Your baby is going to be okay.
Making a vulnerable post here in the hopes that it helps others:
I struggle with health anxiety. I have since before I got pregnant. I’m in therapy for it, which has helped, but sometimes it can get pretty ugly (e.g. convincing myself that I have some sort of weird cancer, worrying about an aneurysm, etc). Since getting pregnant, pretty much all of my health anxiety has shifted to the wellbeing of my baby. I’ve tried so hard to be careful about what I consume and have avoided known harmful products like alcohol, but there is so much information out there (both good and bad) that it’s easy to get lost in it. And whenever I’m in a health anxiety spiral, my tendency is to furiously Google search and read probably less-than-reputable sources in an effort to seek reassurance, which inevitably only makes me feel worse.
I recently read online that topical retinol should be avoided during pregnancy. I’d never heard this before; my doctor never mentioned it, I just happened to randomly see it on the internet. Cue panic of looking through all of my cosmetic products to see if anything had retinol, and my heart sank when I saw that my shampoo has retinyl palmitate as one of the ingredients. I spent hours Googling in a panic and going down the rabbit hole, horrified that I’d somehow harmed my baby. Through all of my frantic searching, what I was basically able to deduce is that oral retinol (i.e. Accutane) is bad and has been known to cause problems, but there is no evidence to suggest that topical retinol has the same effect.
Even after seeing this, I was still beside myself with guilt/shame for quite a while, worrying that I’d somehow hurt my baby. Luckily my husband has been incredibly supportive and helped pull me out of it. Now that I’ve stepped back a bit, I’m reflecting that there really is SO much shit like this out there for pregnant women. The trend I’ve seen for most things seems to be “Well, we don’t know what effect this has on pregnant women, and since we can’t ethically study it, it’s best to avoid it out of an abundance of caution.” But the problem with that is that the internet-fear-machine then takes that to mean “You can’t use this thing EVER or you’ll do irreparable harm to your baby.” And there is such a heavy shamey/blamey culture online toward moms who are just trying to do their best.
With all of that said, I want to emphasize 3 key things:
You are doing your best, and that is good enough.
If you’re reading it on the internet, it’s important to take it with a big grain of salt.
Your baby is going to be okay.
We are all doing this wonderful, frustrating, beautiful, complicated thing of creating new life. And that is something to celebrate, not shame each other for. 🤍