A few weeks after the birth of her second child, Erin1 began experiencing symptoms that were different from those she had with her first.
Transcript
So you stay for five days and five nights. So they can monitor you. A psychiatrist comes in and talks to you, asks you how you’re doing. And I was surprisingly good, partially because, having been through exactly almost the same thing with my son – she was like an ounce smaller than him. She looked just like him. She just – I was kind of like, “Okay. I’ve been through this before.” My partner was much more supportive. And actually, recovering from C-Section was easier than my recovery from the other birth. And my parents, who came to see me the next day, my mom said to me, “Erin, you look – you look so much better than when you had your son – like, so much better.” It wasn’t until she had been, again, for a week – two weeks at this sort of high risk unit, and then she was moved to community hospital NICU. And it wasn’t until she was there that, really, the depression set in.
Interviewer: How – how many weeks was that?
Probably two weeks – two or three weeks.
Interviewer: And was it similar to what you’d experienced the first time?
No. This time it was not the anxiety; it was just that – the bleakness, the crying, the sadness. Part of it felt from this – which I had felt with my son – this failure somehow, that I hadn’t managed to carry my babies for nine months, that I had failed again. I had brought another baby into the world too early. And that was on my mind a lot. And yes, I just – I just – like I said, this bleak sadness set in, this feeling of hopelessness, the feeling that I just wasn’t good at a mother – at being a mother. And my partner and I were fighting a lot. And I remember, one day – and I don’t even remember what it was. We were having a fight in the car on the way to visit her in the NICU. And when I got to the NICU, I had sort of composed myself, but when I got there, I just start crying. And they had a social worker in the NICU who came over to talk to me. And she mentioned that support group that I had been to, years ago, as something I should think about.
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