Category Archives: infant

The Great Return

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Tomorrow we go to Atlanta with Charlotte for follow up with the Cleft Palate Clinic.

I would be lying if I said I was not nervous.

This appointment was supposed to have taken place when she was nine months old.

She’ll be three years old next month.

Charlotte in the NICU

Charlotte in the NICU

It took me this long to get to the point where I could even think about facing the hospital where she spent her first 21 days of life without having an anxiety attack.

This is the same hospital in which I tucked myself into a corner of the sleep room in the NICU area, blasted Linkin Park over the MP3 player and checked out. No desire to come back. Just wanted to stay curled up under the blanket and pretend none of this was happening. Nope. Not to me. I didn’t have a baby in the NICU. She wasn’t downstairs having major jaw surgery at just nine days old. We weren’t doing this. I was stuck in the middle of a really bad dream and I’d wake up at home with a normal baby.

I can still see that hallway, that sleep room, my nostrils fill with the scent of the surgical soap that killed my hands as I washed them every time we went into the NICU, every time i pumped, every time I went to the restroom there.

I remember the pumping rooms in which I spent most of my time staring at the clock wishing I could nurse my daughter instead of shoving my breasts into hard cold flanges, flicking a switch on a massive antique pump, adjusting the suction to just below Holy Crap that Friggin Hurts.

But tomorrow is the day we finally go back.

Chris is going with me as a safety. I don’t know how I will handle this. I’m hoping for the best. Praying for the best. I keep thinking about how far we’ve come since then and how lucky we are that we don’t have a lot of the problems a lot of parents have with their Pierre Robin kids. She’s talking, using sentences nonetheless. She’s breathing on her own. She eats – oh lord, she eats – she’d eat herself sick (and has) if we let her. No oral aversions here.

But she does have a fistula – an opening in her palate repair. It’s at the back of the throat. And her enunciation is off – it’s nasal. She can’t say “s” without blowing air through her nose. Chris and I understand maybe 75 – 80% of what she says and it breaks our hearts that we can’t even understand our own child all the time. It’s led to frustration on both sides and is now turning into a discipline issue.

I’m afraid we’ll be told she needs surgery. I’m afraid of what that will mean for us and for her. I’ve talked with her about the possibility of surgery. She knows that they would give her some medicine to help her go to sleep and fix her mouth while she was asleep. That she might be owwwy when she wakes up and that they’d have medicine ready to help with the owwwy.

She seems cool with it.

I’m not.

I have forgotten how to let her go with the doctors – I got so good at it when she was in the NICU but she’s been all ours for almost three years now. I don’t want to hand her over to be taken to surgery. I want to go with her! That’s my baby you’re taking!

But now I’m thinking too much and need to stop and let God do all this worrying for me.

Please pray for us as we face tomorrow.

Pray for a peaceful heart and soul for me.

Pray for a pain-free and comfortable day for Chris as he goes with us.

Pray for a positive evaluation.

Pray that I am able to handle any news of surgery with strength and grace and truly give it to God.

Hello Kitty joins L&D in Taiwan Hospital

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Thanks to Heidi Koss-Nobel for bringing this one to my attention.

photo courtesy Jenn J at flickr

photo courtesy Jenn J at flickr

I needed the ensuing smiles and feelings of “ummm… say what?” in reaction to a fluffy piece of news related to mother’s moods after the week we’ve had in research around here.

Apparently Hello Kitty has been recruited to help soothe mothers at a maternity ward in Taiwan. Not sure if this is based on legitimate research or is just an anecdoctal piece but still, Hello Kitty? Really?

Prenatal Depression restricts fetal growth

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In a new study published today at ScienceDirect, researchers concluded that Prenatal Depression restricts fetal growth. They also state that up to 18% of all pregnant women experience depression but when focusing specifically on lower socio-economic status and minority moms, the risk more than doubles to 40%. Babies born to depressed moms are more likely to have a smaller head circumference, low birthweight, arrive prematurely, and experience a certain level of growth retardation within their first year of life.

Many mothers, doctors, and family members will buy into the myth that all pregnant mothers are happy. Obviously the numbers beg to differ as do the mothers who experience depression during pregnancy. Moreso than mothers with Postnatal Mood Disorders, pregnant mothers struggling with depression or other mental illness face quite the quandary in seeking treatment. Many find themselves dismissed by their doctors or faced with taking anti-depressants which will affect their fetus as all medications do cross the placenta.

As with any decision, we must always remember to make an educated decision with the support of your physician and other professional advice. There are also risks v. benefits to consider. Yes, there are risks associated with taking medicine during pregnancy but most studies out there do not put this risk at a much higher rate than mothers who do not take anti-depressants.

There are resources for mothers and professionals alike to refer to when faced with this situation:

Mother Risk: A project of the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, they are staffed and well informed regarding medications, herbs, etc, in pregnancy and the postpartum breastfeeding period.

University of Illinois @ Chicago Women’s Mental Health Program is designed to meet the unique needs of women with psychiatric disorders and life problems including during pregnancy and postpartum.

The Emory Women’s Mental Health Program, established in 1991, primarily focuses on the evaluation and treatment of emotional disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The clinical program is complemented by both clinical and laboratory research into the causes of these conditions and their treatment.

I also want to take this opportunity to promote an upcoming teleclass over at Pampered Pregger and Beyond with Tiffani Lawton and Shoshana Bennett. The class starts tomorrow at 11am EST and will be taking an in depth look at her new book, Pregnant on Prozac. I would highly recommend participating if this topic is near and dear to your heart. Registration at the site is not required but the call is a long distance one. Callers will be muted during discussion and unmuted for Q&A so if you have little ones running around, don’t worry – they won’t be interrupting the flow. For more information, click here.

The Misnomer of Postpartum Depression

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Not terribly long ago, Katherine Stone wrote a beautiful diatribe directed at the media regarding the misuse of the term Postpartum Depression.

Just like Katherine, I too have Google Alerts set to scour the web for anything Postpartum or Perinatal related and blessedly I get about 10-15 emails every day. (I LOVE Google!) I must admit that I found myself highly irritated when people misuse the term Postpartum Depression. One particular post used the term Postpartum Depression to describe how the author felt after seeing his car driven into a car wash. Really? REALLY? Then there’s the CNN story Katherine mentions in her post, What do you do about post-election blues? What DO you do when a reputable agency such as CNN misuses the term? Are you glad the term is on their radar at least? Or do you get frustrated about the application and trivial way in which our experience with hell has now been marginalized? Or do you settle on somewhere in between? I had done the latter until yesterday.

What happened to change my mind?

I received an email as a result of my Community Leader position for the Postpartum Depression board over at iVillage. Hidden away in my Spam folder, it went unnoticed for a couple days but finally got read last night.

The email started out innocently enough and asked for casual conversation off-board, something I do quite often for the ladies there because I am all too familar with the stigma and the possibility that there may be some things they don’t want to lay out in public. The sender went on to describe a pretty difficult situation and as I read I kept waiting for the baby to pop into the equation. When I got to the end of the email, there was no baby and now I was expected to share some advice. I re-read the email a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and became confused as to why I had been chosen as a recipient.

I emailed her back with instruction to speak with her mental health caregivers and some general advice. I apologized that I didn’t quite understand why she had emailed me in the first place.

This morning I had a response.

The response made me drop my jaw in awe.

The sender legitimately thought Postpartum Depression was the term for what one feels after experiencing any big event. To steal a line from Hannah Montana, “Mama Say What?”

How could I be upset with her about this? I emailed her back with a brief description of Post-Traumatic vs. Postpartum Depression and promptly came here to blog about the experience.

Let me make this CLEAR.

  • Something traumatic happens to you that DOES NOT INVOLVE BIRTH and you have issues afterwards. This is Post-Traumatic.
  • YOU GIVE BIRTH and feel sad, anxious, panicked, etc, at any time during the first year after giving birth and that is POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION.
  • Your car is driven into a car wash and you feel a tug at your heart. This is just SAD or wistful. It is NOT depressed – not plain depressed, not depressed with a dose of postpartum on top, not depressed with other co-existing conditions. It is just SAD.
  • The campaign is over and you don’t know what to do because you have to unplug from CNN. Time to find a new hobby, not time to claim you have Postpartum Depression.

Media, general public, bloggers, medical professionals, nurses, and whomever else I have missed, please take note of this. Don’t marginalize the hell those of us who have suffered from Postpartum Depression have been through and have miraculously managed to claw our way into the light. My hands are still dirty from that journey and I don’t think they’ll ever get really clean. And no, I’m not ashamed of my “dirt.” I just don’t want anyone else playing with it.

(Addendum here – I’ve started a feature called PPD Misnomer Sightings. The link is over to your right under the Pages section. If you come across any misuse of the term, please email it to me to have it posted there. I’ve already had one sighting today. Infuriating, isn’t it?)