Intruders

I drove home and started my SSRI the same day I had been seen by the nurse practitioner. My husband and I had put the baby down to sleep and while we were watching TV on the couch, we were both startled by a knock on the door. It was the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT), asking if I was sane and if I had been hearing anything that seemed outside of reality. The nurse practitioner reported to the team that I was psychotic and may have Postpartum Psychosis. She thought I was planning on killing my baby and made a mandated report to social services.

For weeks we had unwanted visitors including social workers, PERT, therapists, doctors and officers questioning us and asking about our well-being. I felt angry, misunderstood and not validated. It was as if no one was listening, no one was able to hear me. I felt like I was going crazy.

My therapist was contacted by a PERT team member and she asked if I could come in and speak with her. I was hesitant because I had just been interrogated and still angry about the miscommunication. However, I agreed to come. 

When we met, the first thing she did was apologize to me and said she believed I did not have Postpartum depression but something else called Postpartum OCD.

“OCD?" I thought, "like the cleaning disorder?" She continued to explain what Postpartum OCD was. Perinatal OCD is a condition where new moms, pregnant or postpartum, create compulsions around the health and wellness of their newborn.  Often, new moms will have intrusive thoughts, extreme anxiety, and engage in behaviors to reduce their anxiety such as avoidance. A wave of relief and understanding rushed through me. I was so happy to have a name for my condition! 

Therapy

Trigger warning: intrusive thoughts, harm, death

I had a hard time finding a therapist. And I know now how important it is to truly find the perfect therapist, someone you can connect with. I tell friends who seek therapy, it's like Goldilocks, you have to find someone that's not too big or small, but just right! It was a combination of finding someone who would take my specific health insurance, would offer telemed, and would work with my schedule, that of a new mother. 

It was winter and we had celebrated family holidays together in a new city, in our apartment, as a small family of three. My days were filled with reading books, pushing the baby in a stroller on walks, nursing, learning nap schedules, putting baby in her jumper, and going to the grocery store. 

I wanted to find new mom friends, to be able to talk to someone that I could confide in and who would understand me, because I felt so alone. 

My nine month old was now able to sit up on her own and was trying to crawl. I started to worry excessively about her choking, suffocating from a plastic bag, getting sick (vomiting, diarrhea), and her sleeping schedule to be disrupted. My mind would spin with the worrisome thoughts, “was she safe, having good naps, getting enough overall sleep, nursing properly, or learning enough?”

I tried to escape by reading. I received a kindle over the holidays and made use of it right away. I read a psychological thriller that really made me believe I was capable of murder. "Could I ever become a killer because I could relate to the character in the story?" I felt like I was going insane and it seemed like I had hit my breaking point; I was desperate and burned out. 

I found a therapist that I warmed up to. Luckily I was able to do therapy via telemed because everything was extremely hard with a 9 month old. I had a session with the therapist one morning and was retelling her about my recent experience of a scary thought. My thought occurred to me as I was nursing the baby. I would get extremely hot, almost start to sweat, I would shake and then I’d imagine pushing the baby off of me. I’d then grab her and squeeze her neck until her head popped off! I broke down, sharing something so intimate and scary.

As I retold my therapist this thought, she suggested that I contact my doctor and ask about postpartum depression and antidepressants. She wanted me to explain to the scheduler that it was important for me to been seen as soon as possible because I had thoughts of death and suicide. 

I went to my doctor’s office that afternoon but because my doctor was out of town, I was seen by a nurse practitioner. Through tears and shame I retold the nurse about my thought of murder and depression and death. She asked me if I knew these were not normal thoughts and if I knew that murder and death were not appropriate behaviors. I said, “yes of course, I don’t want these thoughts, that’s why I’m here.” She left the room a few times to ask other professionals about postpartum depression and wrote me a script for an antidepressant that was considered safe while breastfeeding.