A quick little look at the background...

So here we go. Its overwhelming and kind of I'm possible to try and put into words the last 3 nearly 4 years.

As a pregnant mummy, I was besotted with Sam ( my son). Every kick, every ultrasound, heartbeat I got to hear, it was more than I ever expected it would be. Amazing. I'd look in the baby book everyday, see how big he was in my tummy, what he was developing, I was already so incredibly proud of my baby and he wasnt even born yet. But the pain that was about to unfold was nothing I was prepared for.

Looking back I should have seen it coming. I have had cronic anxiety my entire life. I spent a lot of my childhood and majority of high school life riddled with panic and fear. Not average fear... daily, gripping, life threatning panic that my parents would die, or my husband would be in a car accident, I'd start to panic before he was even late home. I would visualise their funerals everyday and cry at the thought, feel every feeling as if it were happening. I grew up thinking that this type of obsessive fear was normal, it probably appeared normal from the outside, although my parents worried when I wasnt sleeping and the fear became obsessive. I remember having such thoughts as a 3 year old, so its been a part of my world since I can remember, I have carried what I thought were "demons" my whole life. I spiritualised it a lot growing up, not realising how physical, and genetic this anxiety was. It went untreated for 25 years, and I suffered quietly without help.( my family was amazing at loving and being there for me as much as they could) I dont ever want this to happen to anyone I know, this is why I'm sharing it all. No real holding back at all.

So early feb 2007, I began going into labour at night. A lot of my anxiety disorder as a child, right up to me as a wife, was all about control. If I maintained control it would be ok. If I could keep everyone I loved safe, I would never lose them. Irrational, yet made perfect sense to me.
Childbirth however, is completely the opposite. There is never any knowing what is next. So I got half way through the process drug free, I didnt want pethadine because  I didnt want to feel out of control so I had an epidural.  ( I had only ever had panadol before this experience so my body was in for a shock! ) The epidural was actually pretty cool and easy, but as the day progressed Sam was stuck to the right of my uterus and was not engaging. His heart rate began to drop, doctors began to run and panic. There were, I swear, 10 different people talking to me, leaning over me, getting me to sign forms and give  injections.
I will never forget my Mum's face as she watched it all play out. She had always been able to save me, from anything, Mum was there, and she could fix it. Not this time.
They wheeled me into surgery and the procedure began.

A few sirens went off right about now, symptoms that were missed that would have made a difference if picked up. I began to feel out of body, the anxiety left me. Mum said she had never seen me so calm, and it was almost eiree, and not right. She said she wanted her daughter there, screaming, panicing. But instead, I felt myself leave. Literally. My life changed then and there, and it has never ever been the same.
That night I couldn't stay awake, I was holding and feeding sam, but was under morphine and was asleep. I would wake up for seconds to my parents walking in to meet Sam, but I was asleep, and it was out of my control. I was missing out, on the most important day of my life to date. My son meeting my parents , and it was torture. Midnight that night I woke up from the drugs, totally and utterly scared and in shock. As the days went on I began not sleeping well, having panic all night and pushing the button for doctors to come in. My legs began to shake uncontrollably, my body convulsing, vomiting, overheating. No doctors said anything about post natal anxiety. They just put more blankets on my legs to stop the shaking, and sent me home 5 days after surgery.

Getting home was the worst, because nothing looked right. Nothing felt right. It felt foreign, in my own home. Like I was in my own movie and everything was happening without me. As hours passed, anxiety began to overtake me. For no real reason, it was that feeling of panic when you hear bad news, but it was happening just because. And it was happening constantly. Like a never ending panic attack. I ended up in the emergency room 3 nights in a row because there was no relief, I felt like I was going to die. I was hooked up to heart machines to find the cause of the rapid heart rate. I couldn't  sit, stand, lay, talk, eat. I didnt eat for a weeks ww.Worst of all, I couldnt sleep, for weeks. Even sleeping tablets barely scraped the surface. In all of this, is my son. My son who I waited 9 months to hold, my son who only I carried, only I felt kick. He had been taken from me in the form of anxiety. I couldnt look after myself let alone him. My mum was amazing. She looked after him for the first 3 months. As medication kicked in the anxiety wasn't there every second anymore, but it was there too much and it crippled me. It took away my normality. It paralised me. As a wife, a friend but mostly as a mother.
After 3 months we went home from my parents. What began to override the anxiety was a sense of unreality, like I was in a bubble. This feeling started in hospital but the anxiety was so bad then that I barely noticed the detatchment. It was numbing, to the core. I remember going for a walk in the rain and I couldnt even feel the cold, or the rain. At the time I would refer to it as 'my movie'. I felt like I was in a constant state of unreality. I was told by my doctor it would wear off after 2 years, the average time it takes for post natal illness to end.

So as you can imagine, I held out for those 2 years to end so I could feel normal again, or so I could at least feel. But 2 years rolled up and I still felt as numb as ever. I put it down to the mediciation. My doctor kept telling me I was overreacting and that I should accept such symptoms. I told her I cant feel love for my son and I have no memory of his life, she said it was 'normal'. Let me tell you Mummys suffering the same, it is not normal and you are not alone. I spent a lot of time on the internet looking up 'mothers who dont feel', or 'mums wuth anxiety/numbness', but nothing ever came up. As the 2 years turned into 3 years, I began to accept that I wasnt normal, something was wrong with me, and it had never been heard of. I felt hopeless.

Insert my christian pysciatrist, Marcus. Absolute answer to prayer, literally. The night before I got the call from him, we prayed for an appointment and I got a call the next morning with a cancellation for that week.
Marcus validated me immediately and listened to my symptoms. He is still fighting for me.

Its hard to explain where I am still at. Nearly 4 years on I still feel like I'm waiting to wake up from a dream. I still feel numb, not here, not real. It doesnt come in waves, it is a state of mind and I have had it every second of everyday since that day in hospital when Sam was born. I have never looked at him, feeling the way I use to. I have no memory, well limited. I think that is because I have very limited emotion and numbness so to try to rememeber even the day before, there is no emotion joined to the memory, so I cant relate to it.It doesnt feel like my memory. Its hard to explain, but that is one of the hardest things about this all. I cant join things together in a timeline. I cant remember sam as a 1 or 2 year old, and soon I'll forget him as a 3 year old. If i don't see people for a while I forget they exist, the complete opposite to how I use to be. Its isolating, scary, repetative, confusing. It feels like the same day is playing over and over and over.

However, it has helped me learn the importance of each day. Although I cant look at sam and 'feel' love, I know I still love him, and I chose to regardless of how it feels. It affects my relationship with God a lot because of the lack of emotion and consistancy of my brain function, it changes all the time.
FINALLY I have a name for this weird feeling. Depersonalisation. It is a malfunction in the brain that changes perception of life and reality. When marcus finally gave me a name for it, I realised I wasnt alone, there was actually thousands of people going thru the same thing for different reasons. The only problem being there is no cure. There is treatment that can help bring things to the surface but no pill that you take and feel back to your old self. To face each day as groundhog day and not know if I will recover or thats just life now is hard, it plagues my mind all the time but I choose to hold onto the promise of the cross, that Jesus is carrying me and knows the pain of my heart and feels it with me.

Sooooooo, thats where I will be blogging from, from now on. My journey with Marcus, how I feel each day, how I get thru this, what works. And I will, God willing, look back on this blog and see the very hand of God at work.

This is the end of the background, and the start of the next chapter.

xxoo