Beating the Heat of Pregnancy - Hot Flashes

Along with pregnancy comes a lot of joy, excitement and a lot of symptoms you probably weren't prepared for. Every woman knows about the morning sickness, the swelling, and the cravings but one symptom a lot of women aren't prepared for including myself is the hot flashes, the sweating and the overall feeling of being hot all the time. Obviously the cause for this is the hormones a woman has surging through her body during these nine months and for some, this symptom may come and go or may just present itself for one of the three trimesters. Unfortunately for me, mine kicked in within the first few weeks of finding out I was pregnant and continued through the entire pregnancy. It's an uncomfortable symptom to experience and depending on the level of severity you have you may or may not be able to ignore it. I realized early on I was going to need to find some way of beating this heat- otherwise it was going to be a very long nine months.

My pregnancy was planned and I thought long and hard about what time of the year I would want to be pregnant. I live in New York so I knew I didn't want to be at the end of my pregnancy in the middle of winter (The last thing I wanted was to deliver a baby at home in the middle of a snow storm) and based on the fact that I hate the extreme heat of summer I didn't want to be nearing the end of my pregnancy in the summer months of July or August when New York weather can reach the high 90's with high levels of humidity. After contemplating it, it made perfect sense to try for a spring baby. That way the bulk of my pregnancy would take place in the fall and winter, and by the time it was warming up, baby would be arriving any day. Everything went as planned and my due date was set for April 12^th. Unfortunately a few weeks into my pregnancy the constant feeling of being hot kicked in even though it was the end of summer and the weather was starting to cool off. I was spared from the morning sickness bug (luckily) so I figured the hot flashes were just a substitute and they would go away by the time I was entering my second trimester.