Wash your hands regularly. Consider not renovating while you’re pregnant or breastfeeding. If you have a task that involves chemicals (such as some types of cleaning), ask someone else to do it. Keep your home well ventilated.

To help you cope:

1. Eat small, frequent meals and snacks. Try to eat every two hours so that your stomach does not become empty.
2. Choose high protein meals and snacks.
3. Take small sips of fluid often during the day.
4. Keep foods and drinks separate.
5. Keep crackers at your bedside.
6. Use ginger.

The good news is that you can safely detox, even when pregnant. By far the greatest benefit of detoxing is being closely supervised by medical professionals such as doctors and nurses.

Alcohol. Avoid wine, beer, and liquor during your pregnancy. Alcohol passes quickly from your bloodstream through the placenta and umbilical cord to your baby, and this can harm your developing baby’s brain and organs.

Some women report feeling a pulse in their stomach when they’re pregnant. While this might feel like your baby’s heartbeat, it’s actually just the pulse in your abdominal aorta. When you’re pregnant, the amount of blood circulating around your body dramatically increases.

Our midwife Kate strongly advises against using home devices for ‘reassurance’, or mobile apps that falsely claim to be able to monitor your baby’s heartbeat.

A new app and device promises to let you hear your developing baby’s heartbeat without the use of a doctor’s ultrasound device. It’s called Shell, and it was developed by Bellabeat. The free app, available now on Apple’s App store, uses the microphone on your cellphone to listen to the baby’s heart.

A baby’s heartbeat can be detected by transvaginal ultrasound as early as 3 to 4 weeks after conception, or 5 to 6 weeks after the first day of the last menstrual period. This early embryonic heartbeat is fast, often about 160-180 beats per minutes, twice as fast as us adults’!

If you are past seven weeks pregnant, seeing no heartbeat may be a sign of miscarriage. But there are many exceptions to the “heartbeat by seven weeks” rule. You’ve likely heard of people who were certain they had miscarried or were not pregnant, and then went on to have a normal pregnancy.

You can hear the placental sounds at the mother’s rate (arteries) and baby’s rate (vein) both with fetoscope and doppler. If you only hear the placental sound with the mother’s rate it does not tell you that the fetus is still alive.

There are a lot of blood vessels in a pregnant woman’s abdomen, the baby’s heart beating being just one. The placenta also pulses at the same rate as the heart and the mother’s main artery runs across the abdomen and that can also be picked up on a doppler.

Sometimes a miscarriage is diagnosed during a routine scan carried out as part of your antenatal care. A scan may reveal your baby has no heartbeat or that your baby is too small for the date of your pregnancy. This is called a missed or delayed miscarriage.