Trigger Warning: This is part 1 of a 2 part story of my misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis after giving birth in 2009. This post contains some references and details about Postpartum OCD and Intrusive Thoughts. If you are feeling particularly vulnerable and prone to triggers, you may want to avoid this post until a later time.
In July of 2009, 3 months after having my first baby, I finally admitted that all was not well in my world. For 3 months, I had been falling deeper and deeper into a spiral of awful. Sometimes I felt indescribably angry. Sometimes I felt a deep sense of sadness and despair and would just cry and cry and cry, or maybe I’d be about to get out of the car in the parking lot at the store and suddenly burst into tears and not even know why. Sometimes I felt completely numb; I would just sit in my rocking chair holding my beautiful little girl, staring off into space, not really thinking or feeling anything at all other than blankness and emptiness. The worst of all was pictures and thoughts that flashed unbidden into my mind. Thoughts and pictures of dropping or throwing my daughter down the stairs. It terrified me and I would actually cancel appointments if I was upstairs because I didn’t want to carry my child on or near the stairs and those pictures and thoughts become reality. As soon as they entered my mind I would chase them away and hug my baby a little closer and pray “God, what’s happening? Please forgive me and make this go away”. I had no idea what was wrong with me.
At my 6 week Postpartum check up at the Wilford Hall Medical Center OB/GYN clinic, I filled out the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale questionnaire that I was handed. My answers clearly indicated that I needed further screening but the Nurse Practitioner who saw me just put it to the side without saying anything and never really asked how I was feeling, so I figured that what I was experiencing must be normal (news flash: it wasn’t). Things kept getting worse until eventually, one night in July, I found myself standing at the top of the stairs while everyone else was asleep thinking that everyone else would be so much better off without me if I threw myself down the stairs. I walked away and started to go to bed and then thought that it would be easy to take a massive amount of the painkillers my husband had left over from ankle surgery and just go to sleep and not wake up. I called the chaplain and he met me at the Emergency Room.
I was diagnosed with Postpartum Depression and transferred to a psychiatric facility in San Antonio, since WHMC (the military hospital on Lackland Air Force Base) only admitted service members for inpatient treatment of mental health issues, dependents automatically got referred out. I was breastfeeding my baby and didn’t want to have to stop, so we tried going the medication-free route first with talk therapy, both individual and group. We quickly realized that it wasn’t making enough of a difference, so on to medication it was.
During this time, one of the biggest questions asked of me was “Do you have thoughts of harming or killing yourself or others?”. I answered yes. Partly because I had found myself on the brink of attempting to commit suicide, but also partly because of the thoughts I had been experiencing. I later found out that the thoughts and images that shoved their way uninvited into my mind were Intrusive Thoughts, one of the classic and tell-tale symptoms of Postpartum Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I didn’t know, at the time, that there was a difference between suicidal/homicidal ideations and intrusive thoughts, or that there was a whole spectrum of Postpartum Mod and Anxiety Disorders, I thought it was just all part of Postpartum Depression. Unfortunately, it seems that none of the staff caring for me at either of the hospitals knew this either, and I was diagnosed as simply Postpartum Depression. This is one of the things that I eventually hope to see changed: to see better education for medical professionals making them aware of the differences between types of symptoms and the various PPMD.
It only took a few days after starting medication (Lexapro) before I started to feel better. Before starting medication, my mom and my husband had come to visit me at the hospital and when my daughter started to cry, it was a noticeable trigger. My mom and husband had to keep the baby up front and switch off who had her and who was visiting with me. After starting meds, I was able to cope better when she started to fuss, I started to open up a little in therapy instead of sitting huddled up in the corner unable to speak without crying. After a little over a week in the hospital, I was sent home with prescriptions for Lexapro to manage my symptoms on a daily basis, Ativan for sudden anxiety attacks, and Ambien to help me sleep at night. I was also given an appointment to see a psychiatrist outside of the hospital.
When I went to my first appointment it was a total disaster. I ended up having to reschedule after I had been there for a couple of hours and still not been seen, because I had to get home since my babysitter had to leave. They weren’t able to reschedule me for another month or so out. I ended up back in the hospital a month after being discharged due to a recurrence of my symptoms (again, the intrusive thoughts that I didn’t know much about and didn’t know how to manage), and had my medication dosage adjusted. Thankfully, I only had to stay for about a week again and was able to go back home.
To be continued tomorrow…
