14 Jun 2012

My Black Dog

I'm going away next week, just for a few days. On my return, I have a project to do. The project I feared when I first recieved my study planner is upon us! I cannot believe I'm halfway through this module already. The project is on analysing the usefulness of self help websites. We pick our own topic, find our own websites and then rate them (and each others) before writing a report on the general quality of information, and a TMA on the report. This is all done over 3 weeks. We work in small groups, and currently, I'm co-ordinating my group, which sounded terrifying to start with, but actually, I LIKE THE POWAH!
Ahem.

Anyway, it makes sense to pick a subject close to one's heart and (if the rest of the group don't pick it) I'm going to do postnatal depression.

Twenty five months elapsed between the births of my two children. I was cripplingly depressed for thirteen of those months.

It started about three days after my eldest was born. I got the baby blues. EVERYONE gets the baby blues. It's caused by an oestrogen crash, and a sudden massive rise in progesterone with the DAWN OF THE LACTATION. Some women get it on day 2, some not til day 14, but everyone has a bit of a wibble at some point in the first 10-ish days where they want to put the baby back where it came from and carry on as before. If you can remember what before was. Which you probably can't, because pregnancy erases the memory of all that has gone before. Either way, you have this baby blues crash where you mourn all that has gone before, and then you feel fine and start to pick up physically and mentally.
Except, I just didn't.

I remained steadfastly in denial, but various events transpired to make me worse. Like the impetigo he got on his mouth at 5 weeks old, and the herniae that even the GP missed at the 6 week check, and the continuous reflexive vomiting from the umbilical hernia that made him continually wet or feeding. My husband was rarely there, because he had a lot of work and was very much of the "BUT THIS IS YOUR JOB NOW" mindset. Due to the vomiting, my boy ate continuously. He fed 3 hourly until he was almost two from habit, but as a newborn, ate every 90 minutes, vomited and then started again. He wouldn't sleep, so at 10 weeks, I started co-sleeping, but then felt even worse because everyone said CO-SLEEPING BABIES DIE (this is a fallacy, as I later found out).
I would sit in bed, alone with him, in the evening, and I would want to jump out of the window and run. And that feeling didn't go away. I didn't wish him harm, but I didn't love him or want him. I felt like I was looking after someone else's child and that they would come back and take him and I could go back to normal (whatever the hell that was). I went back to work on odd days when he was a few months old just to have an excuse to get away from him.
My health visitor spotted all was not well, when I finally divulged that my support was nonexistant most of the time and I was very depressed. I then had one to one sessions with my HV for a few weeks and everything started to get better. My relationship with my husband improved immeasurably, and I fell in love with my little boy.

When he was six months, I was ill and it was thought I might have multiple myeloma because I had strange red cell formation. While we waited for my protein banding test to come back, we were on holiday. It was our second wedding anniversary. For the first time, I had to face the prospect that I might not be able to watch my son grow up. I got the all clear after five ENDLESSLY LONG days. I never looked back.

I had a year of feeling well mentally, and then my husband buggered off with another woman when I was pregnant with our second child. That was a kick in the tits. I went suicidal, then I went rageous, then back to suicidal. I sat at suicidal-without-ideation for months. Then it developed into suicidal WITH ideation, so I got some help and even though I felt much the same about the baby (i.e. nothing), I managed to get on with my life as best I could. I thought I would have him and hate him and want him gone. I thought he would be born looking exactly like his father. I thought he would remind me of everything and tear me in two. Then he stopped growing and I started feeling guilty, because I knew I wasn't looking after myself. I was barely eating, sleeping fairly badly and just not bothering much with my health. I was plagued by UTIs and dental infections, which I couldn't much be arsed to sort out. I went for a scan at 38 weeks and I saw my baby's face and he looked like his brother and then EGAD did I feel guilty. I was still terrified of having him, scared of the reality of having two kids on my own, but I started to want him. He wasn't born until 42 weeks, giving me a whole month from that scan to get used to the idea of having him. When he was born, it became apparent that he was a miracle, his cord should have killed him weeks before. He was meant to be.

So there's a wholly too candid glimpse of the reality of ante and postnatal depression. I didn't suffer postnatal depression after Jack was born, possibly because I had far more support (chiefly from my mum who stayed with me, or I with her until he was 2 weeks old), possibly because I had such a massive jolt when he was born and healthy, possibly because I immediately moved house. I had a few bad days, but I've not suffered depression in the (almost) 14 months since he was born. Huzzah!

But this is a disease which is difficult for family to understand - "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LOVE THIS BABY? HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS BABY? YOU WANTED THIS BABY? LOOK AT HIS FACE!" - and even worse to live with. You know, as a mother, that you are not supposed to feel this way, you are supposed to love this child unconditionally, yet with all the physical, emotional and mental changes of having a child (postnatal depression being most common with the first healthy baby), how are you supposed to adjust without support? Women should be taught antenatally that there is no shame in having postnatal depression. I know so many mothers who struggled through (myself included, obviously) because the SHAME of admitting it to a professional was too great to bear. You have a fear that your child will be taken away from you, partly because you feel they should be anyway, partly because of the great crossover in people's minds between postnatal depression and puerperal psychosis (when the hormonal shift is so great that the mother becomes a danger to herself and the child). It is isolating. It is scary. It is treatable, it is common and it shouldn't be the taboo that it remains.

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