16 | Emma
“I wanted to love it, I really did, because I was so desperate to be pregnant. Then when I was, I was so miserable... So much of this infertility experience has really coloured my ability to be able to talk about my mental health experiences. Because I just am so worried that people are going to think I’m not a fit mother, or that I don’t want my babies, or that I’m not grateful for everything that I went through to get them in the first place.”
Between a PCOS diagnosis, fertility struggles, and several rounds of IVF, it was not easy for Emma to bring her three boys into the world. Unfortunately, trying to conceive was only part of the mental and emotional battles she faced.
Serious health complications in pregnancy, antenatal anxiety, guilt about not loving pregnancy, and a traumatic birth with her first son, only compounded the mental health struggles that Emma was already facing from years of infertility. By the time her second son was born, Emma’s anxiety was tipped over the edge processing her grandmother’s passing and by an accident that nearly claimed the lives of her husband and son.
From an MBU admission to cutting the ribbon at the opening of Sydney’s newest public MBU, this is the breath-taking story of one woman’s determination to prioritise her own healing and to shape the healing of all women who may one day walk the same path. Emma’s story is as incredible as she is.
Please note, this episode details the lived experience of infertility, miscarriages, and IVF. Go gently.
Emma’s perinatal mental health story begins approximately 20 years ago, when she was diagnosed with Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
”Tim and I now have been together for 20 years. From when we met, we wanted kids and we picked names and all that sort of thing. And when we actually first got together, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And I actually remember going back to the GP after I'd been through all the testing, and I said, ‘well, can I get pregnant?’ And he said, ‘well, do you want to have babies now?’ And I went, ‘no, I'm 19’. And he went, ‘well, you cross that bridge when you come to it’. And I said, ‘well, what's the percentage?’ And he goes, ‘I can't tell you.’”
“I actually remember getting the phone call to tell me all of my results, and Tim was with me and I just bursted into tears and I cried and he said, at 19, ‘It's all right, we'll figure it out.’”
“So, seven years down the track, we got married and we wanted to start trying straight away. But things weren't really happening for us.”
“It was about twelve months on, I actually found out I was pregnant and I was overjoyed. Because of my PCOS, my periods are all over the place, so it was hard to keep track of where things were and what was going on. It was sort of a positive test but it was very faint.”
“After a trip to the doctors and a second round of blood tests to check if numbers were rising, the doctor said, ‘no, the numbers are going down’. I kind of just knew. I knew from the beginning… This is the actual really hard part - I think it's really coloured my journey - when I went back, she said to me, ‘it's all right, it's not a real baby anyway’. And that just absolutely threw me.”
“I had this whole idea that there was this baby coming and it was going to be at this particular date. And I had a dream of how I was going to tell my husband and all this sort of thing… I just kind of went, I can't grieve this because it's not a real baby. That's what she told me. Obviously, it must just be something wrong with my body and that's it.”
“Because I was not coping, I'd gone back to that doctor and said I was obviously struggling with my emotions around all of that in that situation. And so she put me on a very, very low dose and it kind of just, I guess, took the edge off and worked for me. I chose not really realising, not knowing anything about medication. I went, oh, I'm just going to go off this because I don't want to interfere with any of this conception stuff. No one had given me any medical advice, I hadn't thought to ask any questions.”
“So we started getting testing done and apart from my PCOS, they couldn't really tell us what the problem was.”
Emma was referred to a gynaecologist who immediately suggested IVF. “And at that point, I just wasn't ready. I just thought, I can't do this, I'm not mentally prepared. I went on and took some medication. Nothing happened. So it actually got to about three years on and I finally kind of realised I was ready. I'm like, I can't keep doing this. It was just killing me every month and it was getting really exhausting. And my husband and I were really sort of struggling mentally. We were blaming ourselves and our relationship was really taking a hit. So I said, ‘that's it’.”
Prior to commencing IVF, the doctor at the IVF clinic decided to investigate and scheduled a laparoscopy… “They said, ‘look, there's nothing we can see, there's no endometriosis, there's nothing that we were thinking might have been the problem. So you're well on your way now to start doing IVF’. But we thought, before we do that, we're going to go on a trip, have a last hurrah before we start the IVF.”
“I went to book it and I found I was pregnant!”
“I'd been feeling really off, really unwell, and by this point, I think I'd been so disappointed by everything that had happened in the years before, I just stopped doing the regular testing. I didn't bother every month pulling out a pregnancy test because I just was so over seeing a negative result. So that weekend, I'd actually did a five kilometre fun run and I was kind of feeling really off, like, really tired, and I thought, ‘oh, maybe it's just from that’.”
Finally, Emma took a test - “it came up positive straight away! And it was so different to the first test that I'd done where it had come up positive. It was, like, really strong and I didn't know what to do. Like, I was kind of pacing around going, okay, what do I do now?”
“I think from that point, it was like one long exercise in holding my breath. I was so panicked that I was not going to get a healthy baby out of it. And again, like, I'm reflecting on this now, I was really doing those safety behaviours where I was stopping my heart from getting too attached. So I actually remember going for our twelve week scan and I just felt awful. I was so anxious. I was so worried that I was going to get in there and it was going to be no heartbeat or something like that. I was just so nervous. It wasn't until we saw a little person I kind of realised that it was real.”
“But even then, thinking back, we didn't even go and do any sort of the buying… I remember going into this baby shop one day and sort of walking in there and freaking out and walking back out again because I'm like, I don't think I'm ready yet… I thought, I'm not going to buy anything until I get to a point where I know this baby is going to be okay… I was just constantly preparing for the worst case scenario.”
“I think the other thing that sort of happened in all of this was the pregnancy was awful. I ended up with HG. We actually even got to a point where one day I vomited so much I couldn't move, I couldn't function. My husband had to call an ambulance and I ended up at the hospital on a drip. And this is after saying to doctors ‘I'm really unwell!’”
“I was diagnosed with something called EDS, which is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I have very hypermobile joints and I discovered this because my pelvis basically fell apart straight away. That was probably at about eight weeks, I was actually waddling like a fully pregnant person…. And it was all because my joints with the relaxant and everything were so loose. Plus with my hypermobility I was just falling apart. So I was actually in agony for the entire pregnancy. I was wearing like multiple belts around my hips. I dislocated my hip. I was at the physio a couple of times a week.”
“I'd gone from being really strong, active, I was doing pole dancing, I was in probably the best shape of my life. I was really active and really healthy to basically feeling like I was falling apart all in like eight weeks.”
“I wanted to love it, I really did, because I was so desperate to be pregnant. Then when I was, I was so miserable!”
“Everyone was so happy for me. So it was so hard to say, I am not happy because I didn't want to appear like I wasn't grateful for it… that was my main mode of thinking. It was like, ‘oh, well, I can't tell anyone that I'm feeling’ this way because I'm so frightened they're going to go, ‘but you wanted this, you wanted this!’ That's what's really made me probably take a long time to come out per se and share my story.”
“So much of this infertility experience has really coloured my ability to be able to talk about my mental health experiences post-birth. Because I just am so worried that people are going to think I'm not a fit mother, or that I don't want my babies, or that I'm not grateful for everything that I went through to get them in the first place.”
Emma’s labour was painful and her water birth was quick, but unfortunately she experienced a fourth degree tear and told she’d never be able to birth vaginally again.
“The bath was full of blood. And they pulled me out of the bath and they moved me over to the bed. And then the midwife said… ‘you're completely torn, there's no tissue left. We need to take you into surgery quite quickly.’ So it just felt like all of a sudden, all these people rush into the room, they've taken the baby away from me, they've handed him over to my husband, and I've been rushed out of the room.”
“I was in surgery for a really long time and I kept saying, ‘when can I go back to my baby?’ I'd had this whole vision in my head what post-birth was supposed to look like and that I'd be have this really lovely time with the baby on my chest and have this lovely bonding time. And I felt like that had already been taken away from me because I'd been rushed out of the room. My husband had been handed the baby. I was in recovery pretty much for almost the entire night.”
“They'd left my husband with my son in the birthing suite, just sitting there… he spent like 5 hours just sort of sitting there with this newborn baby in the waiting room, not really knowing what was going on, not knowing how I was, not really knowing what to do with this baby.”
“So that became my first experience. I was put in a bed, my husband left. So I was on my own with this baby and I was feeling awful. After the surgery, I remember I started vomiting, I must have been having a reaction to whatever medication they gave me for the surgery. And I started vomiting and I couldn't stop. And that just went on for pretty much the first 12 hours… it actually took until about six o’clock that night when a new nurse came on to figure out, we need to give you something to stop the vomiting.”
“That was my very first day with my very first newborn child. It took an absolute toll. I felt so alone because my husband had gone home. I had all these people coming out of my room. So I had the surgeon, I had a physiotherapist. I had all these people sort of arriving and asking me questions and telling me to sign paperwork. And I guess I was still a bit out of it from the medication and obviously vomiting and feeling really unwell and just in a whole heap of shock, so I can't even remember what anyone said. I know that they were telling me that I'd been through this really bad situation, and on the ward, I became known as the ‘fourth degree tear lady’.”
“I just remember being in a whole heap of pain and being really immobile. I was stuck to the bed with a catheter and drips - that was going on for about two or three days, and my husband couldn't stay because it was in a public system. It was, I guess, Christmas, so they were very short staffed, so no one was sort of able to come and help.”
“Day three - I think that's when the anxiety really started kicking in. And I'm just thinking, what have I done? Why? I've made the biggest mistake? Why did I want this? This is terrible. Yeah, I couldn't put my finger on why I was feeling what I was feeling. I knew I was feeling horrible, obviously, because of the situation that I was in. And I thought, maybe once I go home, it'll get better. Everything that we need is at home, my husband's at home to help. It'll all be okay.”
“But when I got home was when things started to escalate.”
Upon discharge, Oliver was weighed and unfortunately he’d lost a lot of weight. Emma was then hooked up to a breast pump to see what was going on. “About 20 minutes later, she came back, and I'd basically produced nothing… So she gave him bottle of formula, which he had very happily, and he must have been starving by this point. So by the time I got home, I thought, oh, my God. I'm already failing. I didn't know that I didn't have any milk or colostrum or anything. I've got this injury that is making it really hard for me to be mobile and look after my baby or lift him. I've made this huge mistake because I can't do this. Like, it's just too hard.”
“I remember being sent home and the nurses are giving me this plan. They said, he really needs to put on weight, so you need to feed him every 2 hours. Then when you're done feeding, you need to pump. And while you're pumping, you need to give him a comp feed of formula. And if he doesn't put on this amount of weight in the next three or four days, then he'll have to come back to hospital. So that just absolutely put the pressure on.”
“By this point, it was like I was doing this whole process and by the time I'd finished the process, I had to start again! So there was no time for eating, no time for sleeping. And I guess I was becoming more and more anxious as time went on. I just hated it. I hated the whole process! And I was getting really worked up that I was doing damage to my baby because I hadn't been able to give him the feeding he needed.”
“I kept thinking, I can't do this, I'm failing. I'm a terrible mother. I've been a teacher, I've done childcare, I've been a nanny. I've looked after kids my whole life. I should just know what I'm doing. Why don't I know? Why is this so hard?”
“I was really struggling. I was not eating, I was not sleeping. I'd lost a lot of weight. And I went to see my regular GP, who had been wonderful throughout my pregnancy, but he didn't quite understand… He said, oh, look, I can look into perhaps putting you on a medication, just a low dose, just to sort of help with the anxiety and make you feel a little bit better, especially after the experience you've gone through. So he sent me away with a prescription. I can't even tell you what it was. He was making sure that it was going to be the right one for breastfeeding. He was being quite fussy about what he was going to prescribe and he didn't really give me a lot of information about it or any side effects or any of that sort of thing.”
“So I started taking this medication pretty much immediately. And by this point, I'd gone through another week and it was another week of very little sleep, not a lot of eating, just getting progressively worse. And I remember at one point, my husband walked into the room one day and I just put Oliver down and I said to him, ‘I can't do it, I can't do this, I'm really not enjoying this. It is not what I thought it was going to be. Can we just take him back to the hospital and just leave him there?’”
“I remember this particular night when I'd gotten through Christmas, Oliver was about three weeks old by this point, and the medication was not working. The side effects were that it had really increased my anxiety - You get that sort of peak of anxiety before it comes down again, so it was a side effect. No one had explained to me or told me was going to be a thing. So I started having panic attacks and I got to this particular night where I'd said to my husband, ‘I just want to try and get some sleep. I just need to go away from the baby, because I was reacting to every little noise that he made. I'm going to just try and get some sleep, it'll be better’.”
“I remember lying there and I just was in this state of fear, just constant, constant! Not that I was going to die, but that this was never going to change. Like, I was never going to get away from this feeling. And all I wanted to do was almost just try and run away from my body. I didn't want to run away from the situation, but I wanted to run away from my body because I was in just that awful, overwhelming, I-can't-function state of fear.”
Emma called her mum who offered to come over to help her look after the baby. “I said, ‘no, he doesn't need help, he's fine’. Like, he was okay! He started putting on the weight and all that sort of thing, but it was me. I was the one that was having the problem.”
Emma’s husband then rang a nurse hotline who recommended Emma go to the hospital. “We showed up that night at the emergency department and I just felt like half of me was almost like, ‘okay, great, someone's going to help me. And the other half was like, what am I doing here?’ I felt like I was an absolute failure… And I thought I was going crazy. I just thought like, I'm losing my mind.”
“By this point, it's the middle of the night and this beautiful nurse came up to me and she was asking me questions and she went and got me a blanket and tucked me in and she was gorgeous. And she said, ‘look, I'm just going to go and pass this information now on to the psychiatrist and they'll come down and see you soon’. So [the psychiatrist] came down and she was very dismissive. She was sort of like, ‘if you're not suicidal, then you can go home’. And I was like, ‘I need help, like, I need help, someone help me!’”
This psychiatrist prescribed Emma a different medication to the one she had been taking, but advised her that she would have to stop breastfeeding. After Emma’s mum picked her up from the hospital at 3 in the morning, she was hopeful the new medication would help her sleep and subsequently feel better. “But when I woke up in the morning, I just felt this like I've failed everybody. I've left my husband, I've left my baby, I've made my mum come out in the middle of the night and pick me up. All these thoughts just started of ‘you are not right to be a mum, this is not for you’.”
“I actually ended up basically living with my parents for probably the first twelve weeks of Oliver's life. My husband would go to work, go to our house, do things he had to do, and then he would drive back to my parents house and we were living on mattresses on the floor of their basement area. That's how we existed for weeks. And I tried at the end of January, going home, and I lasted about two days and I rang my parents crying.”
“I just wanted to be around people because I was just so I don't know, I just felt like they would protect me or something, or protect me from myself. And I can't even put my finger on why. It was just that I couldn't be alone.”
“You feel helpless, you feel so helpless. You feel like, I just have to do this on my own. And it's the most horrible, powerless feeling… I think the only reason why I got through everything that I got through is that I am so damn determined. Like, I don't want to feel like this and I'm going to do everything in my power to stop this, whatever that may be. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to keep going back and asking for answers and asking for help until someone can help me.”
“Again, this is 2013, and I remember this particular day when he was just a newborn… And I remember going outside and taking my phone and starting to Google people with postnatal depression. I didn't know anyone. The only person that I could think of was, like, Jessica Rowe and Brooke Shields, who had gone through it a million miles before. And so I was like, googling going, okay, so they've had it. What was their experience? How did they recover? Because I wanted to know what I needed to do and that's all I needed to look up, but no one was really talking about it. It was very taboo. I remember going to the library and looking for books on it. Okay, what steps do I need to follow to get better and feel like myself again?”
Emma returned to the GP who had prescribed that first medication, which was the turning point in her recovery. “He said to me, ‘I've actually been thinking of you and I've been doing some research! I found this place - a perinatal specialist, St John of God - their outpatient service called ‘Raphael’… I got an admission to the outpatient program. I started regular appointments. I saw their perinatal psychiatrist, who was wonderful. I was seeing a clinical nurse consultant and having regular appointments. Through talking to the psychiatrist, I was diagnosed with PTSD from the birth experience and obviously the feeding. She also said that I had postnatal depression and anxiety.”
“I remember the parts where it was I was starting to get out, I was starting to see friends, and then I was referred to like a mother's group. And I always struggled quite badly with social anxiety, but I needed to be out, I needed to be with other people, so I was going to mother's group and for me, the more that I'd go out and do something that felt normal, the better I would feel rather than just sitting around at home and being alone with my thoughts.”
“I have all these really beautiful memories, really, actually, of going for walks and coffees and playdates at each other's houses or getting to know these people. And now, 9-10 years down the track, our kids are still friends and we're still friends and I have all these really beautiful memories.”
“But the physical stuff was my problem and I felt like I was never going to be the same person again. I think in all of this, I really struggled with my identity. It is such a dramatic shift in what you were and then what you are, and I think especially when you're pregnant. And I was going through really difficult pregnancy, so you were the centre of attention. You were getting all of the help, you were being looked after and going to the doctors and getting help, and it was all about you. And then this baby came and I had this massive injury that I'd suffered and it was, ‘how is he feeding? Is he putting on weight?’ All the attention shifts to him.”
“I get it. I know it's really important for him to put on weight and feed, but hang on, I've had this really traumatic, really awful injury and I'm really struggling with it and I don't know if my life or my body is ever going to be the same again. So, yeah, what about me?”
When Oliver was about 20 months old, Emma and her husband decided to start trying again for another baby, thinking it might take a while. “I think we went a year on and off where we were trying, and I had been struggling with a lot of pain.”
During this time, Emma received blood test results showing a marker indicative of ovarian cancer and was referred to a gynaecologist who happened to work out of IVF Australia and the local public fertility centre. This gynaecologist organised surgery to explore what was going on. “I was really worried and really panicked. And I remember going into the surgery and waiting in the room before they wheel you in, and just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. Terrified! By this point, I wasn't even focused on whether or not I could have another child. It was whether or not they were going to take everything out of me because I had cancer. So I went in and they had found lesions and growth, but nothing was cancerous, which was an absolute relief.”
Due to the lesions though, Emma’s tubes were completely blocked and she was told she’d never be able to conceive a child naturally again and that she’d have to do IVF “She said, ‘there's absolutely no reason other than your blocked tubes why you can't have another baby’.”
“And I just sobbed. I was, like, relieved, but terrified. I didn't want to do IVF. To me, it just seemed like this massive gamble that I may not win… And it was hard because [Oliver] was getting to an age where he was going through catalogues and saying, ‘hey, Mummy, look, that's a baby brother, can we go and buy one?’”
“It probably took us about six months before I was even mentally ready to even consider trying IVF.”
Emma returned to that same gynaecologist and got six embryos through her egg retrieval. Within a few days of her first transfer though, Emma’s grandmother passed away. “It was just the most heartbreaking, heart wrenching thing. And so I was pregnant / not pregnant, processing her passing away. I didn't know what to think. I just thought, this is just not going to work. Like, I can't be! I'm in so much stress and anxiety and sadness and overwhelm that it's just not going to work. And I actually got to the day of her funeral and I found out that it hadn't taken.”
“It took me a long time to get over that. It was a very long process of grief for me that's probably still going on and it's been five years. So much of it's tied up in all of our fertility stuff because she was there and she knew what was going on. And I saw her the very last time that I'd had that very first embryo transfer. So that actually really triggered me when I was going into other embryo transfers because it just took me back that day.”
“I went through a second transfer and that also failed. That wasn't until the following year. With that transfer, I really struggled because it was the first one since my Nan had passed away. She's never going to be able to hold this baby and that just really was a gut punch.”
“With my third transfer, it was positive but it was another one of those tests like I'd seen many, many years before, that was very, very light and same thing happened. The doctor had said it's mostly non-viable. In these experiences, I just never knew how to react because I just never knew whether or not I was, I guess, being overdramatic by grieving this experience.”
“I remember I just bled all over the bathroom and it was just the most traumatic, awful, horrible experience. I was on my own. It was just heart wrenching. It was so hard to process. Not only the fact that my Nan had just died, but I was losing this pregnancy that I'd so dreamed of and wished for and hoped that would happen and that she was going to be there for me. And yeah, it was just this moment that I'll never forget because I just feel like it was the start of everything that kind of happened later on.”
The next transfer was actually a double transfer. “So we had two embryos transferred and it was like half of me was going, what if we end up with two babies? And the other half of me was going, oh, my God, what if we end up with no babies? All I wanted to was see a heartbeat, but I'm not sure how many I want to see.”
“Finally I fell pregnant! And it was this really hard moment of holding my breath and wondering what was going on and yeah, that pregnancy progressed and I was feeling very much the same as what I did with Oliver. My pelvis fell apart. I didn't have HG this time, but I had awful, awful morning sickness. Like, it went on for a really long time. The more tired I would get, the more sick I would get.”
Emma admits that she didn’t prepare for the potential of experiencing PNDA again. “I just brushed it off. I don't know why. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I was so focused on everything else and the fact that I just wanted to be pregnant that I didn't think about what happens down the road… I just thought that was all just a bunch of really shitty circumstances that caused me to end up like that - obviously, giving birth was the reason why I felt the way that I felt. This time is different, so it's not going to be like that. And it was so far down the road, too! By this point, it was five years. It's something that I didn't consider to be a big deal anymore.”
Due to her prior fast labour and 4th degree tear, Emma’s c-section was scheduled for 37 weeks gestation. “I didn't really know what the recovery for a Caesarean was going to be like and I was worried about what I could and couldn't do once he arrived. Yeah, I did everything I could, but I was wrecked. By the time we got to his birth, I was ready, but I was exhausted already.”
“Everything was really straightforward with [Elliot]. His birth was great. I was terrified going in again. I was in tears and my doctor was comforting me and she was amazing. And everyone let my husband be there when I was getting my spinal block. And it was actually my doctor's 50th birthday that day. She came in especially, which was really lovely and was just like a quick, easy experience that just I was in shock about how normal it was and how I was unaffected by it. And, yeah, everything was great with him and they were also really supportive. I felt like things were going really well and Oliver met his little brother and it was all wonderful.”
“I probably got to day three and I started feeling those real anxious, that heart-pounding, sweating, and I thought, oh, maybe it's just that hormonal shift.” Emma confessed to her doctor that she wasn’t feeling right and her doctor told her to speak to the nurses who could provide the names and numbers for people to contact.
“But again, we were discharged on Christmas Eve, so nothing was open… So I think that started compounding. All those feelings of being helpless started coming back. I'm needing help and no one can help me. Everything's closed, I'm trapped. And it just sort of started to build and build and build.”
“So we came home from the hospital and I had the same experience. I just got progressively more and more anxious, but I just felt like I wasn't able to do it. I felt like I was failing Oliver because I wasn't able to give him the same amount of attention. I was really panicked about my husband. I was trying to constantly protect him and not put the burden on him.”
“In all of this, I wasn't on any medication, I wasn't getting any kind of mental health support because I guess I felt like I was fine.”
”So I ended up calling PANDA who thankfully were open, and I spoke to some beautiful people, I actually started talking a lot about my Nan. And I think all that grief hit me like a bus. This baby's here and she's not. She was the first person I called after Oliver was born. I woke her up at 1 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘he's here’. And she was overjoyed. And I couldn't do that again. Just that grief hit me like a truck and it sent me spiralling.”
“I found a doctor who I'd never really seen before and they were open and she was so lovely and so understanding and I told her my whole history and she decided that she was going to put me on the medication that I had been on before because she knew that I'd had a good experience. And she made phone calls to the MotherSafe to make sure that it was still okay for breastfeeding. And she put me on a very high dose to start with and then gave me a PRN, like a benzo, that I had never had experience with before in my life. She basically just said, this will be helpful for when you sleep… And that was pretty much it.”
Emma’s mum organised a family holiday shortly after Elliot was born which Emma hoped would be a good distraction. Unfortunately, she was experiencing bad side effects from the medication “I was sweating, feeling really sick in the stomach, off my food again, really struggling with sleep, so I was taking some of this other medication to help me with that. So I didn't realise what the side effects of this other medication were going to be. That was sort of causing more issues at the same time and I was just feeling terrible.”
Unfortunately, towards the end of the holiday, Emma’s husband and son Oliver were involved in a serious accident where they almost lost their lives. “Tim ended up in a very bad place very quickly because he felt very responsible and we could have lost Oliver. And so that just absolutely pushed me 100% over the edge. I was already feeling terrible and by that point, I just escalated into absolute panic. I was so worried that I was actually going to end up with psychosis because I thought I was going crazy. I was not eating, I was not sleeping. I spent my entire time so panicked about everybody, checking on everybody constantly.”
“I was so worried about Tim because I was so worried something was going to happen to him. My thoughts became more and more irrational around making sure everybody was safe and that I was doing everything that I could to look after them. And I just felt completely out of control. And once we got back from that holiday, I went to my GP and I said to her, ‘you need to give me this referral to Raphael. I know that they can help me!’”
“I called them that day and I was sobbing down the phone and I said, ‘you need to help me. I really need help.’ And she was so beautiful and she said, ‘all right, I can squeeze you in tomorrow’ and got me in for this appointment with psychiatrist.”
“I was just so rattled. I was having thoughts that someone was going to die. I was so frightened. I had these thoughts as well - that would never have ever been the case! - but I was so terrified that Tim was going to hurt the baby. I don't know why, if he would sort of react in any way where it was even like a raised voice, I would cower in fear. I don't know why. He's never done anything like that in his entire life. He has been, honestly, my rock in all of this.”
“I was feeling like things weren't real and it's the most horrible experience to be in and it was constant. I couldn't get out of it and I wanted to be out of it because I just thought, I'm really losing it.”
“So, anyway, I went in to see this psychiatrist and I was a mess. I just was not functioning. I couldn't make a decision, I couldn't get words out. I thought, again, I hate the word, but I was ‘crazy’. And I just poured my heart out to him about everything that had happened and my experiences with Oliver. And he was so quiet and really calm. And his first reaction was, ‘have you heard of the mother-and-baby unit (MBU)?’ He explained it all and he said, ‘I really think it would be very good for you. And he said, It will really help you sort of make a faster recovery. You'll be able to get sleep, which will really help. There's nurses there that are going to help you. You're going to have all the support you need. Your husband can go.’”
“My first reaction was, ‘no’ especially because I had Oliver and he was just about to start school… I remember going home and Tim was there and he freaked out. I guess he didn't know, he didn't understand. I mean, I was terrified. You're at that point where you're thinking, oh, my God, how did I get here? How did I end up being in this situation?”
After the initial shock, Emma decided to go to the MBU. “I actually ended up going in on the day that Oliver started his first day of kindergarten. So we got up in the morning and we drove him to his first day, and then I took myself and my newborn baby into the MBU. So I actually remember this whole morning just feeling so horribly guilty and that I was an awful mother for leaving him… it was just terrible. I really just wanted to get better, but I also didn't want to leave him. It was probably one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do to try and explain to a five year old, ‘hey, look, I know you're starting this new big adventure, but by the way, I'm going to be gone for who knows, three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is.’”
“My mother-in-law drove me in and my mum came as well… I just sat in that reception area and I just sobbed and held my baby and thought, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. This is just the most terrible thing that I've done to everybody. I'm being selfish. In the first week, maybe two, I struggled with being there and thinking whether or not I'd made the right decision and feeling so horribly guilty about putting everybody under the pressure that they had to be under so that I could get better. And, yeah, it took a lot for me to make peace with that.”
“Just being in there, though, and knowing that other women that were in the same position… I felt like I had some people that were sort of taking me under their wing and being really beautiful and supportive and lovely, and I had the opportunity to see that they were at the other end and they were feeling really good. And then I was the person in the middle, and then I had other people that were coming in where I was taking them under my wing and saying, ‘it's all okay, and this is what's going to happen, and It's all right to feel the way you do’. And so it just ended up being the most valuable, rewarding thing that I think I've ever done, and I wouldn't change it for anything. I got to meet some most beautiful women in there. I got to realise that we come from all different types of backgrounds and jobs and family experiences, and we were still all the same.”
”So, yeah, it was like just a really just positive thing. I was reassured I was doing the right thing for my kids and that they weren't going to be scarred by this experience. If anything, they were going to be bolstered by it, because I was getting the health that I needed and I was improving my own mental health, which would be improving their mental health, and I was having the opportunity to bond. And you can just eat and sleep and focus on you and the baby. And, yeah, it's just my experience, honestly, was just the best thing that I've ever done.
“It was you in this beautiful little protective bubble where you knew you're being looked after and if you had a bad day or a bad time, someone was there to talk to you about it. And I had days where I would just cry and cry and cry and whatever nurses would be there would rationalise things or explain things to me and they helped a lot with me processing all of my grief around my Nan dying and the connection with the baby being born.”
“You leave that and you don't have those people anymore that have that understanding and then you've also got to throw yourself back into real life. I came out and I was meeting all these new people through Oliver starting school, and I didn't really tell anybody. I remember going to Oliver's classroom for the very first time and they had their books out on the tables and one of them was like, what I did on the weekend. And Oliver's was ‘I went and visited Mummy at Burwood in the hospital’ with a picture and I was like, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I can again look back on it now and sort of laugh and go, this is his way of processing, and that's great, and it's probably something I'll keep forever, really, but I'm like, this five year old should not be doing this!”
“When I was discharged from the MBU, I went through their outpatient program, which was beautiful because it was with all the girls that I was in the hospital with and so we got to catch up. So I did that and I also was having very regular appointments every few weeks with the Raphael outpatient. And so they had all of my paperwork. They knew my whole history, they knew everything, and it was great.”
Around Elliot’s first birthday, Emma went back to work but found herself struggling with the transition. “My anxiety was back, struggling with eating, struggling with sleeping, and I had these weird little twinges that I was getting where it was like, that round ligament pain. And I'm kind of used to it with my EDS, but this was different because it was that real distinct round ligament pain.”
“So the next morning, I got up and I found some old tests from when I had done IVF that were expired, like, six months expired in the back of the cupboard. And it lit up like Christmas tree! And I thought, I can't be pregnant. Like, this is not right. Again, I was in that state of shock where I didn't say anything to anybody, I didn't say anything to my husband. I threw the test in the bin and just kind of went, I'll deal with this later. And I just thought about it all day, because the risk being pregnant was ectopic pregnancy, especially with the way my tubes were. And the more I started thinking about it, the more those thoughts started coming back, like, oh, my God, what's going on? Am I pregnant? Am I not? I've only just gotten over this whole thing with Elliot. I don't want to go through this again. That anxiety just spiked.”
Thinking the test was wrong, Emma purchased a pregnancy test on the way home from work. “Same thing happened. It lit up like a Christmas tree!”
Despite being told it wouldn’t be possible for her to conceive naturally, Emma had fallen pregnant with Rory.
“It was like, a really shocking situation to be in. Yeah. That actually sent me on a very quick downward spiral that I think I struggled with antenatal anxiety very, very quickly. And I was just so lucky to be in the position that I was in. So I remember going into the doctor to get a blood test and then I sort of just spilled out all of this stuff: I feel the same way, like, I'm going backwards really fast. Also stupidly, upon reflection, I had stopped medication and I didn't know really whether I should be taking any medication when I was that newly pregnant. I didn't know what to do.”
“That was the longest weekend of my life. I remember just sitting underneath a weighted blanket for the whole weekend, just rocking back and forth feeling awful because I didn't know how to feel. This was such a different experience for us, where it was just such a surprise. We didn't know what it was going to look like, we didn't know whether or not it was going to be viable.”
“And I started having all these intrusive, irrational thoughts: this is going to be too much for us, my husband's going to leave me, how are we going to afford it, I'm going to end up in the MBU again. And then it actually got to a point where I said to him, very honestly, ‘I'm considering terminating’, and it's a awful thing to admit. I've really had it in my head I couldn't do it again, I could not go down that same path.”
“I was really lucky because I was already seeing the psychologist and she talked me through everything. Tim turned to me and he said, ‘I don't think that you do. I don't think this is you talking, I think this is your anxiety talking, this is you panicking and jumping to the worst case scenario’. And so he was really able to help me. And then with the psychologist, he actually came in with me to some appointments, and so it actually was really good because I could process all of that and sort of realise it's me being very frightened, like, terrified of going down the same path again. But the psychologist was able to say to me, ‘you're okay now, you can do this. If you've done it once, you can do it again, and look at all these things that you have in place that are going to help you.’”
“That was the beginning of the opportunity to have all of these supports in place to help me through. So, again, I went back on medication and I went on very, very slowly. I was seeing the psychologist really regularly and, yeah, it sort of turned around very quickly.”
At the first scan, it was confirmed that the pregnancy was viable after all. “I just had prepared for the absolute worst, they’ve got to tell me it's ectopic! So I hadn't actually wrapped my brain fully around another baby and another child coming and any of that sort of thing, until I got to that point! So that was when I started really processing and going, okay, this is real, but I can also do it. And I did everything in my power to put as many supports in place as I could to help me.”
Returning to the same gynaecologist/obstetrician was also protective for Emma. “She was just overjoyed for us and she knew everything that I'd gone through, so she was there then and was making sure that everything was in place for me throughout the pregnancy. She would bend over backwards to make sure I got all the things that I needed. She would check and check and triple check, that Tim could be there when he needed to be there for me, and that the hospital was very, very aware of my history.”
“It became a really uplifting experience because I was acknowledged, I was made to feel like I was going to get support no matter what, I was constantly reassured: you've done this before, you can do it again, you've got all these supports in place, we're all here for you.”
“The next experience, having Rory, was just amazing.” Emma experienced a positive birth and ultimately did not experience postpartum mental ill health this time. While there were some stressful moments regarding Rory’s excessive vomiting, Emma found that she coped. “Yeah, it was stressful, but we were in this beautiful room in this hospital with beautiful staff and it was almost like a little holiday. So it was like such a different experience. Even though it was difficult because of COVID, it was probably the best experience I could have had. Even with the fact that Rory had all these sort of health issues and I didn't descend into that fear state, was testament to the fact that I was obviously doing better and that I could manage my distress. And that while I knew that it wasn't good, that I knew that he was okay and that I wasn't going to start really ruminating on the what ifs and the worst case scenario.”
“He's now two and he has come along, I think, to teach me that I could do it. And I actually really, honestly believe that my nan sent him to me to show me I could, that I could have courage, I could be brave, I could be strong, and I could do it. Even though it was still managed and I had all of those protections in place, I could do a postpartum and know what it felt like to not go down that dark path.”
Emma also credits her advocacy work as part of her healing. During pregnancy with Rory, Emma became a consumer representative for the new public MBU that opened recently at Westmead Hospital. She actually got to cut the ribbon at its official opening. “It was just so valuable for me. And I honestly feel like it contributed as well to helping me get through this last period of postpartum with having Rory. So I was pregnant when I had the first meeting, and then he was only a newborn in all of the other meetings. And it just helped. It gave me power back. It gave me an opportunity to use my brain in a different way, to reflect and think about my experiences and also what about my experiences I could use to contribute. And while I wasn't the architect or a builder or anything like that, I really felt like I had so much power to influence what it could be for families and how it could make lives better… I've got the opportunity to contribute to their healing.”
“I know that one day when my kids are older, I can say, ‘hey, I did something with this’. And I really hope it's going to be a really positive place for whoever gets to be there. And that's all I can hope for. And I'm so thankful and so grateful. It gave me so much opportunity to feel like I was giving back, which makes my heart happy.”
“I feel honoured, for want of a better word, that I hope that it makes a difference and that they can end up being here where I am, looking back and going, that was such a valuable thing for me.”
“I think about it all the time. I pick up my nine year old from school and I look in the rear vision mirror at him and I think, I did it. Look at that. I've gotten nine years down the track from what was one of the most awful experiences of my life. And I've survived and I've thrived and I've gone on and I've done it again.”
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