This anxiety disorder has been labelled as "post-traumatic stress disorder" - A condition that was sparked by my baby girl almost choking to death at 5 weeks old. It was sudden. It was frightening. And after many, many tests and a few sleepless nights in the hospital the doctors still could not confirm what caused the thick sticky fluid that had clogged her nose and mouth so suddenly and caused her to turn blue and stop breathing. And they could not assure me that it would not happen again.
And so it began.
Night after night of worrying that this incident would happen again. And it did. Three more times, but each time to a less severe degree. I had my husband there with me; but i have never felt so sad, so frightened and so hopelessly alone in all my life.
I had recently undertaken a big move from Singapore to the Netherlands.
- I had no friends and no family that i could turn to.
- I couldn't speak or read Dutch fast enough.
- I couldn't drive as easily on the opposite side of the road.
- I knew nothing about babies.
- My husband was going through a terrible time at work. He was teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown caused by extreme overwork, lack of sleep and general exhaustion.
I developed a condition of hyper vigilance. The slightest sound in the night would have me leaping up in terror. The smallest movement in bed as my husband turned over was enough to send me spiralling into an irrational rage and unable to fall back to sleep. At the height of this anxiety i was probably getting 3 to 5 hours of VERY broken sleep a night. Can we say Vicious Cycle? I write in the past tense, but all this is still happening. The difference is that i am now largely aware that i have a problem and i have been getting help. There is still such a long way to go.
But this is what i would like anxiety and PTS sufferers to know. My baby's choking incident was not the starting point of this disorder. It was the trigger on a platform of anxieties that have been steadily building over a very long time. It was a big blow when we discovered we were fertility-challenged. The IVF route was like Old Macdonald's farm: An oestrogen shot here, a progesterone shot there; a harvest here and an implant there; a 2 week wait here and a blood test there - here a shot, there a shot, everywhere a shot, shot, shot shot ... Who wouldn't fight tooth and claw to protect this beautiful baby who we so badly wanted and worked so hard to get?
All this can take a toll on the best of us. I am human, i get tired, i make mistakes .
So dear reader, if you can relate - know that you are not crackers. No one suddenly wakes up with a full blown anxiety condition one morning. Like all things, it takes time to grow and someone to feed it!
