As it's Mental Health Awareness Week I've decided to share a blog from a fellow mum, Catherine. Catherine had spent 20 years as an admin manager, PA and senior secretary for international companies, government organisations and a national charity. After neurosurgery in 2012 and radiotherapy in 2014 Catherine was left with chronic health problems and Addisons disease, which came with various symptoms,
including fatigue. Working 9-5 in a stressful, busy office environment wasn’t great for her health or work/life balance. Catherine’s family was taking a back seat too and life felt like an uphill struggle.
Determined to continue doing what she loved, what she’d spent her whole career doing well, Catherine read and researched how to transition from Personal Assistant to Virtual Assistant, and the rest, as they say, is history. Catherine now runs Delegate VA. Here she is speaking about her journey….
I was a single parent until my daughter was 15 and would describe my life with ‘PND’ as bloody hard work for 14 years.
Hello, my name’s Catherine, I’m 41 and a Mum of one and was diagnosed as having PND in 1998.
I think my post-natal depression started ten years before I fell pregnant! I know, I’m obviously still in the midst of it or don’t quite get what ‘post’ natal means.
Or perhaps the diagnosis after my daughter was born in 1998 was wrong, but I’d just had a baby what else could it be?
I remember writing on a yellow post-it note around a year after my daughter was born ‘I’m the luckiest person alive’ and I left it in my little address book. I’d just driven home with her from a friends and she’d fallen asleep, she was so beautiful – still is – and at that moment I felt so blessed, so lucky and then that was the last time I felt what I now know is ‘right’.
I hadn’t spent hours lying awake self-diagnosing, it was the days before Google, so my diagnosis came from the one person we put a lot of trust in – our GPs. Hell, if they don’t know what’s wrong then we must be dying, so I was glad to have the diagnosis after popping in to tell them I felt a bit weird – you know, suicidal, low, tired, hungry, not hungry, angry, sad, etc, etc.
I omitted to tell the GP I’d always felt a bit like this just that it had been exacerbated post natal. And I guess, because I’d felt this way for so long it had become the norm? I was prescribed diazepam initially, which didn’t do anything. I kept popping back and was told ‘give it a little longer’ and eventually sent to see a councillor who had a terrible habit of looking at the clock behind me every time I started talking. That just made me angrier.
Over the next ten years I was given various anti-depressants to manage my post-natal depression including Venlaflaxine, Sertraline, and eventually Prozac before I’d just about had a bloody nough! Absolutely nothing made me feel any better, every morning I’d wake up and after those initial few seconds of coming round I’d then reflect and think ‘right brain what mood are we in today?’. I couldn’t cope with stress, change or anything slightly off plan, which as we know is not how being a Mum is.
I’d look at families and other Mums and think they must be faking it, I can’t be the only one who’s struggling who nothing works for? I didn’t actually think for a second that my diagnosis might be wrong.
I took myself off the anti-depressants when I was 31 (2008) after an awful experience with Prozac – did you know you’re supposed to be monitored carefully when on this drug? It’s even banned in some countries!
Then in 2011 I started to get some very strange symptoms. Excessive hair loss, every time I had a shower the plug hole was absolutely full. I wondered if this happened every year, but for the life of me couldn’t remember? I’d also started to get terribly irrational, a train journey to Cardiff was horrendous – I had no escape plan should the train fall over or get hit. At the time, I didn’t even think I was being irrational, I just thought everyone else must’ve already considered it and have their plan ready – or they just weren’t aware it could happen. I’d then noticed when watching telly and the ad breaks came on that I couldn’t remember what I was watching – in just a few seconds my short-term memory had failed.
My periods became stupidly heavy – a tampon and night time towel would last minutes and then, my periods stopped altogether.
Memory loss, loss of periods for over 12 months, hair loss, memory loss, brittle nails, fatigue and memory loss.
After a year of pointless full blood counts, a patronising female doctor who said ‘I think you’re a little bit stressed love’ and three doctors desperate to get me back on anti-depressants I asked for a referral to a private consultant. I was referred to a gynaecologist as my GP’s felt that the loss of my period was the main problem. He decided he’d do some sort of test which helps determine whether you’ve gone through the Menopause, but said it wasn’t 100% and that we’d look at other things too. I went away a little scared that I might have hit the menopause but relieved that someone was doing something different to investigate.
That night the gynae phoned me at home at 8pm. He’d been going through my notes and wanted to know if I’d ever had a prolactin test? I said my memory was bad, but that I don’t think I’d ever heard this word before so ‘no’. Okay he said, come in tomorrow and we’ll do one – it’s just a blood test.
This prolactin test came back with a reading of almost 10000 – I have since learnt that a normal prolactin is around 20.
This determined there was a problem with my Pituitary Gland – don’t worry, if you’re like me you may never have heard of that either. The Pituitary Gland, as I now know, is one of the major parts of our body, it’s a little pea sized gland at the base of our brain and is in control of almost all of our bodies hormones – the endocrine system.
The high level of prolactin and an MRI determined that I had a tumour in the Pituitary Gland and this blighter was what was causing all those symptoms.
One significant symptom associated with a Pituitary tumour, in men and women, is lactating. Now I didn’t have this symptom but I also didn’t lactate when I had my daughter! I never told anyone because I put her straight onto a bottle. I didn’t think anything of it.
Let’s fast forward, because this blog is aimed at Mum’s and we don’t have time to be reading life stories, do we…
I had the tumour removed in 2012 and radiotherapy in 2014 after the blighter re-grew and although it was a very stressful time I am so glad it happened, because now I wake up, go to bed and live every day ‘happy’. Who even knew that was possible? I didn’t.
I can now genuinely write that post-it note out again and again every day – ‘I am the luckiest person alive’, not only because I am a Mum, but because I am better.
So, if your PND isn’t getting better or you feel every day is a struggle – it doesn’t mean you have a Pituitary tumour – but it might not be PND. Keep asking, keep badgering, get a second, third, fourth opinion. This is your life, you deserve to enjoy it.
Catherine x
A MASSIVE thank you to Catherine for sharing such a personal and complex journey, and offering such an insight. I for one had NO idea, and it just goes to show how varied and under researched mental health issues are.