If you're pregnant and tired, you're in good company. Fatigue in early pregnancy is very common. You can blame your soaring progesterone levels. Also, lower blood sugar levels, increased blood production and lower blood pressure might all be conspiring to make you sleepy.

Here's what our Mommy M.D.s — doctors who are also mothers — do to fight pregnancy fatigue.

"One thing that's perfectly normal and really common in pregnancy, but not always talked about is overwhelming exhaustion in the first trimester," says Erika Schwartz, M.D., a mom of two and the director of Evolved Science Health. She has been in private practice for more than 30 years in New York City, specializing in women's health, disease prevention and bioidentical hormones. "Even getting up to go to the bathroom is a chore. The fatigue is caused by your rising hormones."

"I remember the exhaustion well," Dr. Schwartz continues. "I was around five weeks pregnant, and I suspected I was pregnant, but I didn't know for sure yet. I was working as an attending physician at a nursing home, and I was talking to the head nurse. I was supposed to make rounds to see my patients."

"'I can't get myself up out of this chair,' I told the nurse. 'I'd rather look at these charts than at the patients.'"

"'Don't worry about it,' the nurse said. 'You're pregnant!'"

"I was completely exhausted — so tired I could barely move — for around four weeks. By the second trimester, my energy levels started to rise."

Dr. Schwartz is not the only one who feels this way. "I was very tired at some points in my pregnancies," says Nancy Rappaport, M.D., a mother of three grown children and author of "In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide." She is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an attending child and adolescent psychiatrist in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools. "I remember one day during my third pregnancy, I was so tired, I told my kids we were going to sit on the couch and pretend to watch TV. (We didn't have a TV until my kids were 10.) They fell for it for a little while."

"I'm usually on the go, so the biggest thing I noticed about my pregnancy was feeling very tired," says Dianna K. Kim, M.D., a mom of three and an OB-GYN in private practice at the Midwest Center for Women's Healthcare in Vernon Hills, Illinois. "I never went to sleep so early and slept in so late as I did during the first trimesters of all of my pregnancies. I tried to stay awake as long as possible, but I'd fall asleep at my desk. So I ended up just going to bed very early."

"Before I got pregnant, when pregnant women would complain about being tired, I used to think, 'Ha, you should walk a day in my shoes,'" says Marra S. Francis, M.D., a mom of six children and an OB-GYN in Helotes, Texas. "But when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, I was working 80- to 100-hour work weeks, and I have never been more exhausted in my entire life."

"I didn't know how physically exhausted pregnancy makes women," Dr. Francis adds. "The fatigue is destructive. When I was pregnant, I would put my head down on my desk and fall asleep with mad commotion going on all around me. I'd come home from a 12-hour shift, and I'd fall asleep on the couch. We had a one-bedroom apartment, and I couldn't make it into the bedroom. My husband would carry me into the bedroom, and I'd sleep the entire night in whatever position he put me in. When my alarm went off 12 hours later, I could hardly get out of bed. I just slept as much as I could in the first trimester until the fatigue eased up in the second."

When to Call Your Doctor

If your fatigue is so overwhelming that you can't focus on your work or if you're a hazard while driving, contact your doctor or midwife right away.

Jennifer Bright is a mom of four sons, co-founder and CEO of family- and veteran- owned custom publisher Momosa Publishing, co-founder of the Mommy MD Guides team of 150+ mommy M.D.s, and co-author of "The Mommy MD Guide to the Toddler Years." She lives in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. To find out more about Jennifer Bright and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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