh,” for every child. And I really do understand that this is the mesirus nefesh of our generation.

1:14:01 Speaker 9 It’s astounding. Do you know that it really is astounding?

1:14:03 Speaker 2 I mean—

1:14:04 Speaker 9 Doing it once is one thing, but—

1:14:05 Speaker 2 Even just having gone through it at all.

1:14:07 Speaker 9 Exactly. And then, in a way, choosing—you want another child, of course, but you’re still going to go through it again.

1:14:15 Speaker 2 There’s an eighty-percent chance you’ll go through it again. There are lucky women who—

1:14:19 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:14:19 Speaker 2 Get through—

1:14:19 Speaker 9 Those lucky ones who—

1:14:21 Speaker 2 Who don’t get it again, and it only happens in their first pregnancy. But after it’s happened twice, the chances of avoiding it again are probably much lower.

1:14:26 Speaker 9 Yes, the odds keep shrinking.

1:14:28 Speaker 2 Yes. When they told me about the eighty percent, I said to my husband, “We’ll be in the twenty percent who don’t get it again.” But at the same time, you know, we prepared for the possibility that... And my husband said to me, “You always end up in those percentages.”

1:14:42 Speaker 9 You always get the special offers. But really, I think it’s inspiring, because it also gives people strength. I think—and correct me if I’m wrong—that most women talk about it afterward, or do they talk about it while they’re going through it too?

1:14:57 Speaker 2 Most talk about it afterward, I think, because when—

1:14:59 Speaker 9 I mean, here, when you’re sick and—

1:15:00 Speaker 2 First of all, when you’re sick and busy just surviving, you can’t always, you know, find the energy to speak about other things. It was only during my second pregnancy that I felt it was important to raise awareness, so I took a picture with all the supplies. I arranged all the IV fluid and medication supplies in the shape of a heart, and in the middle I put an ultrasound picture and an outfit I’d bought for the baby to wear when he was born.

1:15:24 Speaker 9 Wow.

1:15:25 Speaker 2 And I posted it.

1:15:26 Speaker 9 Even for you, that’s an incredible keepsake.

1:15:29 Speaker 2 Afterward, everyone said to me, “Oh, were you hinting that it’s a boy?” No, I wasn’t hinting. Those were just my older son’s clothes. I’d actually planned to take a second picture after the birth, with the baby in the middle. But the cleaner who came to clean my house after I gave birth—I really wanted someone to clean the house first—threw out the box of supplies.

1:15:49 Speaker 9 Oh, you’d left it just as it was?

1:15:50 Speaker 2 I’d kept the empty supplies for the second picture, and they got thrown out.

1:15:56 Speaker 9 Oy, oy, oy. At least it’s a sign that you had a cleaner.

1:15:58 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:15:59 Speaker 9 What was I going to ask you? I’m wondering whether, looking back—and “looking back” sounds so easy, but it was nine months of hell—you see it differently. Do you see it as something that gave you something, did something to you, changed something in you? Or did you just survive it and move on with your life?

1:16:25 Speaker 2 That’s a really hard question.

1:16:28 Speaker 9 Chani.

1:16:29 Speaker 2 It’s an interesting question, but it takes a lot of thought. Did it give me something? First of all, it gave me my beautiful children. I mean, Hashem gave them to me, and that was their way of coming into this world. Every child has their own way of coming into the world. Each one has to come in exactly the way that’s right for them. A friend said to me recently, “They’re hyperemesis babies. G-d touched them.” They’re usually so beautiful and smart and sweet, and it’s a kind of compensation for everything you went through. I said that every woman has her own particular way of bringing children into the world. Every woman has her own difficulty around it. Some women have trouble having children, even getting pregnant at all. Some women have been through both. By the way, I know women who went through fertility treatments and then got hyperemesis after all those treatments.

1:17:26 Speaker 9 There are a lot of combinations that can—

1:17:27 Speaker 2 And there are a lot of combinations, like my two-plus-one: three pregnancy problems all at once. But first of all, in the end, you can say it was worth it. Now, to everyone listening to this podcast: don’t you dare go up to a woman who’s been through an illness like this during pregnancy and tell her, “But it was worth it.” No, ladies. Only we have the right to say that to ourselves.

1:17:53 Speaker 9 Right. What else shouldn’t people say?

1:17:56 Speaker 2 Don’t say, “You’re being pampered,” or, “I threw up during pregnancy too.” That’s when they get the look. Too bad you can’t see the look I just gave, but that’s the look a woman going through this will give you, and it isn’t a friendly one. “Crackers helped me in the morning”—if you’d had hyperemesis, crackers wouldn’t have helped you. So let’s stop there.

1:18:22 Speaker 9 But people don’t always know what to say.

1:18:24 Speaker 2 Then just don’t say anything.

1:18:25 Speaker 9 Don’t say anything.

1:18:26 Speaker 2 Don’t.

1:18:27 Speaker 9 In general, I think—

1:18:28 Speaker 2 “Wow, you’re a hero, you’re a lioness.” Don’t say—

1:18:31 Speaker 9 Offer encouragement.

1:18:31 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:18:32 Speaker 9 Some women don’t like being told they’re heroes. “I’m not a hero. I didn’t choose this.”

1:18:36 Speaker 2 Right, I didn’t choose this.

1:18:38 Speaker 9 So it really—

1:18:38 Speaker 2 But still, even if you didn’t choose it, how brave you are to choose to bring another child into the world despite everything.

1:18:46 Speaker 9 Right.

1:18:47 Speaker 2 Even if you didn’t choose this, if Hashem chose you, you must be a special woman.

1:18:53 Speaker 9 Definitely.

1:18:53 Speaker 2 You must have the strength, because Hashem doesn’t give challenges to people who can’t withstand them.

1:18:59 Speaker 9 To really encourage her: you have the strength, but you have to discover it. That’s the hard part.

1:19:05 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:19:06 Speaker 9 That’s the point. Discovering it.

1:19:07 Speaker 2 And don’t suggest all sorts of home remedies. Please, dear people. If she’s reached this point—if only IV medication helps her, and regular medication doesn’t—home remedies aren’t going to help.

1:19:18 Speaker 9 I think people do that to reassure themselves. You want to feel like you’re helping, but you’re so helpless in the face of it and have no idea what to do. You only heard what it was called a second ago. So you try to suggest whatever might—

1:19:32 Speaker 2 Then the only thing you should offer is support, a hug, or say, “I’m here if you want to talk, and if you need any help, I’m here.” Aside from giving you your child—which is incredible, this tangible, physical gift you receive, wrapped in cellophane, or rather in a placenta and amniotic sac—you also gain strength. After that, everything feels manageable. I gave birth to two children without an epidural. People said to me, “Wow, how did you get through that without an epidural?” And I was thinking, I went through hyperemesis. So a few hours of pain, really, it’s—

1:20:08 Speaker 9 Do you feel stronger now? Well, not “now”—afterward.

1:20:11 Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. Though physically stronger comes after you’ve also had iron infusions, vitamins, and so on.

1:20:18 Speaker 9 Actually stronger.

1:20:18 Speaker 2 Stronger physically too, but mentally stronger. Because afterward, when the baby is screaming at night and waking you up, and all those things, when someone else might break—or you’re having trouble breastfeeding and you feel like giving up—you tell yourself: you went through hyperemesis for him. You suffered for nine months, and this is where you’re going to fall apart? Here? No. I’m not giving up.

1:20:41 Speaker 9 Listen, just looking at you—

1:20:42 Speaker 2 You have a different kind of strength.

1:20:45 Speaker 9 I’m saying, with hyperemesis and in general—what a people of brave women, of women who give of themselves completely. Every woman who…

1:20:56 Speaker 2 To bring children into this world. Each one has her own difficulty, because nobody knows. As you said, you walk down the street and see a woman, and you don’t know what she’s going through.

1:21:03 Speaker 9 Right. There’s a—

1:21:04 Speaker 2 You see families with lots of children or with only a few. And here are more things you shouldn’t say: “Why do you only have two children?” In general, when you see a woman—

1:21:13 Speaker 9 People say it right to your face, too. It’s not…

1:21:15 Speaker 2 You see a woman with a few children, or with one child. “Why do you only have—don’t you want another? So when’s the next one?” First of all, stay out of her womb, ladies. Don’t. You can’t know what that woman went through to bring children into the world. Everyone has her own difficulties, but these aren’t things you need to—

1:21:35 Speaker 9 Or what she’s going through right now.

1:21:36 Speaker 2 Or what she’s going through right now, absolutely. And these aren’t things you need to pry into if she hasn’t chosen to share them with you.

1:21:42 Speaker 9 Not even as a…

1:21:43 Speaker 2 So don’t.

1:21:44 Speaker 9 Supposed joke.

1:21:45 Speaker 2 Now, I, for example, chose to share my life because I understand that it gets a message across. And then I hear unbelievable responses. I say that yes, I’m currently preventing pregnancy with rabbinic permission, and people tell me, “But you need more emunah and bitachon. Apparently you don’t have enough.” And I’m just… A woman in her fifties said that to me. I told her, “The same Hakadosh Boruch Hu who taught us emunah and bitachon is the Hakadosh Boruch Hu whose Torah makes room for preventing pregnancy.”

1:22:23 Speaker 9 Wow. It’s like you need to carry around a box of answers for almost every woman and every question.

1:22:29 Speaker 2 Well, you know, that’s why I was born feisty, as they say.

1:22:32 Speaker 9 Yes, so you’d know how to deal with it.

1:22:35 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:22:36 Speaker 9 Wow. Mushka, let’s end with some encouragement for everyone going through challenges, because we all go through them, each in her own area. And wait a second, first I want to thank you. Thank you for coming.

1:22:46 Speaker 2 With love.

1:22:47 Speaker 9 And thank you for…

1:22:49 Speaker 2 Again, when women with hyperemesis are given the platform and the space to talk about it, first of all, talking is like therapy.

1:22:56 Speaker 9 Right.

1:22:56 Speaker 2 Telling people what you went through. And you want so badly to spare other women the lack of empathy. That drives you, motivates you. And at this very moment, this sweet baby is sitting on me…

1:23:07 Speaker 9 The result.

1:23:08 Speaker 2 The result.

1:23:09 Speaker 9 Sweet soul.

1:23:09 Speaker 2 Yes, do you want to say something?

1:23:12 Speaker 9 Here’s your microphone. No, I didn’t mean quite that much. What was I going to say? It’s also a little refreshing, you know, to talk about something other than the war. We’re always dealing with our own private battles and challenges—what every woman is facing in her home, with her own concerns, her births, her family, her body, and…

1:23:39 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:23:40 Speaker 9 We could sit and talk about that alone.

1:23:42 Speaker 2 We could talk for hours about all these things connected to motherhood, pregnancy, birth, and all the difficulties that come with them. But in the end, we have to come away knowing that Hakadosh Boruch Hu doesn’t give a person a challenge they can’t handle, and that you come out of it stronger. You gain something from it. Afterward, I felt like I could handle anything. I’m Superwoman.

1:24:05 Speaker 9 Absolutely.

1:24:06 Speaker 2 I can handle anything. The way I look at my children, the love I feel when I look at them—I think I love them even more. I don’t want to compare, you know, but I worked so hard for them.

1:24:16 Speaker 9 I think that’s how it works for you... During pregnancy, you keep saying, “After the birth, I’ll...” What keeps you going during pregnancy is the thought of after the birth.

1:24:23 Speaker 2 That’s what gives you strength.

1:24:23 Speaker 9 And what keeps you going after the birth is the pregnancy.

1:24:25 Speaker 2 Right, right, right. Throughout the pregnancy, you’re just waiting for the moment they put the baby in your arms.

1:24:29 Speaker 9 Wait, at the end of this, I’ll finally meet my baby.

1:24:30 Speaker 2 You’re laughing, but with my first pregnancy, as soon as they took me to the hospital room and brought me the baby—my husband picked him up from the bassinet and brought him to me—I was sitting on the bed holding him, full of postpartum hormones, and I started telling him everything I’d been through. “Do you hear me? Do you know what I went through to give birth to you?” I was crying, and my husband was looking at me as though I’d landed from the moon.

1:24:59 Speaker 9 Finally, you had someone to listen.

1:25:00 Speaker 2 But he didn’t understand.

1:25:02 Speaker 9 But he listened.

1:25:02 Speaker 2 I said, “What do I care? He needs to know what I went through to give birth to him.” Right?

1:25:05 Speaker 9 Wow, you’d been waiting for that moment.

1:25:07 Speaker 2 I really had.

1:25:09 Speaker 9 Wow, wow, wow. That’s incredible. Let’s end with a wish.

1:25:12 Speaker 2 I wish every woman who faces any difficulty bringing children into this world success—that she’ll be able to have them easily.

1:25:24 Speaker 9 Amen.

1:25:25 Speaker 2 And with love. And even if it doesn’t happen easily, know that you’ll only grow from this.

1:25:31 Speaker 9 That you have the strength.

1:25:32 Speaker 2 And that you have the strength. Absolutely.

1:25:33 Speaker 9 Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave you that strength; try to find it. Like the tips you gave, Mushka: getting out a little, as much as you can, getting some sun, and accepting help and treatment.

1:25:43 Speaker 2 And getting treatment, and knowing that treatments are available. If one doctor doesn’t suggest them, just go to another doctor, because that doctor may simply not be aware enough.

1:25:49 Speaker 9 And mental-health treatment.

1:25:50 Speaker 2 And mental-health treatment, and couples therapy to help your relationship get through it, because it’s a crisis in every sense. If, G-d forbid, it were another illness with a different name, one that had nothing to do with pregnancy, you would certainly do that. So there’s no reason not to do it here.

1:26:03 Speaker 9 Absolutely. Hakadosh Boruch Hu created these treatments, so we should use them when they can help us.

1:26:10 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:26:10 Speaker 9 And may it be easy for everyone. Enough—we need the Geulah to come already, so everything should be smooth and easy, with health, abundance, and joy.

1:26:20 Speaker 2 It’s also time we stopped being punished for Chava.

1:26:25 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:26:25 Speaker 2 For giving birth to children.

1:26:26 Speaker 9 We could have sextuplets by then, I don’t know.

1:26:28 Speaker 2 Listen, if giving birth were as easy as a hen laying eggs, what would I care?

1:26:31 Speaker 9 I think you’re looking forward to that more than anyone.

1:26:34 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

1:26:34 Speaker 9 All right, may we hear only good news.

1:26:36 Speaker 2 Amen.

1:26:36 Speaker 9 From now on, with Hashem’s help.