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Typical and Not So Typical Signs of Pregnancy

Most women do know when they are pregnant, but there are cases when women do not know until the day that they are actually giving birth to a baby.

The first very common symptom of pregnancy is the stopping of your period. When a woman misses her first period or her period is late, in general a woman will test for pregnancy. The menstruation cycle basically is part of the reproductive system and when the cycle disappears it almost always a sure sign for pregnancy.

There are many other typical and not so typical symptoms of pregnancy. A certain percentage of pregnant women have what is called morning sickness. One symptom, typically associated with pregnancy, causes nausea and vomiting. This symptom may appear as early as the first week of pregnancy. The symptom is not only experienced in the morning. Some women are sick in the morning, some in the afternoon and others all day long. There actually is not one answer as to why women do get pregnant and no proper remedy, but eating frequent meals in small amounts throughout the day will lessen the nausea.

Surely you have heard of this symptom being related to pregnancy, frequent urination. The uterus swells very soon after conception to make space for the baby and to be able to provide for the baby. The enlarged uterus will put pressure on the female bladder and therefore causes the frequent urge to go.

During the different stages of pregnancy a woman will generally experience fatigue and sluggishness. Hormone levels in the woman’s body change very rapidly and keep changing over the time. In the first trimester women feel like they want to sleep twice as much as they generally do due to these hormone changes. While in the second trimester this actually turns around and many women say that they have never felt better in their whole life, which is actually also due to another hormone level change. In the third trimester fatigue returns, this time mostly due to the enormous amounts of weight that the body has to carry around. This weight puts a great strain on the female body and tiredness is a normal reaction to that.

Another very typical symptom of pregnancy is heartburn. Many women complain about heartburn especially in the third trimester closer to birth. The uterus and the baby will push slowly upwards and therefore compress the stomach. Other reasons for the heartburn are the hormone levels. Hormones will slow down digestion. This makes the stomach stay filled slightly longer and this will increase the stomach acid. This is also one of the reasons why women in their third trimester feel full after small amounts of food and need to eat more frequent very small amounts of food.

Some more atypical symptoms not quite as well known to the broad public are breast tenderness, light bleeding in the first week, dizziness and fainting, constipation and irritability. The changes in hormones and the breast getting slowly ready for nurturing the baby change the properties of the breast. They get tender, swollen and slowly start to enlarge. Many women’s nipples darken and become more sensitive during this time.

What some women mistakenly thought of as their period could be alight bleeding or spotting, which is caused by the implementation of the egg in the uterus lining. Dizziness and fainting can come from the growing uterus compressing some of the major arteries in the body, as well as the blood sugar. Blood sugar in pregnant women can deplete quickly when not eating frequent meals.

Constipation due to hormones also causes problems in many women and constipation actually gets worse as pregnancy progresses.