I have debated for a few
weeks now as to whether I would share this with you all. After I read something
very similar that one of my very best friends in the whole world posted, I
decided I was ready. Well sort of. (no spelling or grammar police please)! :)
My hope in sharing this with
you is that you don’t feel sorry for me, that you don’t look at me like a crazy
person, I want you to know that if you feel the same way- you are not alone. I
want you to know that a lot of people that you may think are happy all the time
may just be putting on a brave face to make it through the day. So here goes…
6 (well almost 7) years ago
when I had my daughter I suffered from post partum depression in silence. I
never told anyone about it, not my family, not even my doctor. I thought I could
just “get over it”, I thought that people would think I was just being
emotional. I never “got over it”.
Flash forward to October 17,
2013, aka the start of the 16 days that my world came crashing down.
My son was born 3 and a half
weeks early, and wasn’t as ready as the doctors and nurses though he would be
based on his size and his “breathing” activity during the ultrasound the day
before. As most if not all of you know, we had a rough 2 weeks after he was
born; ventilator, multiple chest tubes, followed by feeding tubes, followed by
weight loss etc. Those 2 weeks were the most devastating and scary time of my
life. I didn’t sleep, I was forced to eat, I cried so much I couldn’t open my
eyes, I couldn’t walk into his empty bedroom and had to keep the door shut. (I
did sit outside the door when nobody was home and cried into his blanket and
stuffed bear). I felt like a zombie. I shut down. I didn’t want to shower, I
didn’t want to play with my daughter, I didn’t want to see my friends let alone
give updates on the baby every 5 minutes on the phone. On November 2, 1013 my
son came home. I thought this would change everything. I thought my world would
regain some of the normal it once was. I knew I had post partum depression
again, but this time I thought there was a pretty good reason, and again kept my
mouth shut and never said a word to my family or my doctor.
Now let’s jump to this past
summer. And this is where it gets hard for me to even type.
I think it was around the end
of May or beginning of June that I finally broke. I don’t remember a whole lot
from those summer months. I remember crying every single day. I remember crying
myself to sleep every single night. I cried in the shower, I cried to my
parents, I cried to my husband, I cried to my kids. I stopped going out with my
family. I stopped playing outside with my kids. I would lay on the couch and
sleep every afternoon. When I did work, I just went through the motions of
putting on a happy face and walking out the door. I stopped cooking dinner, I
didn’t even want to get up to feed my children.
Then there was the anxiety. I
began to stay awake all night and watch the baby sleep. In my mind, if I slept
he would stop breathing. If I wasn’t there to watch him, he would not make it
through the night. Every night I relived that NICU stay, I would close my eyes
and it was like we were still there. I started having nightmares when I did try
to sleep. One week I watched the baby and my daughter sleep. I started to not
want the baby out of my sight. The thought of him with my parents or my
husbands’ parents terrified me. What if they don’t see him and he is choking?
What if he swallows a toy? What if they drop him? What if he gets a fever and
they don’t have medicine for him? These are the thoughts that would go through
my head every time he was away from me.
August 2014- or as I like to
call it the second worse time of my life (1st still being the nicu
stay for the baby).
This is the part that nobody
other than my family knows. I got depressed, not like I talked about above, I
mean REALLY depressed. I wished I was dead. I thought my husband hated me. I
wished I never had kids. I would pray every night that God would help me to
feel better, but everyday I felt worse. I started thinking that my family would
be better off if I was dead. Why would they want this sad, pathetic excuse for
a person around anyway? Why won’t they help me? Why won’t anyone listen to me?
I sob every night in bed, why won’t my husband come and comfort me? Why do
people say that I just want attention? Why doesn’t anyone care about me
anymore? How did I let this happen to me? 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2
months this is how I felt. I thought about self harm, I thought about leaving
my husband, I thought about driving my car off a cliff. Then one day, I talked
to my Mom.
She said she could see that I
was not ok. She could see that for the past year I have been off and totally
not myself at all. She told me I needed help and that I needed to call the
doctor NOW.
So I did. I called my doctor
and made an appointment. I wanted to get better, I missed being happy. I needed
to talk to someone who didn’t know the whole story and wouldn’t judge me. Do
you know how hard it is to admit something like all of this to your parents and
you husband? How would it feel if they didn’t think you were sick? Well that’s
what happened next. My husband, whom I love more than life, thought I wasn’t
depressed. He thought I was hormonal. He thought I didn’t need medicine and I
didn’t need to see a therapist. I begged him to open his eyes and see that this
was not a joke, I begged my Mom to talk to him. She did. To this day, I have NO
idea what was discussed. I know they were talking in my parents backyard for a
long time. And I know that when they were done, Dave got it. He has seen me
like this for so long that this was my “normal” to him. That’s crazy. Growing
up and even when Dave and I met, I was happy, so happy that it was ridiculous.
The way I was for the last 7 years and especially this past year is not me,
this is not how I want my husband to think I am, this is not how I want my kids
to think of me.
I went to the doctor. Cried
and cried and cried some more. That was about 2 months ago. He put me on
medicine (which at first I was embarrassed about), and gave me the official diagnosis
of- Major Depressive Disorder w/ Anxiety and Mild Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (related to my son’s start at life and how I handled everything for
the first 9 months of his life).
If you are still reading,
thank you. If you feel depressed, talk to someone. Please don’t ever let
yourself get to the point I was at. I scared myself, and I’m sure scared the
living daylights out of my family.
I’m not perfect, but at least
I’m getting my happy self back!
