7 Terrifying Things They Don't Tell You About Pregnancy

By:Sara J., Tracy V.July 13, 2011

Thanks to sitcoms, romantic comedies and our mother's cuss-filled horror  stories, we all know pregnancy is no walk in the park. In fact, pregnancy can  cause some horrible, horrible things, like inny belly buttons temporarily  turning into outies and ugly-people-making.

And then there's the stuff from a horror movie. Here are seven bizarre  symptoms pregnant women experience prior to giving birth that would make the  rest of us think we were dying of a disease they're going to name after us.

In movies like Knocked Up, vomiting is a quick and tidy signal that  the lady in question has a bun in the oven. Once she realizes what's going on,  the nausea magically disappears, and our mother-to-be gets on with her wacky  life crisis, right?

"OK, puking is over, what's next in  the manual? Looks like crying."

Anyone who's ever had a killer hangover or suffered through a raging flu has  experienced the glory of constant nausea. Not just the  throw-up-and-get-it-over-with kind of sick, the kind where everything that goes  down comes back up in the form of Satanic bile. Everything. Every meal,  every snack, even every sip of water or swallow of saliva. Even when you don't  eat, you're treated to the dry heaves and the burps. You're so broken-down that  all you want to do is go to bed and/or die.

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This picture just made 418 pregnant  women throw up on their keyboards.

Now, picture getting that sick after every meal of every day for nine solid  months. Oh, and another thing -- picture that as the months progress, a  rib-crushing basketball grows under your shirt, making your hourly face-down  trips to the toilet an exercise in torture. Also, just for funsies, imagine  you're also experiencing a host of other ailments, like heartburn, backaches,  random bloody noses, loss of bladder control and a wicked case of the furious  farts. If you can imagine all that, you've got hyperemesis gravidarum down pat.

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"No, it's not a contraction -- get  a lighter. This is going to rule."

In the worst cases, extreme nausea lands moms-to-be in the hospital for  dehydration, and nothing short of an IV can get them back into fighting shape.  And even when someone does come up with a medicine to treat nausea, most ladies  hesitate to medicate themselves while hosting a mini-human parasite. Especially  since the last time a nausea medicine was widely prescribed, it left 10,000 kids  around the world with severe  birth defects.

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"You know what? Worth it."

Anyone who's ever spent more than an hour around a pregnant woman already  knows what hormones can do to an otherwise normal, reasonable person. When not  sobbing over weight gain or the horrors of elastic waistbands, her heightened  estrogen levels are also turning her body into a freak show. For example, in  some cases extra estrogen is making the inside of the woman's mouth taste like a  quarry.

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Mmmmm ... hey, this one even has a  drive-through!

To someone already suffering from a host of other ailments, the constant  taste of penny suckage is not the best way to start the day. Plus, some prenatal vitamins make the metal taste worse. And it's not like  you can skip out on the prenatal vitamins if you ever want to look your child in  the eye (eyes, if you're lucky) later on. On the plus side, for most women  suffering from metal mouth, the taste goes away after the first trimester. On  the negative side, the best way to distract taste buds is with foods that are  high in acid, which probably aren't going to be doing the maternal stomach any  favors.

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Pregnant women are advised to avoid  taking acid. Unless they're looking for a really good time.

What starts out sounding like something the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff do  in the summer actually suuuuucks when you're pregnant. As everyone  knows, the most horrifying part of pregnancy isn't the changes your body goes  through, it's the prospect of squeezing a person out of a lemon-sized orifice.  Fortunately, that's where the hormone relaxin comes in. Relaxin is what gets the  pelvic muscles all loosey-goosey in preparation for the big push. So, obviously,  it's a good thing. Unfortunately, the hormone doesn't just confine itself to the  nether regions; it's also what causes women's feet to grow by up to a whole shoe size during pregnancy,  as the tendons that keep the bones in her feet together relax and start  high-fiving the ground with every step.

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There used to be a building exactly  where her foot is.

But walking around with a permanent case of clown feet isn't the worst part  of relaxin. The horror is that all that relaxin extends to your freakin'  esophagus. As in, the one place that blocks stomach acid from shooting up into  your throat hole. So if you're ever talking to a glowing mom to be and she gives  a sudden, gurgled "GAHHARHGG," don't make fun. Her stomach contents just relaxed  their way up into her mouth.

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The magic of pregnancy!

Speaking of relaxin, sometimes ladies get so much of it that their abdominal  muscles relax the fuck off the belly. They just flat out vamanos from  the the Front of the Stomach Club and separate. That's when a new gang shows up,  the Ridge Going Down the Middle of Your Stomach Gang. That ridge? That's a  uterus. Here's an illustration of one in action:

Via CoffeeScholar
That's right. Pregnant  women get goatse'd by their abs.

It's almost like the abdominal muscles are giving your body a preview of  what's going to happen to your vagina in a few months. But where things really get disgusting is after the baby is long gone from its home  womb. When a mom has a diastasis recti, her abdominal walls stay separated, but without  a 7-pound person stretching them out. It looks, uh, sorry to do this, kind of  like this:

Via Dianelee.ca

Be sure to call your mom and say hello!

There's an old wives' tale that says, "For every pregnancy, a woman loses a  tooth."

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Slut.

It turns out that researchers at NYU found that, on average, women with children  have fewer teeth than women without. As the levels of estrogen and progesterone  climb higher, gums become more sensitive and often swell. They also bleed more  easily, so the pearly white smile that normally follows a good tooth-brushing  becomes a nasty red one.

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"No, I didn't drink Kool-Aid, why  do you ask?"

In fact, according to one report, up to 75 percent of women suffer from  gingivitis during their pregnancies. And since we're so jaded from hearing all  about gingivitis on toothpaste commercials, we tend to forget what actual  gingivitis looks like. Here you go!

Via AAFP.org
GAH!

It's almost like the gums are Sherman and the teeth are Atlanta. But with  more bloodshed. Fortunately, if the gum-swelling is kept in check, it will just  disappear after the baby's birth. That's also true with pregnancy "tumors," which fortunately aren't actual tumors. They're just  painful growths that can bleed, crust over and stay put until long after that  baby is squeezed out.

Via AAFP.org
Babymaking: Not even  once.

You've likely heard of "pregnancy glow," a magical aura of awesomeness that surrounds the fertile female.

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Less awesome are:

Chloasma ...

Via Skincamouflage.com
Oh.

skin tags ...

Via WebMD
My.

and PUPPS:

Via Cafemom.com
GOD.

Let's start the horror show with chloasma, the "mask of pregnancy." Sadly, it's not a fabulous superhero identity: it's dark brown, blotchy patches on the face caused by an increase in melanin, and it happens to 50 to 75 percent of pregnant women. While her face is turning splotchy, her neck, armpits, groin and under-breasts are growing skin tags, which are polyps that look like tiny flaps of skin. So now the mom-to-be looks like the Phantom of the Opera and is covered with little bits of extra skin ... let's throw a rash into the mix!

The most common pregnancy rash is pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy, or PUPPS for short. It starts on the belly with red welts that look like hives (the skin kind, not the bee kind) and then spreads like a tiny rebel force over the thighs, breasts, arms and butt. And since her body isn't going to go down without a fight, it itches like hell and looks pretty fucking disgusting. The only good news here is that two of the skin conditions go away once the baby is born and that skin tags can be easily removed, which probably isn't a lot of comfort to the pregnant woman who's looking like an unholy hybrid of Davy Jones, Two-Face and a diaper rash.

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Skin changes? I have no idea what you're talking about.

It's hard to imagine combining two things that most men love and getting something horrible out of it.

"How could this not be wonderful?"

All that personmaking involves a lot of blood, which is why the amount of blood in a woman's body increases by up to 50 percent during pregnancy. As the baby gets bigger and heavier, more fluid + weight = external vaginal swelling, or cheeseburger crotch. Why cheeseburger crotch? Because some long-suffering lady realized the excess fluid in her bottom bits made her look like she was shoplifting a cheeseburger in her panties. And just for kicks, the inflammation doesn't have to be equal: one side can be totally normal, while the other can be as puffed up as a Donald Trump press release. It can come and go, too, so one day might be business as usual, and the next ... would you like fries with that burger?

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Oh, we forgot to tell you not to read this during lunch.

As an added bonus, if her lady parts turn bright red, purple or blue, she might have varicose veins in her va-jay-jay. And there's not much she can do about it, other than -- you guessed it -- have the baby.

Via Wikipedia
Pictured: varicose veins. We admit that we didn't really look hard for a photo of vaginal ones.

Here's how hair growth normally works: individual hairs grow about half an inch a month for a few years, then they stop growing for a few months like they're in some kind of sleep chamber, then they fall out. Then, if you're lucky, the cycle starts over. So, for most of a lady's life, her hair is 90 percent growing and 10 percent resting.

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Um ... sure, that hair will work for our purposes.

Until she gets pregnant. The same hormones that are torturing the rest of her body parts do an insane number on mama's hair growth. Specifically, that little resting phase that hair goes through before falling out is obliterated. There is no resting period during pregnancy -- the hair just keeps growing. And that's why, alongside the obvious knocker-related advantages of pregnancy, thick, luxurious hair is the one thing the ladies have to look forward to. That's the good news. We wish we could just stop there, we really, really do. But if you made it this far, you might as well know the truth: In addition to getting a head full of sexy tresses, pregnant women also find individual hairs in places they don't belong. Like the upper lip, chin, back, belly and, you guessed it, nipples.

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Typical pregnancy photo.

And other than the usual hair removal remedies that ladies have been employing since the dawn of time, there is nothing you can do about it. BUT! The bad news doesn't end there! Like every other condition on this list, things are (hopefully) going to return back to normal once the baby is born. Except the hair-growth thing. And not in the way you'd expect. At some point in the weeks and months following the baby's birth, all that that hair was that was growing like a pesticide-resistant weed is going to fall out. In clumps. Maybe not clumps clumps, but definitely enough to clog the shower drain and freak an already hormonal woman the fuck out.

Via Sometimesigetangry
Ew. Just ... ew.

It's at this point that we should give full disclosure: This entire article was Cracked's attempt at helping to solve the overpopulation crisis. You're welcome.