Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Excerpt from I Want A Healthy Pregnancy – journal entry, pregnancy week 11: “We’re all sick this week. Sore throat, cough, congestion. It’s terrible. And of course who gets it the worst – me! I don’t want to take any meds for it so I’ll just wait it out. I feel like I’m being dragged down into a deep hole of exhaustion. I worry the illness will put me into labour – can it?”
There’s a theory that says that a woman’s immunity is lowered when she’s pregnant so that her immune system does not fight and reject the growing foetus.
Whatever the reason for lowered immunity, I can certainly confirm that when you’re pregnant your defences go down and you’re more likely to fall for a bug that’s going around.
One of my friends gets nervous when she gets sick while she’s pregnant. She feels that the illness might affect her baby, so she ends up taking medication for it in order to get better as soon as possible. I always disagreed with her on doing that because I feel that the body should know what to do during an illness, provided I help it out a bit.
Preventing an illness is much better than waiting for it to happen and then treating it. I’m sure you knew that, but ‘prevention’ is a general word which needs to be looked at in more detail. Preventing an illness means adjusting your diet and lifestyle so that you give your body the raw materials to work with.
l Quick prevention tip: Read your body’s signals. Signs of an impending illness are very clear if you know what you’re looking for. Try to listen to your body to find out what’s happening. Any change in energy levels is a good indication that something is not quite right. Also, if you notice new symptoms that you didn’t have before, it may mean that your body is lacking something. Look out for signs such as fatigue, mood swings, itchy ears, sore throat, extra mucus, headaches, etc.
Do you get sick often during pregnancy? Get great tips from my latest book I Want A Healthy Pregnancy, sold in bookstores around Bahrain or online at Amazon, iTunes or Kindle store. The Arabic version is due out this month so stay tuned! For more info, visit www.IWantAHealthyPregnancy.com
