Tag: trauma

Labor Pains

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When I found out that I was pregnant, my boss granted me four weeks paid maternity leave. I was also allowed to use short-term disability to take two additional weeks off, giving me six weeks total maternity leave. I was lucky, considering there is no federal law that guarantees paid maternity leave in America.

Elroy arrived 5 weeks ahead of schedule. My body decided it didn’t like being pregnant anymore, so my organs started to shut down in an attempt to evict him. This is also known as HELLP Syndrome. He and I spent eight days in the hospital following his arrival to get his jaundice cleared and get my blood pressure and liver semi-straightened out. We were lucky, considering the high perinatal mortality rate associated with HELLP, which some sources cite can be as high as 70%.

After Elroy was born, I felt…off. Weepy. Panicky. Anxious. I had just been through a traumatic experience where I had to face my own mortality, along with the mortality of my newborn son, so maybe the trauma flipped a switch in my brain. Maybe my familial tendency toward mental illness was finally showing up. Regardless of the cause, it soon became clear that the “baby blues” had evolved into something more serious for me. I was scared to be alone with Elroy. The sound of him crying made me want to hurt myself. Elroy was a sleepy baby. Because he was premature, he had to eat every three hours, and we had to wake him up to eat. Feedings took over an hour because he would doze off as soon as he started to eat, plus he had reflux. Sleep was fractured and came with shame attached – I should be doing laundry / writing thank-you notes / taking a shower instead of taking a nap. Elroy and I were lucky because Gomez stepped up and took care of everything he could.

Then, right around the time my maternity leave was coming to an end, I became suicidal. I would lie in bed at night, unable to sleep because of my anxiety, and mentally inventory my medicine cabinet – What could I take to just go to sleep and never wake up? Was it possible to overdose on leftover prenatal vitamins? The only thing that kept me from attempting suicide was the fear that I wouldn’t be successful. There was no way I could leave Gomez with a disabled wife to care for and preemie to raise on his own. I was lucky because ibuprofen was the strongest medicine we had in the house.

Six weeks after Elroy was born (and when he should have been a little over a week old, had he not been premature), Elroy started day care, and I returned to work. Having babies is expensive. Having babies with an extended hospital stay attached is extra expensive. I couldn’t afford to take any unpaid time off because the hospital and doctors’ bills had already started to roll in. Then, the mom guilt piled on top of the PPD and the insane sleep (or lack of sleep) schedule. I struggled to make headway on the backlog of work that had piled up for my six weeks’ leave while trying to keep up with current tasks. I would lock my office door and pump milk twice a day, sobbing the entire time because my tiny baby whom I hadn’t ever really bonded with was being cared for by people I hardly even knew. I was lucky because I had an office door that locked, so I was able to sob in private.

Elroy was sick a lot that first year. He had RSV, more than one ear infection, and some febrile seizures which led to a two night stay in the hospital, in addition to the routine well checks and immunizations. Gomez and I didn’t have relatives nearby, so he or I had to take off from work every time Elroy was sick or had an appointment. I had several doctor’s appointments, as well – to keep an eye on my liver, to adjust and re-adjust my blood pressure medication, and to monitor my heart. It didn’t take long for me to burn through my company-provided PTO. My body had fallen apart. My brain was falling apart. I was spiraling, but I couldn’t do anything about it because now Gomez and I had a baby and we had to have my salary in order to make it from one month to the next. I was doing too much, and not doing anything well. I needed mental healthcare, but I was afraid to seek treatment because there are times when corporations do gross things like find a reason to fire employees who need to use their health insurance “too much.” I was lucky because I hadn’t already had the “talking-to.”

One positive aspect of working as an accountant was the annual Christmas bonus. Bonuses were robust, equaling more than 10 percent of my annual salary at that time. My salary wasn’t much, but the annual bonuses narrowed the gap between my salary and the salary of other accounts with similar experience who worked for larger companies or in public accounting. Our office closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day each year. On December 23rd, my boss stepped into my office with my Christmas bonus in his hand. He took a seat and explained to me that because I had missed so much work and because my performance had declined, I would only be receiving half of my normal bonus that year. I was clearly drowning, but nobody offered me a life preserver. Nobody even asked me if I was okay. I was drowning, and I felt ashamed – and I was being shamed – because I wasn’t able to just swim my way out of it. I felt like I was lucky, though, considering bonuses aren’t guaranteed. I guess I was lucky because I didn’t get fired, even though I live and work in an at-will employment state.

Elroy was two and a half years old before I stepped into a therapist’s office. I was lucky because I had found another job where I wasn’t afraid to use my health insurance. I was lucky because the suicidal thoughts didn’t dominate my every waking moment anymore. But I’m certain that there is some damage that won’t ever heal because I didn’t get help sooner.

So many people aren’t as lucky as I was; instead, they suffer in silence because they don’t have access to mental healthcare or the means to afford it. Mental health is just as important as physical health. Our society doesn’t bat an eye when an athlete gets a concussion or somebody breaks his or her arm, yet there is a shameful stigma attached to someone whose brain and emotions aren’t working nicely together. I’m lucky, though, because I’m still alive. All my experience took from me was months bonding with my newborn, the only newborn I’ll ever have, and half of a Christmas bonus.

Homesickness

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I’m currently wading through what I’m calling “a dark night of the soul.”

Maybe it’s the time change after we “fell back” earlier this month.Maybe it’s the starkness with which the seasons change up here in the mountains.

Maybe it’s the antiepileptic medication.
Maybe it’s the 55-gallon drum full of trauma that I’m dragging around while I try to dig to the bottom of it all, understand my feelings, and clear it all out.
Most probably, it’s a combination of all the above.
I spent my first year back here convinced that I would feel more at peace once we found a house. Okay, that’s not exactly true. I spent our first three months here thinking we had a house, then I spent the nine months after that trying to find a house. That was the prize that I kept my eye on. Just find a place to live, and everything else would sort itself out. Eventually (almost a year to the day after we moved), we closed on the house we’re living in now.
Then I was diagnosed with epilepsy, which means I can’t drive for at least a while.
Then Gomez and Elroy met a deer in the middle of the highway and almost rurnt my little car.And the hits just keep coming.

Seeing how happy Elroy was here and seeing Gomez flourish at his job were enough to sustain me through a solid year of the three of us living out of one bedroom, but I don’t know how much longer that sustenance will last.

I’m homesick, but my homesickness isn’t for one specific place.

I’m homesick for a pre-mined Yates Gap that doesn’t have a clear view to where my grandmother’s house used to sit and for a Fremont that doesn’t smell like the sulfuric pits of hell.

I’m homesick for our old house because that’s where I watched Elroy grow up.

I’m homesick for my life before I came back “home” – when distance was the reason I felt like we were always on our own because the truth is that absence is a choice, and the truth hurts so much.

I’m homesick for the option to shop from more than one grocery store, for a Wal-Mart that doesn’t take the better part of an hour to get to, for decent healthcare that doesn’t require taking a sick day and spending three and a half hours on the road to access.

I’m homesick for our barely-middle-class life, for a time when the idea of having to pay for braces for Elroy or a routine oil change or an annual property tax bill didn’t send me into a “how are we going to make it this month?” panic.

I’m homesick for the anonymity that living in a larger (relatively-speaking) area provides. That way, I could seize out in school in peace without having to assure my mother months later that I absolutely did not have a stroke despite what “everybody” says.

And despite all of my backward-looking sadness, I know that we have to make this work. We chose to move here, out of everywhere in the world, and we don’t have the option to change our minds now.

A(n) (Un)Burdened Mind

On By The Homesick Homecomer2 Comments

I had a doozy planned for my next post. It would’ve probably evolved into a series of sorts, full of observations from my time as an accountant in the coal mining industry, musings on the healthcare vacuum in our area, and my best attempts at squaring my feelings about the larger forces I see at work behind the scenes.

Then my brain exploded, and I’ve spent the past four days losing the trash can in my kitchen (that’s not some cutesy euphemism – I literally cannot remember where the garbage can sits).

I’m not sure which is more terrifying – waking up on the floor, surrounded by paramedics telling me I’ve had a seizure (which is how my last two “episodes” played out) or knowing that it was going to happen before it did. Both situations are equally terrifying in their own ways.

I think back to when Elroy was born as the first time I ever felt like my body had let me down. I did not handle that revelation well at all. His premature arrival kicked off two solid years of postpartum depression that left me on shaky ground with my then-employer and afraid to be alone with my own child.

And I feel the sadness creeping back in around the edges. I’m a control freak, so knowing that something can sneak up from nowhere, sock me in the hospital for three days, erase a ton of my recent memories (while not erasing any of the recently-recovered trauma memories – thanks for that, brain), take my driver’s license, and completely change my life makes me feel helpless on a level that I can’t do justice with words.

But this time, I also feel warmth and love from my community and my neighbors. I feel the fight that that I used to finally break through the thickness of  the sedatives that kept me out for 36 hours because all I wanted to do was talk to my boy. I feel a sense of commitment to my family and my students. I’m not afraid of the potential weight gain or rage that I might experience while my doctors and I try to figure out the meds that will work best for me. I’ve finally tamped my vanity down enough to embrace the C-PAP that will be taking up residence on my nightstand really soon.

Because the truth is, I will do and accept all that and more if it means I get to spend more time with Gomez and Elroy.

I met my own mortality this week. It really scared me. And it made me really thankful, too.