43 | Natalie
“She was quite an active baby, so they kept reassuring me, ‘That’s a really good sign. She’s very active.’ But of course, when your mind’s just in that zone, you’re just like ‘But I’ve also read that fast too many movements is just as bad as decreased.’ Then my mind is constantly racing like, ‘Are these normal? Are they not? It’s my first pregnancy. I don’t know what to expect!’ There was just a lot going on. I didn’t know what was right or wrong.
I kept reminding myself, ‘Once my daughter Tilly is here, it’ll be fine. Once she’s safe in my hands, it’ll be fine. I won’t be feeling this scared. I won’t be worried about her health and everything. She’s going to be fine once she’s in my arms.’ But I was just waiting for that moment...”
Like so many of us with antenatal anxiety, Natalie downplayed her symptoms and clung to the belief that she would find relief from the all-consuming worry and insomnia when her baby was finally in her arms. But instead of finding relief after birth, Natalie’s symptoms only grew stronger.
In this heartfelt episode, Natalie shares in excruciating detail the messiness of mental health during pregnancy and recounts how a flare of her pre-existing autoimmune disease and a ‘high-risk’ label only fuelled her tireless need for reassurance: fixating on the baby’s movements, counting down the days until the next scan at the hospital, scouring Facebook groups to compare stories, and trying to interpret doppler readings on Google.
This is a story I hear all too often, and one that I personally know all too well.
This is a story about the human mind’s desperate attempts to find safety from constant anxiety and insomnia.
This is a story about deep love and deep fear, and how closely those can exist side-by-side.
This is part one of Natalie’s raw and profoundly relatable story.
If you’ve ever felt consumed by anxiety in pregnancy or early postpartum, or know someone who has, this episode is for you.
Please note, this episode discusses suicidal ideation. Go gently.
“I was diagnosed with postnatal anxiety, but looking back now, there was so much during my pregnancy.”
“I think, unfortunately, like a lot of us who go through this type of journey, a lot of that was swept under the rug. And even for me personally, I kept reminding myself, ‘once my daughter Tilly is here, it'll be fine. Once she's safe in my hands, it'll be fine. I won't be feeling this scared. I won't be worried about her health and everything. She's going to be fine once she's in my arms.’ But I was just waiting for that moment.”
“Then as things progressed and once she was born, then it did, unfortunately, get a lot worse for my mental health.”
"We were fortunate to conceive naturally. I know how lucky we are. I have a lot of friends who have struggled with fertility issues, miscarriages and things, or are going down the IVF route.”
“That's probably where the anxiety did start: in that first trimester. I think because I had been surrounded by a lot of friends who had experienced loss, I always had that in the back of my mind.”
“At this stage, I wasn't diagnosed high risk yet - it was a bit later on in the pregnancy that that title came. But I had done one of those pregnancy tests where it says 1-2 weeks pregnant, and I just kept thinking, ‘Okay, it's one to two weeks, in another one to two weeks, I'm going to do another one. And hopefully it increases.’”
“So the following week, I think I bought another test, and then sure enough, it came up 2-3 weeks. I was like, ‘okay, things are looking good. Obviously, my pregnancy levels are increasing. Hopefully everything's okay.’”
“We did have a scan quite early. I think it was only around six weeks. Just waiting for the ultrasound tech to say, ‘Yes, there's a heartbeat.’ They said it's a very tiny but healthy heartbeat. That was a bit of reassurance.”
“I guess, like a lot of us, too, you wait that 12-week period to really start telling close friends or family or sharing the news. It was almost like that next six weeks, I was still really a bit stressed that something could still happen. There was a lot of anxiety around that.”
“We only really told our family at seven and eight weeks, and then we waited till around 16 weeks to actually share the news on social media. Then we were around 12 or 13 weeks when we just told some really close friends because I just had that underlying anxiety there that anything could still happen.”
“I really liked the reassurance that I would be having more checks and scans and things that for me really helped with my anxiety. But also hearing that your pregnancy is not low risk anymore... it did also increase that anxiety that I was already experiencing...”
“I did my NIPT test at 11 weeks. That came back low risk, which was great. Everything was looking really good. And that, again, provided me with reassurance.”
“We found out the gender. We were having a girl. We did a big gender reveal and felt really confident about everything then. But after we'd done the NIP test, I was referred to one of the midwives who would then not do a scan, but they would check the heartbeat and things, and they started to go through a few things with me.”
“So I think that was around 13 weeks of pregnancy… she was checking the heartbeat. And again, that reassurance that came over me as, ‘Oh, yes, the heartbeat is still there.’ I've got another scan soon. I just can't wait to keep getting that reassurance from a medical professional.”
“But she sat down with me and we started going through a survey. I think this is, from memory, the only time I was asked about my mental health. No fault of the system or anything like that, but I know, looking back now, there are definitely, I think improvements that need to be made, and I'm sure a lot of us feel that way.”
“I did mention to her ‘I've had a little bit of, I guess, worries and anxiety around miscarrying and things like that’. She was like, ‘Okay, that can happen.’ Then she gave me a pamphlet, if you're feeling this way, who to call, and everything like that.”
“But then we also got talking about my health.”
“I have an autoimmune disease. It's called ulcerative colitis. It's a form of inflammatory bowel disease. And I've been pretty fortunate. I was diagnosed at 19. I'm 29 now. So for the past 10 years, I've never really had many issues with it. I've just taken some daily medication and been on top of it. Nothing has really stemmed from that.”
“And prior to getting pregnant, I actually saw my specialist and mentioned we were going to try and start conceiving. And she just told me to make sure that that's in control, because if you do have a flare in pregnancy, that's when it can get quite dangerous. Or if you're flaring before you conceive, she said you are more likely to flare during pregnancy. So at this stage, all of that was looking really healthy as well.”
“But when I brought this up to the midwife and said that I had this, I don't know how they do it on the computer, but then she said, ‘okay, that actually brings your pregnancy from a low risk to a medium’, she called it the yellow or orange zone. She said, ‘you're not high risk, you're not red zone, but you will probably have a few more checks and things throughout your pregnancy.’”
“And for me, hearing that, obviously, it was a bit of a mixture of emotions. I really liked the reassurance that I would be having more checks and scans and things that for me really helped with my anxiety. But also hearing that your pregnancy is not low risk anymore, there is a little bit of a possibility that something could become complicated. Then it did also increase that anxiety that I was already experiencing.”
“I think when your mind’s in that zone, you always just take that negative little thing and you run with it and you can’t see past it...”
“Looking back, the second trimester was definitely my favourite. I overcame a little bit the anxiety. You start to feel movements and all of that is really reassuring.”
“I felt really good in myself. I wasn't really fatigued anymore. I wasn't as anxious as I had been. We went on a baby moon. There were lots of positives in that second trimester, and everything was looking really great.”
“But it was around, I think, the 20-week anatomy scan. I had started feeling quite good about things, but scans definitely brought that bit of anxiety.”
“We went into this scan, and they were taking a little bit longer than normal. I was like, ‘Okay, try to just reassure yourself.’ You could see the baby was moving and everything. They were saying that she was tracking healthy at 60th percentile. Things were looking great.”
“But I just had this weird… I think you just have this mother's intuition. I don't know. I just had this strange feeling that they weren't telling me everything because it did take a lot longer than usual.”
“They said, ‘No, you can go home now.’ But they didn't really say everything's okay. I rang my husband crying, ‘I think something's wrong.’ And he said, ‘No, if they didn't tell you or they didn't send you to hospital, it'll be fine.’”
“And then the next day, I got a call from the obstetrician that had taken my scan and she had said that there could be something with the baby's left ventricle of the heart not developing properly. So my anxiety just started spiralling.”
“It was a really scary time.”
“Where we live, it's considered regional, but it's quite a populated city. But a lot of the hospital and health staff actually train up in Melbourne, and they go to the Royal Women's, which is one of the most amazing hospitals we have. They had advised me on the phone that they had sent my scans of the ultrasound up to the Royal Women's and that they'd like us to attend an appointment.”
“It was like a foetal cardi [foetal echocardiogram] - I don't know the health term - but an ultrasound of the foetus' heart, and that was only able to be done up in Melbourne at the Royal Women's.”
“That was on the Wednesday I got the call. We had been pushed to the Friday, so it was two days of waiting at home, but also they had got us in quite quickly, so my mind started racing like, ‘They're seeing us quite soon, and is this urgent? Is this something I need to be worried about?’”
“I think even just knowing that we had to go to this specific hospital that brought up, ‘why are we going there when we're in the care of our regional provider?’ You start thinking all of these scenarios.”
“They took a while to scan everything, but they just said, ‘Look, we are being extra thorough. I’t was a female and a male at the time, and they were just incredible.”
“The female actually really held my hand. She said, ‘I can tell you're anxious about this. We do this all the time. We're going to find out.’ She said, ‘If there is anything picked up, you're in the right hands.’ That was really reassuring.”
“Then, thankfully, after probably about 40 minutes, they just said, ‘Look, we can give you the all clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your baby's heart.’ I just remember the relief that came over us. She said, ‘I'll even get my head person to come in and confirm with you, too.’ Because I think she could just see the anxiety or feel it from me.”
“So yeah, it was a bit of a scare. I don't know if you'd call it traumatising, but it really then did heighten my anxiety around scans. Then from there, I was like, ‘Last time we got told this, and then it wasn't that. What if they never did pick up on it?’”
“My husband has always been so good in that sense. He's just like, ‘listen to the professionals. They've told us what it is and has really helped me in that.’”
“But I think when your mind's in that zone, you always just take that negative little thing and you run with it and you can't see past it. But that is where a lot of the anxiety and things around the baby's health and scans really started.”
“She was quite an active baby, so they kept reassuring me, ‘That’s a really good sign. She’s very active.’ But of course, when your mind’s just in that zone, you’re just like ‘But I’ve also read that fast too many movements is just as bad as decreased.’ Then my mind is constantly racing like, ‘Are these normal? Are they not? It’s my first pregnancy. I don’t know what to expect!’ There was just a lot going on. I didn’t know what was right or wrong...”
“Thankfully from there, things were pretty good for about the next eight weeks.”
“It was around that 26-week mark. I was meant to go to our usual ultrasound place, but they had rang me and said, ‘Actually, we want you to come in and see the foetal maternal specialist from now on.’ They are obstetricians that train in high-risk pregnancies. Again, they had said, because of the ulcerative colitis, because of the little scare we had, even though it was all proved okay with our daughter's heart, they just wanted to make sure that things were still tracking okay.”
“For me, seeing the foetal maternal specialist, actually, it's so hard to know what was right or wrong for your anxiety. For me, I think that really helped me because I connected with two of the obstetricians. I kept seeing the two obstetricians for the remainder of my pregnancy, and that continuity of care was incredible.”
“But also knowing, okay, now I am in high risk, I'm having more scans than a usual person. I had some friends that were pregnant at the same time, and they were just like, ‘Oh, no, we're just in and out.’ You think like, ‘Oh, Why am I not having the same as them?’ But obviously everyone's journey is so different.”
“I'd been speaking to my specialist at this time about my autoimmune disease and delivery. Because my autoimmune disease is bowel related, she had mentioned to me that if I delivered vaginally, then there was a possibility of either tearing or episiotomy that I might become incontinent for the rest of my life. That's quite a lot to, I guess, take on because I hadn't really thought about my birth yet in a sense. But when I had seen her and heard that, I was like, ‘Okay, maybe a caesarean is going to be the best option for me.’”
“We had gone in for our next scan after the 20-week one. It was around 26 weeks. We just got back from the baby moon, had the most incredible obstetrician, and I brought up a lot of my anxiety to him. I brought up my autoimmune disease and things.”
“And he just said, ‘Yeah, we can book it in with you now. If you want, we can pick the date. You just have to sign the form.’ He explained a little bit how it worked, and he said, ‘We'll go over it all more later.’ But he said, ‘Your baby is tracking perfectly healthy. Still around the 60th percentile, things are looking great.’”
“We left there with the forms to think about how we wanted to deliver, and things were really positive.”
“Then about a week and a half later from there, my autoimmune disease really started to flare. The symptoms can vary for people with ulcerative colitis. That's the strange thing, too. No one's symptoms are exactly the same. But for me, this involved quite a lot of blood loss whilst going to the bathroom and just unable to keep foods down and things like that.”
“Unfortunately, I started to flare and I started to lose a lot of blood when I was going to the bathroom. It'd been about two days of experiencing this, not being able to keep any food down, feeling severely dehydrated. I was trying to get a hold of my specialist because of course it happened over a weekend when you have limited access to these things.”
“She advised, ‘Go straight to emergency. You need to be admitted to hospital. You probably need some steroids to get this back on track.’”
“Unfortunately, again, where we live, it is regional. Our emergency was absolutely crowded with people on a Saturday night in the early hours. We sat there for about eight hours, and I still, unfortunately, haven't been seen. Multiple trips to the bathroom during this time, just feeling severely unwell, severely dehydrated, almost like I was going to faint. Ended up coming home, and then we had to wait about a day.”
“I messaged my specialist saying, ‘Look, I couldn't get in. I can still feel my daughter moving. That all feels okay, but I'm really worried. Obviously, I haven't really eaten for nearly three days now. I don't know what nutrients my daughter's getting’ et cetera. She said, ‘Come straight to my office in the morning, and I'm going to write a letter to the hospital. We're getting you in’. She's been awesome. She's been my specialist throughout, but she basically said, ‘Bring a bag in as well because you are getting admitted to hospital.’”
“A lot of anxiety started to peak around going into hospital. I just wanted to make sure my daughter was okay. That was my main thing. I couldn't care less what my body was doing to me. But I just kept thinking, ‘please tell me my daughter is okay.’”
“At this stage, I think I'd even gone down the rabbit hole of Googling things, as we all do. Yes, it sent me down into a pretty dark place. There was a lot of things that I read, and this will probably need a trigger warning, but it did say if you have ulcerative colitis, you are more likely to have a stillbirth or go into preterm labour.”
“Then I started freaking out thinking, ‘what if I end up losing my baby after all of this, or if I go into labour really early?’ Again, being regional, if you deliver before 32 weeks, you have to go up to Melbourne to deliver your baby because we just don't have the resources. Then all of this is running through my head. Then we got admitted to hospital, thankfully, with my specialist there. They got me into IV steroids and pumped me full of that.”
“But by this stage, I had lost four kilos, which obviously going into your third trimester, this is the time you'll usually start to really gaining and keeping that weight on for a healthy pregnancy. I had become anaemic because I had lost so much blood. So again, anaemia when you're growing a baby started to really freak me out thinking I'm not supplying enough blood to the baby. And just a lot was going through my mind.”
“There were other things they picked up in my blood test and things that they ended up having to give me through a drip. And then I ended up staying on the maternity ward for about five nights. So this was to not only get my flare under control, but it was to make sure, obviously, that my daughter was still going okay.”
“While I was in there, they would hook me up to the CTG. She was quite an active baby, so they kept reassuring me, ‘That's a really good sign. She's very active.’ But of course, when your mind's just in that zone, you're just like ‘But I've also read that fast too many movements is just as bad as decreased.’ Then my mind is constantly racing like, ‘Are these normal? Are they not?’ It's my first pregnancy. I don't know what to expect. There was just a lot going on. I didn't know what was right or wrong.”
“Sometimes they could get the results in half an hour, and then other times I would be sitting on the CTG for three to six hours just because they couldn't get a proper reading, or they'd have to wait for a head person to come in and check over it.”
“Definitely from there, the trauma really started in ‘Okay, hospitals for me are quite a scary place now.’ As much as I could not fault the care that I was in, it was just really hard being in there and just constantly worrying about my baby.”
“And then I started thinking, ‘they've given me these steroid medications. Are these safe for a baby?’ I'm quite reluctant around taking new things in pregnancy. I was so strict around what I was eating, what I was doing, and things like that. And then all of a sudden, they're pumping me full of medication. And it's like you start thinking around that as well.”
“This is likely where a lot of my insomnia did start. It wasn’t as severe as it became in the postpartum, but I would constantly wake up at around 2:00 or 3:00 AM and just could not go back to sleep, and I’d just be constantly rubbing my belly, just waiting to feel like some type of movement...”
Upon discharge, Natalie was told about the Maternal Assessment Unit at her local hospital where she could attend, instead of the Emergency Department, if she became unwell again or if she was ever worried about her baby’s movements.
“Don't know why the Emergency Department didn't tell me that. Anyway, this was both a blessing and a curse because then my anxiety, I latched onto the lady who told me. I said, ‘Can I just come in every week for a CTG?’ She just said, ‘Yes, you can do that if you need to.’”
“That week leading up to those, I would always get so stressed out, had to take time off work. Thankfully, my work was really supportive in that. But yeah, there was just so much going through my head. For me, I would constantly seek that reassurance, ‘Okay, we've got a good reading. You can go now.’ Whereas my husband saw it from the perspective that I was constantly just waiting around a week for these CTG to latch on to positive news or not.”
“It's crazy what your mind does.”
“From there, they said, ‘You're still going to see the maternal foetal medicine specialist, but you're going to have scans every two weeks.’ That was purely to track my daughter's growth. Again, having those scans for me felt like, ‘Yes, I get to see my daughter today. I get to hopefully to hear good news’ and things like that, and just seeking that reassurance. But it also did bring up that anxiety.”
“From there, we had our next one. He said, ‘your daughter's tracking in the 25th percentile.’ They were not worried about that. But for me, My head has gone, ‘hang on, she's gone from 60th to 25th. I've lost 4 kilos. Why is no one worried about the weight that I've lost?’ I'm really stressed about this.”
“Of course, I didn't tell these people that. Then I'd come home just an absolute mess, sobbing.”
“I can’t remember much of it, but this is likely where a lot of my insomnia did start. It wasn't as severe as it became in the postpartum, but I would constantly wake up at around 2:00 or 3:00 AM and just could not go back to sleep, and I'd just be constantly rubbing my belly, just waiting to feel like some type of movement.”
“I also started to get a little bit of spotting during this time. Again, my anxiety was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think I'm going into preterm labour.’ My Braxton Hicks really started. Again, I was reaching out to friends constantly, and some of them had never experienced Braxton Hicks at all, where there were others like, ‘Oh, no, that's fine. But this is quite early to be getting them.’ I was like, ‘Is it early? I don't know.’”
“Again, my mind was just racing with what to do and what's happening. ‘Is my daughter okay? Am I going to go into labour tonight or tomorrow? Is she decreasing in growth? What's actually happening?’ And there was just so much anxiety around that.”
“The worst it probably got was at… I was 35 weeks and 6 days. I was meant to have a scan at 34, but they pushed it back and my husband kept saying, ‘That's a good sign. They're not worried about it.’ But I really wanted that scan to check how things are going.”
“He came with me because he knew how anxious I was. He tried to come to most of them, and that was really reassuring for me as well. But I felt it reminded me of the 20-week scan because the way they were just taking their time, they were being a bit quieter than usual. They weren't asking as many questions to me, and then they were talking to each other.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, this just feels a bit odd.’ Then it was a new obstetrician that I hadn't seen yet... She was a bit more down the line. There's nothing wrong with that. My husband connected with her really well. He said ‘she was great. She just told us as it is.’ But yeah, it was a bit like, ‘Okay, why have I suddenly got this new person?’ Then later I found out she is the big boss. Then I was a bit like, ‘Oh, my gosh, why is the big boss doing my scan? Is this something serious?’”
“She actually, for once, printed me the Doppler readings of my baby, and I'd never received that before. I was like, ‘Oh, this is quite reassuring. I've got the Doppler readings.’ She was like, ‘Your baby's tracking well. They are dropping a little bit in percentile. Come back in two weeks and we'll reassess.’”
“But then she said, ‘Oh, we might book you in next week.’”
“I was like, ‘Why next week?’”
“She was like, ‘No, everything's fine. I'd like you to come back.’”
“Then, again, my mind just started racing. I was like, ‘Why do we have to come back in one week now, not two weeks?’”
“You’re just seeking that reassurance. She would tell me all these positive things, but I still just had that stress and worry in my mind...”
“I took that Doppler reading home. Probably the worst thing - I look back now - is actually having a copy of that because then I jumped straight onto Google. As a lot of us do, I was trying to be a doctor or an obstetrician, and I was Googling, what the hell do these Doppler readings mean?”
“One of the readings was in the lower end of a scale, I guess. Again, I'm not a medical expert, so I don't know. But that's really weird. What is that doing? Then I jumped on Google and it started telling me my daughter was brain sparring. I was like, ‘Why did she not tell me that she's doing that?’”
“My husband caught wind what I was doing. He said, ‘You need to get off Google. This is not good for your mental health.’”
Based on her husband’s suggestion, Natalie reached out to a friend who happens to be a midwife. “She's an amazing friend, but also an incredible midwife. And she said to me, I can tell you're really anxious about this. I've actually got a friend who is a midwife who sits in on all the scans and things. I'll send it to them to find out for you.“
“She sent it off to them and she said, ‘No, your baby is not showing signs of brain sparring. Everything is looking great. Try not to stress too much about it. I know it's easier said than done.’”
“She said, ‘I can tell you're really anxious.’ I explained to her I'd been sick and I felt like no one was listening to me or worried that I had lost so much weight and things. Then she actually referred me to one of her friends who's a midwife that can come out to your house or you can go in to see her privately as many times as you need. ‘She will check your baby's heartbeat and things like that.’ That all I got set up. I met her. She was incredible. She stayed with me for the last few weeks of my pregnancy.”
“She was also very reassuring if I had scans and things. She had a bit of ‘an inside’. She worked at the hospital as well, so she would always be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can see you've been in the hands of this obstetrician. They're incredible. They know what they're doing.’ So again, it's like you said, you're just seeking that reassurance.”
“So she would tell me all these positive things, but it's like I still just had that stress and worry in my mind. And then each week, I did have to go back in for growth scans then. So there was definitely something going on that I felt they weren't telling me.”
“And then it was about 36 weeks and 6 days. And then my husband came with me again and he said, ‘Natalie thinks the baby's brain sparring. And she said, Get off Google. That's the worst thing you can do for your mental health.’”
“But she said, ‘There is something that your baby is displaying. She is in a bit of distress in the womb. We can't confirm for sure. There have been slight signs of brain sparring.’”
“Then I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I knew it. Why wouldn’t they tell me that?’ Then I just started bawling my eyes out thinking, Something's going to happen to our daughter! Why is she doing this? Why is she in distress? What can we do?”
“Then she said, ‘Look, we're going to send you home for one week. We need you to come back and we're going to do your Doppler readings again because they have shown abnormal a week or two in a row now.’ She just said, ‘Sometimes it's honestly just the way the baby’s sitting in the womb.’”
“But again, I just had a feeling like, I just thought there's been so much that has happened since I got sick now, and we still had that scare at the 20 weeks. So I started thinking, Is it related to that? They did rule it out, but is anything going to come from that?”
“Going home from there, that was honestly the longest and toughest week, just waiting to get through that week and thinking, is my baby going to be okay?”
“I started really worrying about her movements by that stage, just overthinking and overthinking so much. Again, I got on Google and went down a very dark rabbit hole.”
“I also was in a few Facebook groups for people who had been through IBD [Inflammatory Bowel Disease] with pregnancy, and I was constantly searching ‘preterm labour’ or ‘abnormal Doppler readings’, and then it would come up with people's previous experience. There were lots of positive ones being like, ‘Don't worry, my baby came. They were healthy.’ But then there were a few that did say, ‘My baby passed away,’ and things like that. This was really, really tough to read.”
“I just kept thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is going to happen. We're not going to get our daughter in our arms.’”
“I actually don't know how I made it through that week without… I don't know. That was a really hard week.”
“They all knew I had anxiety. But at this stage, we hadn’t really thought, maybe I need to speak to someone about what is actually going on. As we all thought, hopefully our daughter would arrive and then it would bypass...”
“Going into that scan, my husband couldn't be there because he had a really big project at work.”
“But my dad was around at the time and he said, ‘I'm coming with you. You need to have someone with you.’ They had seen how distressed I had been, and they all knew I had anxiety. But at this stage, we hadn't really thought, maybe I need to speak to someone about what is actually going on. As we all thought, hopefully our daughter would arrive and then it would bypass.”
“It was the previous obstetrician I had been seeing. She took her time and she just said, ‘Look, because this is a few weeks in a row now of your baby showing some signs of stress, I'm going to send them to my friends at the Royal Women's, and we're going to get a second opinion.’”
“Again, I just grabbed that one bad thing.”
“She said, ‘I need you to go across to the hospital now’ - so where I would have the scans was opposite to the hospital - she said, ‘You're going to go straight into MAU, the Maternal Assessment Unit. You're going to do a CTG and just get them to check bub’s heart rate.’”
“I'm thinking, ‘Why are you getting me to do that when you can see everything?’ Again, then my mind started really racing. I was absolutely bawling by this stage.”
“My dad was with me, hugging me. He's like, ‘It's okay, we'll get through this.’ He came over with me. The midwives hooked me up, did the CTG. We were sitting there for about an hour at this stage. One of the young midwives in training came in. She goes, ‘Everything's looking good. We're going to unhook you now and you're probably going to go home.’”
“I was like, Oh, okay, maybe I've been crying for no reason! Maybe there was no reason to worry!”
“Then just as I was getting unhooked, the obstetrician who had done my scan had come over.”
“She said, ‘Look, I've spoken with the Royal Women's. Because there have been abnormal readings so many days in a row now, we think there could be a knot in your placenta.’”
“She said, ‘We're actually going to get your baby out today.’”
“This was at 37 and 6 weeks.”
“The obstetrician said, ‘You're not an emergency, but you're a semi-emergency. You're going to go home, you're going to get a bag, you're going to come back. Then once we've done today's elective ones, you'll be the next in line.’”
“She said, ‘Nothing should happen to your baby in this time, but we just need to get her out because she will grow better and be safer on the outside.’”
“Then on come all of the emotions like, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to meet my baby today, but also, is everything going to be okay with my baby? What is actually going on? Why is she showing signs of stress? Why is my placenta failing me? Am I failing my daughter?“
“I knew since I got sick that something wasn't right. And it just, I guess, connected all of those emotions.”
“Of course, I rang my husband and he was like, ‘oh, my God!’ He was on a big digger at the time and he had to stop it all and answer the call.”
“We look back and laugh now, but it wasn't until the midwives handed him the scrubs that he was like, ‘Oh, are we actually having our daughter today?’”
“I'm like, ‘Yes!’ Here's me just crying and just trying to process what the hell has been happening these last few weeks, and what's going to happen today! Things like that. But then he was like, ‘Oh, shit, we're actually having our baby!’”
“I think the worrying shifted from, ‘Okay, I’ve had my baby, she’s here.’ Now, ‘oh my gosh, I have to keep this baby alive’...”
“I had prepared to have a caesarean. So that for me has always been a positive. I sat down with the private midwife who was visiting my home. She stayed for two hours, explained the whole process. She explained how many people were going to be in the room. She explained all their jobs. I wrote down a lot of notes, and that was really comforting for me.”
“I wasn't scared about the procedure, but I was just so scared about our daughter.”
“I said to the obstetrician, ‘is our daughter going to have any disability and things that we need to prepare for? Because she was sending less oxygen to her heart and it's going to her brain.’ And she said, ‘your baby should be fine. We're just going to do this. We're going to get her out. We just need her to be growing better.’”
“Again, just, I guess, looking for that reassurance.”
“And then, yeah, it was about 7:30 PM that night. We went to get ready for surgery. I had a really positive birth experience, and I often think to this day, if my C-section had been traumatic, I don't know if I would have the strength to be here. Just knowing where my brain went in that postpartum period, I just constantly think, I know I'm very fortunate to have had a positive birth experience.”
“Having gone into that, knowing that that was always going to be the procedure, even though it was a bit like, ‘Okay, we're having the baby today earlier than expected,’ but this is what we had planned for the last trimester, and this is what I knew was going to happen on how I would birth my baby. I think that made a big difference.”
“I often think it's weird how things happen, but when I had gotten sick at 28-29 weeks and ended up on the maternity ward, I had the most incredible midwife. We just connected so well. She really looked after me. She loved golden retrievers. I've got a golden retriever. She went for the same footie team as my husband. Then I remember waiting in the room in our scrubs and they said, ‘Hey, you've got a really great midwife delivering your baby.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God, imagine it's her and she's delivering our daughter that would just It make me feel so much better about this situation.’ Then sure enough, she's like, ‘Hey, Natalie, look at you. You're doing great. You're about to have your daughter. I helped you when you were sick!’”
“If I hadn't had my daughter on this date, I wouldn't have maybe had her as a midwife to deliver our baby. And for me, that was just a really positive highlight of everything. And even my husband said, he's like, ‘Yeah, she was an awesome midwife.’ I mean, they're all amazing in their own sense. I could never do what they do. But I just think having that, again, a little bit of that continuity, I had known her face, I had been with her for five nights in hospital, and now here she was going to deliver our daughter. It just made it really positive.”
“So, yeah, very thankful to obviously have had that positive birth experience.”
“And yeah, my daughter came. She was quite on the smaller side, so around the fifth percentile in the end, she was 2.7 kilos. So we had no outfits that fit her. We did not come prepared. My husband had to race off and get some preemie stuff to fit her. But she passed all her tests with flying colours. She was, thankfully, healthy. There was nothing wrong.”
“Then they had just said that my placenta had calcified. ‘It was on the way out,’ they said, and they had actually said, ‘Look, if we had to kept her in until the 39 weeks when you originally booked your C-section, they said she may have made it, but she would have likely just kept decreasing and showing those signs of distress.’ They said she is going to grow so much better now on the outside.”
“I think that was the first sign of me actually going, ‘Okay, I trust what you're saying.’ I think because she was in my arm, she was safe, she was healthy, it was like, ‘Okay, I trust this. I've got my daughter now. We're here.’”
“That was a really big moment for me.”
“Looking back now, I remember once I finally talked about my pregnancy to a psychologist and to friends and family, they're like, ‘That's actually quite traumatic what you've been through.’ I was like, ‘Is it?’ You don't see it when you're going through that, but it's true.”
Natalie reflects that some support for her anxiety during pregnancy may have made a difference to the postpartum that she was about to be faced with. “My mum will say, and my husband will say, ‘We knew you weren't well,’ but they didn't realise the severity of it.”
“I was still eating. I was still sleeping for the most part. But it was that latching on to what the health care professionals are saying and then going against what they're saying, and Googling things, and self-diagnosing, and all of that crazy stuff your brain does.”
“But I think if I had had the resources in place to go, ‘Okay, I know now that I'm really starting to cling on to this. What are some exercises I can do to ground me or bring me back?’ And there's some things that I've thankfully been able to work through postpartum with an amazing perinatal psychologist.”
“I just think, though, if I had maybe have had that help during or throughout the pregnancy, then even though there were definitely things there that were showing signs of stress and things like that, then it would have hopefully have eased my mind and I would have been able to look at things from, ‘Okay, you're right. They've told me this. They're not rushing me to hospital to get her out. It's not that severe.’ Yeah, different things like that.”
“But yeah, if you could turn back time.”
“I think the worrying shifted from, ‘Okay, I've had my baby, she's here.’ Now, ‘oh my gosh, I have to keep this baby alive.’ It just happened quite quickly.”
“It had just started to really overtake me because I just kept thinking, the minute you go to sleep, something’s going to happen to your baby...”
“Being a regional hospital - could not fault the care or anything like that - but you are rushed out very quickly. So two nights after a c-section, I was being sent home. And you're trying to recover, obviously. You're trying to learn how to breastfeed. You're trying to learn all of this. You're trying to learn how to even just swaddle a baby and all these things that you've never done before.”
“They had a sheet that they give you on discharge, and it said, ‘Please tick all of the things you would like to learn.’ I just ticked everything. I just thought, I'm a first-time mum. Obviously, that was anxiety probably speaking too, but it was like, I want to know this, this, and this. It was like a three or four-page sheet, and I just wanted to know everything about how to take care of a baby because it's a whole new experience.”
“This was probably the only unfortunate thing that happened is we did have a midwife at the time, and she skimmed through it, started talking about things here and there, and then she said, ‘Oh, you've got a private midwife in your home. She'll explain it all to you.’ She just said it like that, and I was a bit like, ‘Okay, I've just been through… I came into hospital two days ago for a scan. Now I've suddenly had a baby, and now I'm just being told someone else will talk me through this.’”
“I think that was It was a really hard part for me to grasp onto because I was like, ‘will I be okay though? I'm still going home tonight without the help of the hospital and without the help of midwives to care for my baby’ and things like that. It certainly did probably trigger a little bit of anxiety there as well.”
“I hadn't really slept in the hospital. I think most of the time you're not going to anyway. There's a lot going on, especially in public, you’re sharing a room with other people and things like that. Tilly was constantly crying until my milk had come in, so there were things like that.”
“But probably for those two nights in the hospital, I had that reassurance of knowing I'm in a hospital if something were to happen.”
“Then we came home, and I remember my husband - this was probably the first sign - he's like, ‘What do you want to eat? You've gone nine months without sushi and certain cheese!’ He's like, ‘What do you want to get for dinner tonight?’ I just couldn't even think. I was like, ‘I'm not even hungry. I don't want to eat. I just want to know that my baby's okay.’ But she was okay. She was healthy and she had started feeding, my breast milk had come in and we had no issues with latching and things. There were so many positives, but your mind is just like, ‘Oh my God, it's coming into night-time tonight, like I'm not going to have the midwives there. What do we do?’”
“Then I think, I don't know why or how, but I just suddenly started getting this overwhelming fear of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I think, again, I had gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. Is the room too hot? Is she in a safe enough?”
“She was in a bassinet, then I read that some bassinets aren't approved in Australia, not all of them, it's only cots. Then I'm thinking, ‘Oh, my God, we've done the wrong thing!’ My mind just really started spiralling.”
“I didn't really tell my husband about that, but I just could not switch off at night time. It would get a few nights in, and then he was like, ‘oh, Tilly slept pretty good for a newborn.’ We were blessed. She's always been a pretty good sleeper. But me, on the other hand, had gone from sleeping pretty good to now I just could not sleep.”
“It had just started to really overtake me because I just kept thinking, the minute you go to sleep, something's going to happen to your baby. I would just constantly, like a lot of us, and I've heard on your podcast so many times, you're watching their breathing, you're feeling their breathing. You just cannot switch off!”
“Like I said to my husband, I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy, not being able to sleep when you are so exhausted. You're still getting up during the day to feed and care for a baby. You're still recovering from whichever way you gave birth and things like that. Trying to learn all of these new things as a new mother. And just I would be so exhausted.”
“And I had such an amazing village. They would come over and try to assist me in sleeping and take Tilly when we needed some rest and things like that. But I would then put so much pressure on myself and I would be laying there in the day and at night, and my mind would just be racing.”
“It started from, ‘if I'm not watching her breathe in her sleep, something is going to happen.’ And I was so fixated on that. And as I said, Tilly, we were pretty lucky. She'd been quite a good sleeper since we bought her home, not so much in the hospital, but once we settled into a routine, I had my husband helping in the nights and things, too. You know, you'd still get up to feed her, but in between these feeds and nappy changes and her crying, I could not shut off.”
“It was also as well the pressure of knowing I'm going to have to wake up in two or three hours to feed her anyway.”
“At the time, I didn't know how much weight she had been gaining since we left hospital. We were waiting on our next check-in and things like that. So you're constantly worrying, ‘am I giving her enough?’ I don't know what my breast milk is producing. I was starting to learn how to pump and things like that as well, which also took a really bad toll on my mental health.”
“And then by about eight-nine days postpartum, it started to change to, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my life now. I am never going to sleep again.’ And the inbuilt fear of the bedroom and things came flooding in.”
“I would go to the bathroom that was close to our bedroom and I would stare down at the bed and I would be like, ‘You are not going to sleep tonight. You’re never going to sleep again.’ Things then started changing from, ‘if you go to sleep, something will happen to Tilly’, to, ‘You’re never going to sleep again. This is your life now...’”
“It was probably about six or seven days postpartum, so around five to six nights of not a decent amount of sleep at all. I remember laying there one night and we had an automated air freshener in our room. If there was no motion detected, it would just automatically go off every hour and spray a nice lavender spray, again, to try and help me sleep and things like that. But then it turned into this episode of me counting how many times that went off, that I was still awake and not getting an ounce of sleep.”
“And obviously in between, I was feeding Tilly and changing her, so I was awake anyway, but it was when I was laying in bed and I would be counting and I would hear it go off once, twice. And then we'd get to eight, nine, 10. And I'm thinking that's over 10 hours without any sleep at all!”
“And I just wanted to crumble.”
“It started to become a trigger.”
“It wasn't until a few weeks later that I said to my husband, ‘Can you just please move that air freshener away?’ Because I was trying to do all the right things with sleep hygiene, not look at my phone, not look at the time. But then it was like this air fresher that was just letting off this lovely baby-safe smell to help you calm down had just started to become a trigger.”
“I would sit there and just count it and go, ‘Okay, that's another eight hours gone by! Now it's the morning and I've got to get up and do things in the day, and I just couldn't rest.’”
“You just become so fixated on, I need to sleep, I need to sleep. Why am I not sleeping? I'm so exhausted. Why? You can't control your brain with that. It's just horrible. I think the best thing we did was eventually get rid of that. Now it just sits in our lounge room. But I remember at the time, I just couldn't even look at it after a while.”
“ I just thought, I'm just counting and relying on that too much. I'm noticing how little sleep I'm actually getting.”
“Linton will say, ‘No, I heard you snoring in that time,’ but I had remembered I'd been out. I could hear myself snoring, but I was never having that deep restorative sleep that I so badly craved because it was like the minute I switched off, something was going to happen.”
“Then at this stage, it had been like the 10th going into the 11th night. I had actually started to get a really overwhelming fear, this probably sounds so stupid, but of the bedroom.”
“I would go to the bathroom that was close to our bedroom and I would stare down at the bed and I would be like, ‘You are not going to sleep tonight. You're never going to sleep again.’”
“Things then started changing from, ‘if you go to sleep, something will happen to Tilly’, to, ‘You're never going to sleep again. This is your life now.’ I was so exhausted.”
“I had my mother-in-law and my mum come over in the day to take Tilly for a few hours. They're like, ‘Just go and sleep, just go and sleep.’ But I think now having that added pressure of, ‘Oh, my gosh, they've got Tilly, she's going to need a feed in two or three hours, quick try and sleep,’ it just started to really deteriorate my mental health, putting that pressure on myself, trying to sleep.”
“Then I ended up becoming quite irritable. I remember I just had to keep clenching my hands and fist, squeezing the blanket, being like, ‘why the hell can I not sleep?’ I just couldn't sleep.”
“Looking back now, it just really shows you where your mind can go, but what the lack of sleep can actually do to you and your mental health...”
“So this part of my story, only immediate family would know that this was occurring, but I am ready to share. I've spoken to my psychologist a lot about it, and I think for me, this was definitely the darkest that I ever got, where this little stick man popped into my head.”
“And it really, looking back now, it just really shows you where your mind can go, but what the lack of sleep can actually do to you and your mental health.”
“I would be sitting there with my eyes closed because I was so exhausted, but my mind would never actually switch off, and I had not had a decent amount of deep sleep that I really needed.”
“It was probably going into the 11th night, postpartum. I was just like, I cannot have another night of no sleep. I had been counting the air freshener, and adding up all those hours that had gone by without a wink of sleep.”
“Tilly had been crying on and off throughout the night. Of course, my husband was sleeping soundly, switched off to it all, so I was getting up and I would have to wake him - because I was recovering from the C-section, he'd help me feed her and things like that.”
“As soon as she'd feed, she'd be drowsy and go back to sleep after a while. So my husband also went back to sleep. And it was about three or four in the morning and I was sitting there and I looked at my phone and I remember, yeah, it was around three or four. And I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it's already the early hours of the morning.’”
“And I just started to sit there on the edge of the bed. I crawled to the edge of the bed. I was really irritable by this stage. I have never felt like that before either. I just had all of this inbuilt frustration. I'd been tossing and turning. I'd been trying to shut my mind off. I think I'd even listen to some sleep podcast to try and calm myself down, but nothing was working by this stage, and I just was at breaking point.”
“I was sitting there and I was just clenching my fist open and shut. And suddenly, I don't know if you would call it a hallucination, but suddenly this, this sounds crazy again, but this angry little stick man just popped into my head and he was just in black and white and he had a triangle face with really his angry eyebrows, but he was drawn out of like, sticks.”
“As he was popping into my head, I was scanning around the room and I saw the blinds hanging down with our curtains… Then the little man that came into my head was saying, ‘just do it. You know you will never sleep again unless you do it.’ I can't recall much else from that night, but I know that I just sat there crying, crying and shaking and clenching my fist, and I knew I did not want to do that. I had looked at my daughter and I had looked at my husband both sleeping, and I thought, I really don't want to do this.”
“I just thought, ‘Why am I thinking like this?’ But also I had this person in my head telling me, ‘You need to do this. This is the only way you will ever sleep again.’”
“I don't know how I made it through the next few hours, but I remember just sitting on the edge of my bed. I probably looked so just destroyed by this point. Somehow I made it to about 7:00-7:30 in the morning, and that's when my husband woke up and saw me sitting at the edge of the bed.”
“My husband had woken because Tilly had started crying. The first thing he actually said is, ‘What are you doing with your fist?’ Because I was just grabbing the blanket and I was like clenching and I had so much frustration and I was just defeated by this point.”
“He had said to me, ‘What's wrong? Are you okay?’ He put his arm around me.”
“I just remember thinking, ‘Why have I got insomnia?’ I started Googling a lot of that. Of course, it popped up with the Royal Women's, which is a very trusted source, so I knew it was the right source to be looking at, but it said insomnia and irritability could be signs of postpartum psychosis. Then I started thinking, ‘Oh, my God, it's been 10 days, I've got postpartum psychosis! I'm seeing a little man in my head telling me to kill myself. This is definitely it!’”
“I think I'd convinced myself that something was going on, but it wasn't until I'd been on the edge of that bed that morning and my husband had woken and seen me and he just said, ‘I'll never forget how just destroyed you looked.’”
“The insomnia was so, it's really debilitating that it had really pushed me to that. He just rang my mum straight away. He just rang my mum and said, ‘This is what Nat's been saying to me. We need you to come over.’”
“Mum and Dad live around the corner, thankfully, so they were here within a few minutes. My mum actually grew up with a schizophrenic mum, so she is very familiar with mental health and how that works. She actually called the Crisis Assessment Team, the CAT Team.”
“She said, ‘We're going to get you to help that you need. It's okay.’”
“My husband's always been my rock, but my mum, through this postpartum journey, really became my rock. She really saved my life.”
To be continued…
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This episode of Perinatal Stories Australia is proudly sponsored by Mums Matter Psychology—because your mental health matters.
Frances and her expert team of psychologists, social workers, and occupational therapists are passionate about providing affordable, high-quality mental health care for pregnant women and parents with children up to 4 years old.
Through Medicare bulk-billed therapy sessions—up to 20 at no cost to you—they make support accessible to everyone. If you’re in Victoria, visit one of their welcoming clinic locations. Outside Victoria? Their nationwide Telehealth services bring care to your fingertips.
Mums Matter Psychology also offers a range of online therapy groups and webinars, providing additional ways to access support and connect with others on a similar journey.
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