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.

Getty
"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!

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.

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.