Hell that happens in sleep

[sepa]

Cramp. Blinking leg cramp. Why must you rear you head from the depths of hell and wake me from my sleep

I literally feel your pain! I pulled a calf muscle trying to sort out cramp the other day

I get them when I stretch my legs, bloody hurts.

The only thing that helps me is if I catch it early and immediately curl my toes upwards towards my knees.

Bananas

Having said that curling my toes helps me, I woke up last night with cramp so bad I was crying out and woke DH up. It felt like someone was ripping my calf muscle in half. This morning it's hell to walk on.

Apart from bananas, is there anything else we can do?!

I found a glass of milk at bedtime really helped.

Another leg cramper. It's awful! I dreamt I was being bitten by snakes in my bed the other night because of them. I imagine the two feel quite similar. I daren't stretch in bed as that sets it off!

It's horrible. I used to find that stretching my legs out before bed helped when I used to go the the gym all the time. This hasn't seemed to work for pregnancy though.
I have now taken to sleeping with my legs at an angle as I find that sleeping with my legs straight is when it cramps

Oh the agony! And then the inconvenience of limping for days afterwards if it was a really bad one! I find that vigorously rubbing the muscle when it cramps often helps, or at least takes my mind off it.

Apparently stretching your legs before bed should help avoid cramp, but I maintain it's the same as stretch marks - you either get them or you don't and nothing will really help influence that.

I had terrible cramps in last trimester of first pregnancy that were making my life a misery and waking me up screaming in the night. It can be due to lack of salts like calcium, sodium (salt), dehydration, lack of potassium etc. Quinine can also help but they won't prescribe tablets to pregnant women.
In desperation I put myself on a diet of loads of calcium (mainly milk), salt on everything, drank loads, ate loads of bananas (potassium) and drank tonic water (quinine) every day. The cramps went. I did get palpitations at the end though. Maybe I overdid my anti-cramp diet!

Bananas help. It's the potassium I think.

I find jumping out of bed like a cat on a hot plate while screaming in agony, hobbling back and forth and waking the whole house up to share my pain really helps.
Other than that, yeah, bananas will help.