30 Unfortunate Things That Might Happen When You’re Pregnant

To find out more about pregnancy challenges, Bored Panda reached out to Amy Morrison, author, mom of two, and founder of Pregnant Chicken. Amy explained that pregnancy comes with a ton of treats that aren’t so pretty, like “swollen feet, heartburn, constipation, and weird hair growth, just to name a few.”

“Unfortunately, they rarely make for great dinner conversation so people stick to topics like picking names and getting the nursery ready over pregnancy ailments.”

But such an impression makes people mistakenly think the majority of pregnancies are easy, and as a result, “pregnant people think their pregnancy isn’t normal when often, it is.”

Amy said that when she herself was pregnant, her feet grew half a size. “It happened during my first pregnancy and never went back. I had no idea how common this was.”

To all the pregnant moms to be out there, Amy says that “building a person from scratch with your body is difficult, but some roads are definitely tougher than others. It’s not fair and my heart goes out to anyone who is having a challenging pregnancy.”

As we are now living in unprecedented times of worldwide pandemic, being pregnant and delivering a baby now cause so many more challenges than they used to. In addition to all the other unpleasant (to say the least) pregnancy symptoms, women are dealing with even more stress.

In order to find out whether the risks that worry so many pregnant women currently are justified, the University of Florida College of Medicine’s department of obstetrics and gynecology chair Dr. John Smulian answers a couple of frequently asked questions.

Dr. Smulian said that even if there’s limited information regarding the link between Covid-19 and pregnancy, reports suggest that pregnant women are not more likely to become infected. Moreover, he confirmed that there’s no evidence that pregnant women who get infected with the virus are more likely to endure a severe course of illness than others.

When it comes to worrying whether Covid-19 can be passed on to one's baby, Dr. Smulian explained that from several scientific studies that looked at pregnancies affected by the coronavirus, “none of the babies appeared to have been infected, based either on the absence of symptoms or negative tests for the virus.”

However, Dr. Smulian also said that there has been one case reported in the media of a possible mother-to-baby transmission of coronavirus, but there’s not enough information to draw conclusions.

And as for visiting moms and their newborns in hospitals, Dr. Smulian believes it’s crucial to limit visitors to one single designated person that bears no symptoms or risks for having and transmitting Covid-19.