What NOT To Do While Taking Ozempic

#1: Get pregnant…

Warning: This post contains references to intentional weightloss and pregnancy. If you’re not in the right head space to read about either (or both!) of those, please skip this one.

There’s a really irritating saying people tend to trot out when you’re struggling to accept the lack of something in your life: maybe you’re single and you’re finding it hard to meet someone you’d consider sitting next to on a bus, never mind going on a date with; you’re house hunting and every single house you see ends up going for €100k over asking (Irish house hunters, I see you); you’re hoping to get pregnant and it’s just not happening.

“You know,” they’ll say, sagely, not realising the red mist that’s about to descend from behind your eyelids at the uttering of their very next words, “It’ll probably happen when you stop trying…” (It’s a wonder more of us aren’t murderers, honestly.)

In a lot of instances, these sayings are completely and utterly without merit (and entirely unhelpful). In the year of our Lord 2024, it’s very rare that you’ll meet someone you fancy, and who fancies you back, entirely by accident. It’s even less likely, still, that you’ll end up finding the perfect house for you to buy – at the perfect price – if you’re not actively looking. And as for pregnancy… well. We don’t really need to go into the basics of the birds and the bees, do we?!

An aside

Where does that phrase come from?! Birds and bees don’t mate with one another, so trying to use them as a way of explaining sex seems… ill-advised, at best. No wonder children are confused.

According to Grammarist, “The origin of the phrase is uncertain. Many give credit to the poem Work without Hope, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1825, however the poem in question simply references bees that are stirring and birds on the wing, not the phrase the birds and the bees.”

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

“I have not-so-secretly wanted to have another baby for a while now, driven, in part, by the…opportunity to redo my birth experience”

Anyway, it will be no secret to those of you who listen to the podcast, or follow me on Instagram, that I have not-so-secretly wanted to have another baby for a while now, driven, in part, by the fact that Atlas is so adorable and I’d love him to have a little friend, as his older brothers have each other… but also, I can admit (although I’m slightly ashamed by the selfishness of it all) as an opportunity to redo my birth experience, which I didn’t love.

But Brandin – my husband and other deciding force in our household’s major life changes, for better or worse – has been less keen, worried about how our (badly managed) budget would stretch to a fourth child, along with logistical concerns like having to switch my car out for one that fits six of us, where to slot a baby into a house that’s already quite tight for space, and whether or not I’m too old to have another child. (Yes, he has the bad sense to say that last part out loud.)

The last few months have seen a lot of debate being had about whether or not another baby will be happening, and ultimately I’d concluded that it just wasn’t going to be in the cards for us.

And while I’d like to say that I was fine with that, I wasn’t, not really. I was disappointed and heartbroken and felt as though I was in mourning for something or someone I never even knew. There were a lot of complicated feelings that I struggled to express or share, and that, honestly, I felt quite isolated in because I knew that the disappointment I was feeling wasn’t shared by the other person in my relationship.

Now, for the Ozempic of it all…

Part of my deciding to take semaglutide injections, I think, was in response to this grief. It felt as though, if I wasn’t going to have this second baby I’d been dreaming of (we have two older boys from Brandin’s previous marriage), at least I could achieve my other lifelong dream: of getting skinny.

The night before I was due to take my second shot, I sat on our bed next to Brandin and I wept. I told him that I felt as though I was finally okay with us not having another baby (he may not have believed me, due to the weeping), but that I felt like I was mourning that dream, and even though I loved our three boys and was optimistic about the life we’d have as a little family of sometimes-five and sometimes-three (we share 50/50 custody with the boys’ mom), I was still kind of sad about this other potential baby I’d been imagining and dreaming of and hoping for.

And I remember, too, turning to Brandin and saying, “you probably think I’m just getting my period but I’m also just really sad about this!” and him looking slightly skeptical (again, what judge in the land would convict me?!) but (for once, wisely) saying nothing.

The following day, though, there was no period, and I decided to check on my Health app to see when I was due. As it turns out, I was two days late.

My period’s pretty predictable, by and large, and though I can be a day or two late, or early, here and there, this time I had a weird feeling about it; I’d noticed, a few days previously, that I was very bloated around my mid-section. “I could literally be six months pregnant,” I’d said to Brandin, who’d said absolutely nothing, in the style of a man with a death wish.

Not just that, but my nipples, which have more or less lost all sensitivity in the three whole years I’ve been breastfeeding Atlas, had started to feel really sensitive and sore to the touch.

These two factors combined made me decide to take a test, which Brandin picked up for me on his way home from work, and which I took, alone, in our upstairs bathroom, before I was due to take my third semaglutide shot. You’ll know, by now, how that went.

I’m pregnant! But I’ve been taking Ozempic…

Honestly? I was freaked. Beyond freaked. Brandin was freaked, too, but for, I think, different reasons – the aforementioned finances, his obsession with children each needing their own room, his concern about jamming a football team’s worth of kids into our cars – while my freakout was almost exclusively around the fact that I’d been pregnant for the full two weeks I’d been injecting myself with appetite-suppressing drugs that have not been studied in pregnancy except in rabbits and rats, where they’ve shown to result in fetal abnormalities.

So, you know, it wasn’t a great feeling.

That night, I called Bea and strong-armed her into meeting me for dinner at Three Fires, a pizza restaurant near both of our houses. She tried to reassure me that everything would be okay: I’d taken two of the very lowest doses you can take; it’s very early days; people smoke and drink to excess and take drugs, and it’s not great for the babies, but they survive. “Everything will be fine,” she told me, as I cried while shoving slice after slice of spicy sausage-and-ricotta pizza into my face.

The following morning, I called my gynecologist’s office and asked to speak to a nurse, to whom I explained my predicament. She took notes and asked questions and said she’d speak to my OB, but that I should schedule my first two appointments – at 12 and 16 weeks – while I was on the phone.

Later that day, the office called me back to say that, while my doctor wasn’t overly concerned about my Ozempic use, she did want to see me at eight weeks “for an early scan to check viability”. At the time, we estimated that I was about five weeks pregnant, so I had three weeks to wait for this scan that would tell me whether or not my desire to lose weight had irrevocably damaged my baby.

It was, honestly, a really difficult few weeks. I told some close family and friends, while Brandin wanted to wait until we’d been for the first scan before sharing the news with his side. I do understand why the general advice is not to tell people until you’re past the 12-week mark, when the chance of miscarriage isn’t quite as high as it is in thosee first three months, but I’ve just always felt as though, if something did go wrong, I would hate to feel like I couldn’t talk to people about that, or to have to start with, “So, I was pregnant…” Plus, you know, I’ve never been great at keeping things to myself.

On the day of the scan itself, I felt a sticky, kind of nauseating anxiety. I took Atlas to his occupational therapy appointment and tried to read my book, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which is brilliant, but maybe not what I’d recommend for this kind of high-stress time. I’ve since switched to Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians¹ series and finding that is much more appropriate for my current needs – I’d highly recommend the books but, if you’re considering checking them out, please read my footnote below first.

I dropped him back to his babysitter’s and I went home and I let Vinny out to do his business and I made myself a cup of coffee and I sat outside and looked at my garden (which had not, at this stage, been destroyed so thoroughly by the bunnies that seem to look at it as their very own all-you-can-munch buffet) and when it was time to leave I grabbed a bottle of water (all the better to prepare for a urine sample) and my bag and set off for the clinic.

I’d forgotten not only how incredible it is to hear the heartbeat of this little person you’re growing inside your own body (like WHAT?! how is this how people are made it’s bonkers), but also how uncomfortable it is to have a trans-vaginal ultrasound (yuck), so I guess every rose really does have its thorn.

Out of the ultrasound room, a lovely nurse admired my Van Halen T-shirt and told me that everything was looking great; the baby’s looking good, heartbeat was perfect, my blood pressure is great. Great, great, great. She told me she wouldn’t worry too much about two weeks of semaglutide at a low dose; that I should avoid deli meat, “but there’s a TikTok trend going around that’s making a lot of my moms-to-be crave Jersey Mike’s subs, have you seen this?”; and then, before I left she said, “congratulations! I’m glad it’s you.”

I laughed, and asked, “as opposed to you?!” Yes, she told me; she’s a grandmother and has zero desire to go back to those early days of child-rearing but, you know, good luck to me!

I’m now eight weeks pregnant, well before the traditional time to tell everyone, but honestly I’ve been struggling with feeling as though I lured people over here to read all about my Ozempic journey and owe them an explanation as to why updates have not been so forthcoming.

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So I would love if you’d stick around (but I understand if you don’t want to). I still have it in my head that, once this baby’s out and in the world, I’ll revisit my weightloss injection journey – and, in the interim, I’m particularly interested in speaking to experts about their knowledge and experience of prescribing and monitoring patients on these drugs.

I am, after all, a journalist – and as a journalist, I do occasionally write about things without always having first-hand experience – and now that I’ve started down the rabbit-hole of researching these medications, I do think there’s a lot to be written about them that isn’t yet out there (and no, I don’t trust Oprah, TYVM).

If you have any suggestions as to who I should speak to, or what you’d like to read, please, reply to this email, drop me a comment on Substack or DM me (button below!).

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1. These books are highly ridiculous and highly spicy but there is also a really terrible gang rape scene in the opening pages of the first book, and its an incident that’s referred to many times throughout the series of books, so please exercise caution 🩵