(The 5th and final blog in my series about my very personal, unpleasant pregnancy experience. Please read the previous posts before reading this one, otherwise it’ll all be out of context. WARNING: These are NOT cheery posts. They are a real, authentic, warts and all account of my quite horrible pregnancy experience, while managing CFS and the Electrosensitivity that developed during the pregnancy. Read Part 1 to see why I now believe this occurred. Please be cautious when reading these posts. What happened to me is very unlikely to happen to you. What happened to me is VERY unusual, but I need to tell the story in case it helps even one other person!)
Crisis Point: Depression & Suicidal Thoughts
Despite my new daughter bringing me such joy in my life, when Sophie was 6 weeks old, I wasn’t coping. As I walked at our local lake in an attempt to ignite some endorphins, distract myself from the continuous nausea, and basically get out of the house to give D a break (and some TV!), I felt despair.
All hope was gone. The electrosensitivity seemed here to stay. Accompanied by the nausea, it gave me very little reason to want to remain on this earth.
“But I had a baby!”, you might say.
“Yes”, I would have said, “but what kind of a mother could I be to her when I was so ill. What sort of life would it be for her when she had to live with no TV, computers, etc in the house? And what kind of life was it for D. They would both be better off without the burden of me. Sophie was so young she wouldn’t remember me to miss me. David was a good looking, charismatic man who could easily find someone else to be a Mum to Sophie. And how could I possibly keep on living the non-life I was “living”?”
(And so goes the thoughts of a person who is so ill they are contemplating suicide. These thoughts were completely rational to me at the time … and to some extent, even looking back, they still seem quite rational under the circumstances.)
Suicide had always been something I considered selfish. I couldn’t understand it when people left grieving relatives and friends to pick up the pieces while they took “the easy way out”. Selfish!
I had never considered these people were in such a defeated, negative state of mind that they actually may have thought they were doing their family and friends a favour by ‘topping’ themselves.
Once again, life was teaching me never to judge until you’ve walked a day in the other person’s shoes – and then have another look!
That day I seriously considered suicide for the first and only time.
Luckily my counselling and psychology-trained mind still had a little voice – especially the suicide intervention trained bit! I knew I needed help, but what exactly?! No one could help the electrosensitivity. Many had tried and failed.
Counselling couldn’t change my circumstances or my illness. What was the use?
But I knew I had to at least try – for Sophie and for D.
It broke my heart to see the sparkly light in D’s eyes starting to dull with the burden of my illness. I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing more of that, plus putting a similar burden onto my child.
Getting Help
I went home that night and told my husband about the suicidal thoughts I’d been having.
It was hard, but I knew I had to tell him because I had always told him everything in our 11 year realationship, and vice versa.
We hugged each other and cried, both of us not knowing what to do, both of us completely overwhelmed and at a total loss as to how to handle this situation.
That night my friend, Steve from my Honours year in psychology came for his weekly dinner. At the time he was doing his Doctorate in Psychology and was doing his placement at a psychology practice.
After telling him what I had been thinking, he gently suggested that maybe I should have some counselling. With a sense of defeat and hopelessness, I agreed maybe I should.
So the next day I made an appointment where he was doing his placement, and I also called my doctor and made an appointment with him.
I went to see my doctor, told him my situation and asked for some anti-depressants.
I truly didn’t believe that anti-depressants would make any difference and I told him that, but I also told him that I needed to do everything that I could possibly could do to get myself out of this depression so that I could be there for my daughter. He agreed and was very supportive. My GP is a great guy!
Counselling
I started the counselling fairly soon after with a very stern yet compassionate psychologist named Erica. Erica used a style of counselling which generally allowed me to talk about whatever topic I wanted to talk about. She directed me at times but generally she just listened.
Often I would walk in each week and say “I don’t want to be here”, because I just felt that it didn’t matter what I talked about or how much I dealt with my emotions, she couldn’t change the fact that I got headaches from electricity.
Nothing I said, no emotions I dealt with, nothing I talked about regarding my Mum, my Dad, or anything else was going to change the physical effects and what was going on for me.
At that time, getting rid of those physical effects was the only way I could see for me to feel better mentally. And she couldn’t change the nausea either (that I still had constantly, incidentally, which was one of the major issues causing the depression).
But, over time it did help to go to see Erica every week, even if it was just someone other than my family and friends to talk to about what I was going through.
I could say anything to her, I didn’t have to worry about what she thought of me, I didn’t have to worry about burdening her with my pain, my fears, with my anxiety, or my worries, and that was the best part of going to a counsellor.
Just being able to say everything and anything, and not having to worry about the impact that was having on her and our relationship in the way I worried about speaking about similar things with my husband or family members or friends.
I always worried that I was burdening them and so I very rarely talked about how I truly felt or the extent of those feelings.
Healing Begins …
In the end, I had the counselling for 12 to 18 months and it made a big difference just to be able to talk to someone that wasn’t my family or friends.
I’m not really sure that it was the counselling or anything else that really lifted the depression. I think it was the combination of everything, and I think, mostly, in the end, it was when my body healed enough for the nausea and heart burn to go away that I started to be able to think clearly again.
That heavy weight of depression (that anyone who has experienced depression will know very well), that weight on your chest when you wake up in the morning, that heaviness, that black cloud that you walk around in all day … When the nausea lifted, the cloud of depression lifted too, but speaking to my psychologist every week and just letting my feelings and thoughts out really helped too.
I gave up my anti-depressants after about three months. I don’t believe that it was a chemical issue with me. It may well have been to some extent, but I didn’t believe that at the time. I just chose to stop taking them (not recommended to anyone reading this!).
So, in the end, the depression did lift and I started to move forward in my life. I’ve written a number of times about the experience with electrosensitivity. One of them is called ‘Allergic’ to Electricity: My Story With Electrosensitivity, and the other is Trapped in my body: CFS, Pregnancy & Electrosensitivity. There are also other blog posts that refer to the pain, dealing with the pain and electrosensitivity, so I won’t go into that here.
In Summary
The long and the short of it, for me pregnancy made me much worse from a physical and mental symptom point of view – both CFS symptoms and the added ones.
Effectively, those symptoms and the effect they had on my relationship with my husband were the reason that we ended up breaking up.
The greatest casualty of my pregnancy, and of my beautiful, vibrant daughter coming into this world and lighting up our lives (and every one of her extended family’s lives!), I believe, was the loss of my marriage to her Dad – my marriage to my soul mate.
I still bear the scars of that casualty, and still feel very sad to this day that this illness had that impact on our lives.
Yet I also believe very strongly that everything in life is meant to be, no matter how difficult it is at that time. I believe it’s happening for a reason.
Whether that’s just a way for me to make sense of these things and to ease the emotional pain of these things, I don’t know, but that’s the way I deal with it.
And I see many things that have since come from my divorce from Sophie’s Dad. I see the strengths that were unknown to me, that I had within myself, and the resilience that I have built since then. I see the benefits of that.
And there are certain people who I adore in my life now, who I very likely would not have met if not for my divorce from Sophie’s dad.
D and I still, to this day, have quite a good relationship. We partner very well in bringing Sophie up.
From day one he was an amazing father and he still is. He’s now married again and my daughter, who I was so worried was going to be an only child, now has a sister (step-sister), who is two years older than her, and she has a brother too because her Dad and step-Mum have a 3 1/2 year old little boy.
And so my daughter has a little brother and a big sister :-).
I’ve realised we often fear the worst when difficult times occur, but life often works out a lot better than what we could have ever expected.
And despite all the hardship, I now know that I went through all this so that I can make a difference to other people going through similar things – so that I can have the life I have right now.
It’s all come together to make me the person that I am today.
My Message To Others Considering Pregnancy While Living With CFS
So would I recommend pregnancy to anyone who has CFS?
That’s not my role to play. It’s not my position to recommend that to anyone or to not recommend that to anyone. It is a very personal decision for each person who has CFS / ME or other chronic illnesses to weigh up themselves and to consider.
Most people would not go through what I went through.
I now know that I have pyroluria, a genetic condition that meant that I had very low levels, if any, of Zinc in my body, B3, B6 and some omega-6 fatty acids (I believe).
So if you Google that and find out the effects of having low levels (or none of) those nutrients in your system, you’ll see why I possibly experienced what I did. And that helps me too to understand.
I have a written another blog that gives my suggestions for CFS patients who want to have a baby. Once again, they’re not coming from a medical perspective or any other perspective other than my own personal experience.
And I know many people who had perfect, normal pregnancies while living with CFS. I also know people who thrived in pregnancy who have CFS. You could be one of these people.
It Was Worth It!
I guess the final thing that I want to say is, if you really, really want to have a baby, if you really, really want children, having a daughter is the best thing that I have ever done in my life. She is the sunshine of my life and has been for the last 10 ½ years, and despite the pain, and despite what I have gone through to have her (and to continue to be her mother), I don’t regret anything.
She has given me a purpose in this world that I never had before motherhood.
It was worth it all, but I do wish that some of the casualties of this did not occur, and I do wish that I didn’t have to go through such a hardship just to have her. But that’s life and that’s my life.
That was my experience of pregnancy. I needed to share that just in case it helps one person. I was hesitant to share it, as I’ve said before, because I don’t want to put anyone off having children by reading my story.
I really hope you see that this is just one person’s experience and that it’s very unlikely to be your experience if you’re considering having a baby.
Please leave me your feedback. I really want to hear what you have to say about these blogs.
Please, if you know anyone who experiences electrosensitivity, I would really love to hear from them too because I do plan to start writing more blogs about electosensitivity and how it affects me.
More importantly I plan to write about ways to manage electrosensitivity in a powerful way so that it doesn’t destroy your life. I plan to find ways to support those people in the world who are not using the internet because they get headaches or whatever other symptoms they get from electrosensitivity.
I plan to find a way to emotionally support those people who are sitting in their homes feeling like they are aliens to this world, like I felt for so long – and sometimes still do.
So if you know anyone who experiences electrosensitivity or you are one of those people, please email me or contact me via Twitter or our Facebook page. I want to hear from you.
I want to create a community to emotionally support others with this rare condition – this condition that I believe unfortunately in this ever-growing electro-magnetic world is probably going to grow in prevalence [I’ve recently found other online communities here and here for those with electrosensitivity].
And so I end it there. That’s my series on Pregnancy, CFS and Electrosensitivity and my experience with it. Thank you for your patience if you’ve read the whole 5 blog posts in this series, and please let me know what you think of the blogs – negative, positive, anything in between.
Thanks guys
Keep Smiling!
Louise
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 …
Related links: “Allergic To Electricity”: My Story With Electrosensitivity, Trapped In My Body: CFS, Pregnancy and Electrosensitivity, The Dilemma of Pain: An Unusual Choice, CFS and Pain: A Silent War On An Internal Battlefield