I got hit with postpartum anxiety. We were on watch for postpartum depression and no one told me PPA even existed.
Racing thoughts, feelings of failure (which is exaggerated by when the baby cries), inability to eat, puking everything up, extreme fatigue and soreness (because your body is tired from the extreme stress), questioning your ability to successfully raise a child, wondering how you can possibly do it all, worried you are missing something, worried you will mess your kid up for life, every mistake is magnified in your brain, etc... etc...
PPA is like hearing 'you can't do this' over and over and you justify it by all the inevitable failures that you make as a new parent.
Basically it was a vicious cycle. I stressed due to the above, which just continually got worse. It got to the point where the stress affected me physically. Since I was tired and sore, I slept more, which made me more stressed because it gave me even less time to take care of the baby and myself. Then, I started losing the ability to eat, which made me more tired and made me feel more like crap. Then, I started puking up everything. Which made me more tired, more sore and i felt even more like crap.
As you can imagine as I got worse, the more I thought that I couldn't do it. Which added to the stress. Plus, there was the worry of not being able to breastfeed because I couldn't keep anything down. And, since everyone was worried about PPD and those symptoms, PPA symptoms were overlooked.
And, of course, since all parents are extremely stressed, you wonder if it is just normal and if it is worth bringing up to your doctor...and what if it is bad enough that they take the baby away?
I'm on medication now and a lot better, but idk. It was just crazy. Stress is nothing new to me and I thought I had great stress management skills, but damn.
And I swear I'm not going to let her know all the pain I have known
04-Jul-2017 08:19:53
- Last edited on
04-Jul-2017 08:24:24
by
Averia Light