Trigger warning: The following blog posts are heavy with describing details of Postpartum Depression, Postpartum Anxiety and Postpartum OCD, also including suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts and various medical procedures/complications during pregnancy and delivery. Please use caution while reading Under the Dome posts if they might trigger you.
I thought long and hard about how to describe what it feels like to be stuck in the battle of maternal mental health and it wasn't until I was freed that I could come up with that analogy.
You know how some people believe that there is good and evil in all of us? How we make daily choices that make us either good or bad?
Maternal mental health struggles are like that. You get split into two different people. Imagine that the "good" part... the part that helps you flourish in joy, that is made up of a million tiny things that make you "you", gets locked into one of those old style outdoor cellars with the two wooden doors. The wooden doors are old enough to see the world in slots of light and dark. To watch the broken parts of yourself carrying on with a life you had dreamed about since you were young.
One thousand six hundred fourteen days I was trapped in that cellar.
I feel like I owe it to every other mother who suffers any form of maternal mental health struggle to share my story - in it's entirety - with every shameful, heart wrenching, fearful truth that I never wanted to share. I didn't want to, but I have to. With my third baby came this new wave of struggles... to admit to a happy, blissful, and (nearly) perfect postpartum experience and be even closer to knowing why my story needed to be told. If version #3 was how everyone else experienced postpartum and motherhood then they really didn't understand what the rest of us had been going through.
Truth: 40% of women experience maternal mental health struggles starting in pregnancy.
I wish I had known that. It actually wasn't something I came to know until I was pregnant with my 3rd, believe it or not.
The first 12 weeks of my first pregnancy were filled with a lot of obsessive reading about everything and anything that could go wrong. While this is probably what happens with lot of people, with me it was a bit different since I suffered from PTSD. PTSD never allowed me to truly envision a future - especially not one where I could be a mother - so I was pretty certain that something was going to happen to crush any dreams of normalcy that I had.
In the beginning I called my new OB/GYN and asked her nurse about medications I was currently taking for my PTSD that I had been on for over 10 years. "Stop them immediately" she told me. I asked if she was sure. I told her that I feared that the stress of not being medicated was going to be far more harmful than the medications were. She told me that wasn't correct. I asked her to ask the doctor if I needed to wean off of any of them, she said no.
I sat and stared at a wall before then calling back and requesting to be switched to a midwife.
My midwife listened to everything I had to say and said she would call me back. When she did call back she agreed with my feelings about stress>medication harm and told me that she would support my staying on them. She also suggested that I inform my mental health prescriber before my first doctor appointment.
My mental health prescriber was an AODA specialist since I was taking a low dose of an AODA medication for my PTSD. My reasons for taking the medication had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol but my doctor was unable to ever get out of that mode of thinking.
"You can stay on the drugs if you can research them and prove they are safe. You also need to bring the father in and I need his permission to prescribe to you since this is his child too" he told me.
So, I went home and researched and actually found out that the medication had been used in various other countries as a fertility drug and that the people who took it had stayed on it after conceiving with a lesser outcome of miscarriage while taking it. My husband (then boyfriend) came with me to the next appointment where I made my case and then listened to my doctor explain that he was unaware of what the medications would do to me and needed his permission to prescribe them.
"I trust her" Kevin said with a unwavering stare.
Everyone seems to be in charge of my life except for me.
My worry kept me up at night.
My worry paralyzed me.
My worry had me obsessively scouring the internet.
My worry made my body hum with anxiety so vicious that once, during an argument with my husband, I told him I wished we hadn't gotten pregnant so we could instead get to the point of complete understanding of each other before bringing another life into the world.
I worried about miscarriage...
and sometimes I wished it would just happen already so I could be put out of my worried misery. So I could start over and do things the right way.
My worry caused me to over analyze every pregnancy symptom I had which led to many worried calls to my midwife and then scans and tests to make sure that the symptoms were not a result of a real, sometimes life threatening, problem.
At week 11 I got a call back from the doctor regarding a scan I had to make sure bleeding hadn't been a result of a bigger issue. Thankfully, it wasn't but unfortunately they had found something else. They had seen that the nuchal fold was thicker than it should be and wanted me to see a specialist who would be able to measure properly to confirm. They made me an appointment right away and I hung up to then search what nuchal fold measurements had meant.
Down syndrome.
I talked it over with my husband and did all the research I could before my next appointment. We were going to love a baby no matter what challenges it brought us. I wrote entries about my appointments in more detail but here's the truths I left out:
My doctor never told me that there was an option of "everything is fine". In every option there was going to be a high risk of a mental disability, shortened life, or no life beyond the womb at all. In order to find out "which one" I was going to be doomed with my doctor told me I could either have a blood test done (which would take weeks for the results and not be as specific) or I could have a CVS done (which was going to be done immediately, a sample taken from the placenta via needle through my stomach going in and out of it over a dozen times to collect the needed amount).
"If you take the blood test route you will be further into your pregnancy and by then if we abort due to possible complications we would have to take your baby out in pieces since it will be larger."
I excused myself to the bathroom to sob in private.
That is the moment that my fear went silent. That all of my previous worries had lost their voice and instead caused a constant hum throughout my body that simply said "run".
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