22 wks

Sometimes you get invited on a completely spontaneous getaway for one-and-a-half days, and you pack one-and-a-half days worth of clothes, bagels, and nausea medicine, and drive-two-and-a-half hours up a mountain road, and arrive at a cabin surrounded by fresh air and cold streams and a lake and your family, and you and your dog feel pretty good about things. So good, in fact, that when one-and-a-half days turns into two-and-a-half days you don't even worry about your dwindling stash of medicine, because you sort of secretly believe that all that fresh mountain air and good company has lead to the end of your miserable, lingering morning sickness. You've been hiking and boating and knitting and yammering and not once have you had to run to the bathroom for anything more dire than your poor pregnant bladder.

Maybe it's really over, you allow yourself, cautiously.

But then by that final evening, after your happy but pharmaceutically compromised day, as you sit around a fire with your favorite people playing Catchphrase, you start to feel it. The rumbling.

You think maybe you can sleep it off. You leave your cabin window open in the night for some of that crisp, pure air. You eat your breakfast carefully. But the sickness just laughs at you. It grows and it grows as you make your way down the mountain, and by the time you are home it has returned completely.

And then you spend the evening the same way you've spent most of the last hundred and twenty or so evenings: throwing up and hugging your stash of Zofran, Unisom and Vitamin B. I'll never leave you guys at home again, you whisper, before going to bed with the windows open, city air blowing over you as you sleep.