I recently added my memoir Adventures With Postpartum Depression to Kindle Unlimited. It is also still available as a paperback or regular Kindle e-book. Since my old PPD website decided to crash and burn, I am going to slowly add content about my experiences with maternal mental health here. To get the ball rolling, I am sharing an excerpt from my memoir.
In this excerpt, I am meeting with my obstetrician for my six-week checkup. I am fully in the darkness of postpartum depression, but I am also in complete denial that I might be suffering from a mental illness. In fact, my primary objective at this appointment was to convince my obstetrician that I felt great! marvelous! absolutely divine!
If you enjoy this excerpt, the Kindle e-book is available for FREE until May 14, 2020. Now that the memoir is part of Kindle Unlimited, I can offer the book for free for five days of every ninety day cycle. I’ll post here and on IG (I’m @Courtney.Novak) whenever the book is free.
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“How are you doing?”
“Wonderful! I’m doing great.” I knew exactly what the obstetrician was doing. She was trying to sniff out a whiff of postpartum depression.
As if on cue, Pippa started to scream. She sounded like a siren portending the world’s end, but the obstetrician seemed unperturbed by the noise. Instead, she looked concerned for me. I willed myself to appear calm and collected.
“But how do you feel?” she pressed.
“I feel great.”
I was at my six-week postpartum appointment and given my history with hypochondria, did not want to say anything that would lead to a misdiagnosis of postpartum depression. Still, my doctor seemed to think I had it.
In hindsight, I realize my appearance might have tipped her off.
I usually got my long brown hair professionally cut and highlighted every two months. During pregnancy, my obstetrician had assured me that I could continue getting my hair highlighted, but I was not taking any chances. What if some chemicals seeped through my scalp, got into my bloodstream, and hurt my baby? If I was not getting my hair highlighted, I might as well skip the haircuts too. I had read about postpartum hair loss and reasoned it was better to have as much hair as possible in case half of it fell out.
By the time my water broke, my hair was straggly and a mix of greys and faded highlights. Three hours of active labor did nothing to improve my look: the ponytail holder fell out, and my hair got tangled into a sweaty, salty mess. During my first postpartum shower, I was too tired and defeated to drag a comb through the knots.
Six weeks later, I still felt too defeated to deal with the hair situation. Eventually, I would buy detangler and conquer the knots, but that was still several weeks away. My obstetrician must have been more than a little alarmed by my hairstyle.
“Are you happy? Getting enough rest?”
(My hair was truly frightening.)
“I am doing wonderfully. I didn’t even have the baby blues. I haven’t cried. I’ve been so happy since Pippa arrived.”
When I said I was happy, I was trying to convince myself as much as the doctor. The part about crying, though, was true. I had not cried since Pippa’s birth aside from the one time I started crying at one in the morning from pure exhaustion. That didn’t count. That was not the baby blues. I assumed that whether or not a new mother had the baby blues was the ultimate barometer of her mental health; that postpartum depression was an extension of the baby blues.
In a few months, I’d know better.
By the time of this six-week appointment, I had postpartum depression. I had not experienced any symptoms that would get me locked up in the mental ward (those would come soon enough), but looking back, I can see the red flags.
There was my new obsession with germs. Previously, my hypochondria had always been limited to symptoms I had, or thought I had, never extending into mysophobia, or fear of germs. Postpartum depression had helped me make the leap from hypochondria to mysophobia.
The first day of Pippa’s life, while my parents and grandma were visiting us in the maternity ward, I scrolled through the online options for face masks. I needed a cache of masks for visitors who might arrive at my house with coughs and sneezes.
“I can’t tell which one is good enough.”
“I’m sure they are all fine.” That was my mom, a woman who was always vigilant about her children’s health. When everyone, including the pediatrician, insisted my sister simply had the flu, my mom was the one who piled everyone into the car to go to the hospital. Three hours later, the nurses were prepping Katherine for an emergency appendectomy. Now that her first grandchild was here, you could be sure my mom was not going to let anything endanger Pippa’s health.
“But even the ones that are supposed to be good enough for surgery are not 100 percent effective.”
“Courtney, if it’s good enough for surgery, it will keep Pippa safe.”
“You don’t know that.” I spent another hour agonizing over the options before settling on the best bad choice. Then I fixated on my next fear: unwanted visitors.
“What if someone wants to visit and they are sick?”
My mom had Pippa stretched across her legs, facedown, and was patting her back. This seemed to help her burp. “Courtney, no one is going to visit when they are sick.”
“But what if someone wants to visit and they are already sick and contagious but they don’t have any symptoms yet? Or they think it’s allergies? A cold can kill a newborn.”
I was imagining droves of Hennings, aunts, uncles and cousins from my dad’s side of the family, descending upon our house unannounced.
“If the Hennings ask, do you want me to tell them you don’t want visitors?”
“Yes. Be nice about it. But if anyone asks, discourage visitors.”
The message must have been effectively delivered, because almost no one visited. Just my parents, Nathan’s parents, my siblings, my grandma, and one cousin. I have a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins in Los Angeles who would have loved to meet Pippa, but they steered clear.
So the mysophobia created another red-flag behavior: isolation.
