My Current Wade Through PPD

Carissa - posted on 01/04/2009 ( 3 moms have responded )

I have a 12 day old daughter. I have not been diagnosed with PPD yet, but I am nearly 100% certain I have it and that I will want to be medicated for it. Here's my story of the last 12 days - sorry that it's kinda jagged and here and there.

The hospital I delivered in (BGH - Burnaby General) was offering same day discharge options to the moms. At first, this sounded like a good idea to DH and I, but there were logistical issues with very heavy snowfall and I didn't feel confident in taking care of the baby yet. I stayed my second night, but still got no help learning to breastfeed. I asked my nurses repeatedly about her latch and her being sleepy and I'd get one of two responses: a. a nurse would come over take my breast, if I was already trying to feed, and shove it in the baby's mouth but not tell me what she was doing'; or b. tell me to "keep trying"- keep trying was no use to me as no one had ever shown me how to feed correctly. So anyhow we got discharged the second day postpartum.

I took my sleepy baby home and figured she'd wake and tell me when she wanted to be fed. Third day postpartum and she wasn't waking much at all, except to scream when we changed her diaper and at night when she seemed to fuss nonstop. I was starting to get worried about her not eating, so I kept trying to put her to the breast, but she just refused to latch. I felt horrible that she wasn't eating, we only had 20 dipes in her size (she was born having outgrown NB size & was wearing a size 1 - and the 60 cloth dipes from the delivery service were too tiny too) and with the weather the way it was outside, I couldn't get more and DH had to go to work and had no time or place to get dipes. The public health nurse called us up and asked how Aiyana was feeding. I read off the statistics from my chart and she was deeply concerned that about Aiyana and especially the fact she had a ten-hour stretch without food (I had attempted to wake her feed, with no luck). She told us we had to take the baby back to the hospital. I asked if we could go to the hospital closer to us (RCH - Royal Columbian Hosp) - the PHN called ahead to the triage nurse and told her of our expected arrival. Meanwhile another friend who is both a mother and a doula phoned right after I was off the phone with the PHN. I was a mess at that point, and my friend offered to brave the elements to get us to the hospital.

We got to the hospital (RCH) at about 3:30/4pm on Boxing Day. We went through Paediatric ER and got checked out. Several nurses looked at Ai's latch and offered their tips. Eventually, the paediatrician saw us and admitted us to the Paediatrics ward. (Granted, there was a measure of comfort there knowing I could weigh her and keep track of her input/output and an extra set of knowledgeable/experienced hands.)

Both DH and I are stressed like crazy with this emotional rollercoaster of "Hey look! She woke herself up to eat. Yay!" then back to "Please wake up and eat baby." Other than this, my baby is a very healthy 8lb 14oz infant.

(End of Week 1)

Day 11
Ugh emotional vent... my body just dumped a boatload of hormonal blues on me 15 minutes ago. I'm rather dreading waking Aiyana up for her feed. (I have to wake her up every four hours or she doesn't wake herself up to eat.) Last night, she spent from midnight to four am awake with gas pains and then I couldn't put her down to sleep in her crib. I seriously hope there comes a time when I don't have to wake her every four hours to eat. Or that I don't have to wake her to eat and she wakes herself when she's hungry. Just no more periods of "I don't need to eat for 10 hours" which sent us back to the hospital in the first place.

Around 4 am, DH decided he needed to get some sleep so he could actually work in the morning,he went to sleep on the couch. At that point, I decided to take her to bed with me. I cleared DHs side of the bed of pillows and blankets and let her have his side. From there she passed out for four hours until her next feed. I had got so frustrated in the midnight-to-4-am stretch, that I was crying while feeding her. I can't take too many more of nights like those.

I sorta lost my train of thought as I was called to feed my child while I was typing the first two paragraphs, and the hormonal surge of prolactin from breastfeeding her made me feel a little better for now. Ugh... she finished feeding and now she's hyper-alert instead of drowsy. Good thing I was getting my naps in earlier in the day when she was sleeping.

Day 12
Lately, I've been jolting myself out of sleep, thinking that I let Aiyana fall asleep in the bed between DH and I and that she was getting smothered. In reality, I had put her back to sleep in the crib and recorded her feeding time in the log and I had actually been asleep for about an hour or more. Aiyana was usually fast asleep herself and my body was just playing mean tricks on me.

Today the stress has been getting to me so that I had one of those giant floaters appear in my vision obscuring the left side of my field of vision and it looked like a snake with a blue-green diamondback pattern on it. It just so happened to be circling the area over my daughter's head.

I'm almost at the stage where I think I'm going to start turning from talking to other people about this to internalizing all my thoughts and emotions. I'm not certain how much I can take of people telling me that what I'm going through is normal. If this much stress, anxiety, and depression is normal I think people will end up visiting me in a psychiatric ward. Along with a history of depression and anxiety, I also have two forms of OCD - chronic hair pulling and skin picking - normally I keep my hair buzzed really short to help with the hair pulling, but I haven't lately and I've been letting myself pull as a means of coping with all the stress. I can already see a few months worth of damage there ... but I don't care right now.

I'm also paranoid that each sound that comes out of my daughter is going to be inconsolable crying, which I find difficult to deal with.