It did worry me that I was damaging the baby, especially in the first trimester when the baby was forming all its parts, but that was before I told work so I couldn’t really do much about it then. Later on in pregnancy my focus was on removing stress to give my body the best chance to birth naturally.
Like PP said I actually couldn’t find any evidence that it would be damaging, my blood pressure etc was always fine (mine is always low anyway) and I always ate well. I was lucky that DH took over everything else so he’d cook most of the meals etc.
I didn’t go on leave sooner because I wanted to help them through the busiest part of the year, which is a bit silly looking back but the 4 days weeks made a big difference and made the whole thing more manageable. If they hadn’t of let me do that I would have got signed off sick and started maternity leave sooner.
I started thinking about looking for a job about 4 months before I needed to go back to work, DS was an age where he’d go to bed at about 7:30 and sleep for a good few hours so I could spend a few evenings putting my cv together and looking for jobs. I was happy to find that my brain still worked!
When I had interviews I was roughly 3 months away from returning to work, so my start date would be the same as someone who was on 3 months notice. I was very open in interviews that I was on maternity leave and I don’t think it put anyone off. I got a job offer from everywhere I interviewed anyway!
It helped that my DH is very flexible with his job though, so when I was given an interview date he could pick up childcare. He has also always spent enough time with DS that neither of us were worried about him caring for him on his own.
If I were you I’d probably have a quick look now for other jobs, see what’s about, if there’s anything you’d especially like to move to. But carry on TTC as normal. If you get pregnant quickly you can make a choice because the different maternity packages vs keeping the more stressful job.