The pregnancy prescription: ‘I was told a baby might cure my chronic pain. I was sold a lie’

I was 14 the first time a doctor told me that having a baby would be the solution to the debilitating, menstrual cycle-centred pain that consumed me every month.

I was also told that I would struggle to get pregnant. In the face of my unrelenting pain, this advice, and the warnings, would be given to me repeatedly by health professionals over the next 20 years.

I was naive going into pregnancy. There are innumerable ways in which having a baby is a crash course in the unexpected, but topping my own list was the belief that pregnancy would give me a nine-month break followed by a potential cure for the chronic pain I have lived with for more than two decades.

When I told the assorted practitioners at the pain clinic I attend that I was pregnant, I could feel the collective sigh of relief.

I’d been attending for a year, and over that time I had felt them grow frustrated, then disinterested, one by one, as the various medications and techniques they had suggested failed to improve my pain. The welcome news of pregnancy meant that they could discharge me from their care.

Initially, I did not realise I was pregnant. I still experienced bad premenstrual pain at the time my period was due. But it never came and, at two days late, a faint second line appeared on my pregnancy test. This was good news and bad – it confirmed my pregnancy but foreshadowed that my new circumstances would not be a cure for my pain.

A few days later I was on the couch wrapped in agony and heat packs. It felt exactly like my period was beginning. The mysterious pain continued, then a week later the morning sickness kicked in. This shifted my focus. The nausea built over the course of a couple days until my world became round-the-clock sickness and an aversion to just about every smell. Week 10 or 12 I was told, that’s when it will start to ease off. I threw up in side streets, at playgrounds and in the car. My pregnancy went until 42 weeks; I threw up every single day of those 10 months.

Gradually the pelvic pain got worse too. It took the form of a constant ache, the feeling that my legs were going to be ripped away from the rest of my body. At night as I lay sleepless; it felt as if a hot knife was being dragged across my pelvis, searing and severing my insides.

It is confusing to be so incredibly unwell during pregnancy

“So long as baby is healthy,” became a mantra repeated to me by health professionals. They said this to the aching shell of a body that housed the baby; a body so wracked with pain that crutches were required for the final two months of my pregnancy. I began to feel marginalised in my own body: it was no longer about me or my health.

The thing is, I was so happy to be pregnant. The baby was very wanted. I feel lucky that I was able to get pregnant easily, when I’d been warned it would be difficult. I feel lucky that my baby was healthy the whole way through. It is confusing to be so incredibly unwell during pregnancy. The image we’re sold is that pregnancy is a beautiful time, the most natural thing in the world.

For it to be hard, painful and at times very depressing, is alienating and isolating. In that way it is a lot like the chronic pain I’ve lived with for so much of my life. Something to be endured, that no one likes to talk about.

I am now in love with the most wonderful baby, but the reality is that pregnancy has not cured my chronic pain.

I am lucky that I waited until I was ready to have a baby, but the elusive assurance of a cure was dangled in front of me 20 years earlier. I was sold a dangerous lie, one that says that bringing a child into the world is a valid treatment for chronically misunderstood pelvic pain conditions.

I will likely return to the pain clinics now; to the practitioners who have run out of options. This time I will have the added weight of navigating chronic pain as a mother.