"Can you tell me if THIS is normal?"

Hi my name is Joanne. I live in Poynton and I am a mum to two cheeky rascals, Betsy and Jude.  Sadly, like so many others, I suffered with ante-natal anxiety and postnatal anxiety and depression when I had my second child, Jude.  Poynton PANDAS have really made an unbelievable difference to my life and that of my family.  If it wasn’t for speaking to Rhiannon who runs the group I certainly wouldn’t have sought help when I did.  PANDAS also placed me with a counsellor called Julia Larmer who was amazing and helped me make sense of what was happening to me and start on the road to becoming ‘me’ again.

Betsy was born in September 2011.  She was, thankfully, conceived soon after we started trying.  I can’t say I enjoyed pregnancy; it wasn’t really what I expected.   I felt like I was hungover for most of the first 16 weeks (dizzy, sick and tired) and during the pregnancy I had pretty much every minor symptom you can imagine!  Betsy’s birth was difficult, I was contracting regularly and strongly from the word go but I didn’t dilate past 6cms.  Eventually she was born by emergency c-section.  When I held her though I was very lucky, I felt immense love and a feeling that I would describe as euphoria.  I found being a mum very rewarding and generally loved it.  Betsy wasn’t the easiest of babies though and as time went on the gloss wore off a little and I began to wonder if I could manage with 2 children, as we had planned.  We decided that perhaps we would start trying after Betsy was 2. 

However fate had other plans and I unexpectedly got pregnant again when Betsy was 9 months old.  I was terrified by the prospect of having another baby; I wondered how on earth I was going to cope.  Those close to me were encouraging but I didn’t hear them.  I felt my life was out of control, I had just returned to work in a stressful job in Law and we were in the process of moving house.  I started to feel sudden waves of panic without warning, almost like somebody had startled me and made me jump.  I felt like I was suffocating and that there were no answers to the issues I felt I was facing.  I kept carrying on spinning the plates until one weekend I got ill with a flu like illness and fainted twice.  I went to see my GP and I ended up getting very upset and telling him about my anxiety.  He was very understanding and signed me off work with the intention of me getting some space and hopefully getting to the best place possible in readiness for the birth.  This was great advice as I gradually did feel better until the point that I just wanted my baby to be born so I could hold him and have that ‘moment’ that I had with Betsy.

Jude was born in March 2013 by elective c-section.  As soon as I was able, I held him and tried to feed him, as I had with Betsy.  He wouldn’t feed but I wasn’t concerned; I just thought he wasn’t ready yet.  However the midwife queried whether he was breathing properly and ran some tests.  I remember her ringing someone and then an incubator type cot arrived.  She said Jude had to be seen by a doctor and off he went.  I did not want to be separated from him and I felt very traumatised that we couldn’t be together.  I was unable to move though following a spinal block anaesthetic and I was taken on to a ward with mums and their new babies.  It transpired that Jude had a lung infection that they thought he had contracted in the womb.  Jude was ventilated and cared for in the intensive care unit of the neonatal unit.   I didn’t hold him again until 6 days after his birth.  He spent 12 days in the neonatal unit in total and I stayed with him either as an in-patient myself or in a bed on the neo natal unit.  It was awful being apart from Betsy but at the time she was quite a Daddy’s girl so she seemed to cope well.

When we came home, I initially felt happy to be home and very grateful that Jude was now well.  I felt driven and motivated to begin life as a family of four and I thought that if I could cope with what had happened initially then I could cope with anything.  I found that my husband and family didn’t really want to talk about what had happened, it seemed a bit of a taboo subject and people quickly shut down conversations before they really began. 

I can’t be precise about when I started to experience feelings of anxiety and post-natal depression, I think it was somewhere around the 6-9 month mark.  My symptoms appeared very gradually, with a drip, drip, drip effect. The symptoms I experienced were not what you might necessarily expect.  I think this was because I had a toddler too so I just had to keep going and keep going.   I became very irritable, negative, frustrated and angry. My internal voice was so horrible and I used to tell myself I was a bad person and a bad mother. I felt overwhelmed by things and like I just couldn’t cope with anything more. If I was alone with the two children all day I would worry how I would manage; I felt that something would happen that I couldn’t cope with.  I thought I shouldn’t have had children, I wasn’t deserving of them or good enough for them.   I felt it would be best if I left but thankfully I didn’t have thoughts of suicide.   However I could have periods of feeling fine and when I was in company I was usually quite jovial, I think it took my mind off things.

When almost everybody close to me irritated me and most days were bad, it occurred to me that I might have a problem.  Prior to that, I thought it was usually the fault of somebody else that I felt the way I did.  Looking back I felt scared and bewildered.  I didn’t know what was happening to me.  I remember thinking that it couldn’t be post natal depression as that was something that happened to people soon after birth.   I made contact with Rhiannon of PANDAS and we met for a coffee.  I thought I was wasting her time and that she would just reassure me I was a stressed mum of two.  I remember telling her my feelings and symptoms and needing constant reassurance. "Can you tell me if THIS is normal" I asked her repeatedly. It became apparent though as we were talking that my feelings were familiar to Rhiannon as somebody who had experienced post natal depression and had also helped people in similar positions. I decided to see my GP who luckily was very understanding.  Rhiannon also gave me Julia’s details and I started having counselling.  It made a huge difference almost immediately as Julia gave me strategies to help with feelings of anger and being overwhelmed.  Being able to discuss what happened to Jude also helped me gain the acknowledgement that I needed about how upsetting that situation was.

However I still had symptoms of tearfulness and feeling unable to cope with anything further.  My GP advised I start anti-depressants.  I was very reluctant initially but my GP explained anti-depressants as having a rebalancing effect on the brain and I decided to give them a go.  I felt that I really wanted to deal with my symptoms in order to make as full a recovery as possible.  Quite soon after, I started to feel better.  My symptoms started to fade and the old me began to emerge.   I remember being surprised when I did something that I would associate with my old self.

I think I am well now; I even feel like some good has come from the whole experience.   I am trying new things such as different forms of exercise, meditation and art and I feel much more content than I did even before I became ill.   I also volunteer for PANDAS in Poynton as I feel passionate about helping families who suffer with post natal illness and to try and raise the profile of post-natal depression which occurs later down the line.  Please, please do get in touch if you are struggling.  We really want to help. 

Joanne x

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