Today’s guest had a pregnancy marked by extremely easy things and significantly hard things. Getting pregnant was consistent with the kind of fertility you see in a romantic comedy instantaneous, but the first trimester morning sickness was more like a sci fi thriller, totally extreme and requiring all kinds of medical help. And after a pretty challenging pregnancy, she ran into postpartum depression after the birth but her’s is a story of overcoming. She found help and recovered and she’s deeply immersed in the joy only a five year old child can bring.
(image courtesy of https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/blog/articles/pregnancy-hormones/)
Links to some of Dr. Meltzer Brody‘s work
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6CCrvBEAAAAJ&hl=en
Audio Transcript
Paulette : Hi, welcome to war stories from the womb. I’m your host, Paulette kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer and the mother of two girls. Today’s guest had a pregnancy marked by extremely easy things and significantly hard things. Getting pregnant was consistent with the kind of fertility you see in a romantic comedy instantaneous, but the first trimester morning sickness was more like a sci fi thriller, totally extreme and requiring all kinds of medical help. And after a pretty challenging pregnancy, she ran into postpartum depression after the birth but her’s is a story of overcoming. She found help and recovered and she’s deeply immersed in the joy only a five year old child can bring. After we spoke, I talked to a fantastic psychiatrist who’s done lots of research on postpartum depression, and gives us a sense of what the field might look like in the future. One more thing to add. My dogs were desperate to be a part of this episode. So you’ll hear their contributions at certain points, which in no way reflects the many efforts I made to keep them happy and quiet. Sorry about that.
Let’s get to this inspiring story.
P: Hi, thanks so much for coming to the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you live?
Laura : Sure. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Laura Nelson. And I live in San Francisco, California.
P: Nice, lovely. And Laura, how many kids do you have?
L: I have one child and one husband.
P: well said and before you got pregnant, I’m sure you had an idea about what pregnancy would be like. What did you imagine it would be like?
Laura : Oh, well, I imagined I didn’t imagine it would be magical. I didn’t imagine it would be like a fairy tale. I think I took worst parts of pregnancy depicted on TV and media and went yeah, that’s probably what it’s gonna be like.
P: Well good. There’s only up from there. Right? That’s that’s a good way to start.
L: Yeah.
P: And did you get pregnant easily the first time?
Laura 2:09
Oh, yeah. First first try. We pulled the goalie pregnant.
P: Good lord. You’re the story we all hear. Everyone. Everyone thinks they’ll get pregnant as soon as they try. But it doesn’t happen all the time. Right? But this is the perfect example. That’s so good. I’m glad that was easy. And you found out with like a home pregnancy test.
L: I found out I was I was house sitting for my parents and their dog. And I went to I didn’t know I was pregnant, obviously. But I went to Long’s and I got I was like, I really needed some kulula And why not like a pregnancy test? So I had some grua and I took some more pregnancy tests and all of them are positive. And I was like, well yes, that’s that’s what it is. You know, truthfully, I was like, I was a smoker. And so I was like, I called my best friend and I was crying. So it’s just like such a shock. And I was smoking. I was like, it doesn’t count until the doctor says it right. And she’s like, you’re fine.
P: Yeah, that’s kind of a shock.
L: Yeah, but it was it was nice. It was good. And a good reason to quit smoking. So how about that?
P: And how was the pregnancy? How did it start off?
L: What was it like? Oh, the pregnancy was in a word traumatic. I think it started off with violence, never ending nausea and vomiting. So throughout the course of my pregnancy, I lost 30 pounds.
P: Wow
L: and then I think, so weeks, six through about 20 is going to the hospital three times a week for IV infusions, because I couldn’t even hold down ginger ale and crackers. I was just unable to eat food without taking. I ended up taking what was called Zofran. I took sublingually as well as intravenously. So if you are experiencing severe morning sickness and you’re worried about Zofran I took it pretty much the whole pregnancy and there were zero adverse side effects other than I could pull down food, which was nice.
P: so that seems like a violent entrance into a pregnancy like what it happened once and you thought, Oh, this is just once or like, did you react to a food or it was all food or how does it work?
L: It’s all food, all food and all smells and I was throwing up Bile or food. On a good day. 10 times I was throwing up.
P: Wow, that sounds unbelievably intense. So did it. It happened one day and you went to your doctor like how did it how did you kind of sort it out?
L: Oh, it happened in happened for a few days in it. I thought like, Oh, this is morning sickness. Right? Like This must be what everybody talks about. And then when I was showing signs of dehydration, and I like couldn’t actually function and was feeling very sick. I went to my OB and she said, Oh yeah, no, you need to hyperemesis Gavardiam you need to get fluids we need to give you medicines or you can eat and we need to give you something so you can not be nauseous all the time.
P: So they think like oh, maybe you have the flu or because it’s pretty distinct.
L: yup
P: So even though they gave you the medicine you lost all my weight.
L: Yeah. So I gained again Yeah, back towards months, eight and nine, nine and a half. Right. But But yeah, in the beginning, it was dramatic
P: That sounds super unpleasant. And where are you at? Were you working?
L: I was I was working. I was going into the office. I you know once I was able to announce my pregnancy, which I had to do earlier than I wanted, because I was so sick. You know, it would just be I’d be talking with people about plans and then I thought oh lord is gonna go vomit and I’m gonna throw up and then come back and keep working. But yeah, I was a very understanding very parent focused company. So I was very lucky that, you know, the CEO had kids and everyone I was working with was already a parent.
P: Yeah, that sounds intense. And so it sounds like it got a little less prominent later in the pregnancy.
L: So weeks 20 to about 32. I would say I was normal. So I was eating food walking around. I had a good normal pregnancy and then weeks 33 to 42. It came back and then
P: No, no, is that normal? Was that what they say?
L: Yeah, you’ll either have it just for the first semester or you’ll have it for the first semester and we’ve got like school for the first trimester or you’ll have it for first trimester in the second trimester and the third, so I was lucky that it got a little less severe. For the second semester, trimester. But It came back.
P: Oh my god, I’m so sorry to hear it. Good Lord. That must have been so disappointing the first time you threw up after you have the break.
L: for sure,
P: and so you get to 40 weeks and what happens?
L: I get 40 weeks and and nothing happens. You get to 41 weeks may be scraped the inside what’s it called an induction
P: Yeah. they strip the membranes or something or
L: yeah, they stripped the membranes and then they send you home so they gave me an induction I was induced. They said go home out should start happening. When it’s less than five minutes apart. Come back.
P: so this is this exciting. Because you’re done.
L: Oh, I am ready to not be pregnant. Yeah. Yeah. So I go home as they’re happening and laboring, and it never retiming them. It never gets closer than five minutes eight eighths and spicy food. And it still stayed farther apart than 4-5 minutes. So I called and they said no, if you if you came in, we wouldn’t be able to admit you. I said okay. So 41 weeks, 2 days, I go back. We’re doing health checks. They’re doing the screens. They induced me again, go home labor. bounce on a ball. again It doesn’t stay closer than five minutes. So finally at 41 and five, said okay, well it’s time to come in. so We went down. We checked into hospital it was so I think the one of the nicest and most surreal things about going to the hospital knowing that you’re going to have the baby is you have this like brand new car seat. That you take with you. And you’re like, Okay, we’re taking carseat with us and like we’re leaving, we’re entering the hospital as just us and we’re gonna leave as a family like that. That’s just like it’s definitely a beautiful moment. So
P: let’s talk about your labor for a second. Were you like imagining a natural labor or I want to be in a bathtub or what was your you’re already shaking your head? What were you hoping for?
L: No, I took some birthing class classes with liars. They all said they wanted natural childbirth with flowers, and I said, my vision was epidurals just all of the like as many natural drugs as you can give me. Yeah. Was my natural birth vision. Plan.
P: good, I feel like you’re moving in the right direction then.
L: Yeah. So we go I’m in. I’m induced, they give me they give me Pitocin. I labor for about 12 hours. So that’s fine. We’re just me and my husband all night or just watching 30 Rock and I’m like, a little bit of pain, but not too bad. Then the doctor comes in and checks on me and she says, All right, you’ve been laboring for 12 hours and you’re not even one centimeter. And at this point, I was like, No, like really? Are you kidding? And so she said very plainly. She was a wonderful, wonderful doctor. She said, we think your baby’s really big. Can you either labor naturally over the weekend, and if things get bad, we’re going to have to do an emergency C section. Or we can get this baby out of you in the next two hours
P: oh wow
L: and do a C section right now.
P: yeah, I’ll take the door marked baby now.
L: I said yeah, let’s get this baby out. Like right now. And so the so it just went from a having a baby in two hours. So anesthesiologist came in and the anesthesiologist assistant who looks like Jessica Alba it might have been the drugs I was on but I swear I still tell my husband I’m like man do you remember that anesthesiologist. She was just she delivered kisses from angels with the epidural and she’s out of this world attractive. So anyway, I had the epidural. Seeing your partner scrubbed up in scrubs is just like, interesting.
P: I sort of felt like it you felt like you want to do an SNL skit
L: a little bit
P: come in with all the blue scrubs in that and hair cover and stuff. It’s so weird.
L: Yeah, just like Alright, we’re gonna go have a baby and then I didn’t expect can’t have your husband in when they give you the epidural. So you’re on your own and they’re having you bend over. You’re like gigantic pregnant belly. Yeah, this point I’m like basically 42 Weeks Pregnant I would say again to our baby and me. As the room is so cold, and you’re naked, your butts expose. Just jabbing you with a needle
P: It’s glamorous.
L: Yeah, then I had what’s known as a gentle C section. So I was able to listen to music which was nice we put on Lyle Lovett and put on allow love it playlist. So I was now they put up the curtain and they tested they said let us know if you feel this and just looked at my husband and said it’d be funny if I said it out. And he’s like, No, it would not be funny if you sat down. So we listened to music. Baby came out beautifully and immediately instead of wiping her off or when her they just immediately her on my chest and I was able to breastfeed her while they sewed me up.
P: Oh, wow. That’s amazing.
L: So that was really beautiful. And then they weighed her. And, you know, whisked us off to the recovery room. Once everything was all done. It was life changing in a lot of ways but I think having that gentle entrance into the world surrounded by so much chaos was just very nice bookend and blessing.
P: I was thinking gentle C section was marketing, but that sounds like a gentle C section. That sounds really nice.
L: Yeah,they just give you the baby right away.
P: That’s awesome.
L: Being able to breastfeed even though like I couldn’t feel my arms was nice.
P: Maybe the best way to do it. So you up, you’re in recovery. And then how long do you stay in
the hospital?
L: I was in the hospital. She was born on the 10th and went home on the 13th.
P: All right. And how do you feel when you go home?
L: Oh, I was loopy for sure. I think one thing that I was grateful for from just another friend who was a mother was I was taking the stronger pain medicine. It wasn’t Vicodin. I think it was Percocet and was actually causing like panic and me taking such a strong as soon as my friends had stopped taking Percocet, only take Motrin and so I switched to Motrin, and immediately the panic went away.
P: Oh good. I’ve never heard of that. That’s interesting to know that. It’s like well known enough that someone could give you a nice,
L: yeah, it was very good advice. Yeah, went home. tried to figure out how to be parents, and it was it was nice, but it was also very hard because I had a C section and I was on the I lived on the third floor walk up. And so the doctor says don’t do don’t take any stairs or I live on a third floor walk up. You know in retrospect, they after the kid is born, they have you come back or the next day or two days later for a sort of wellness check to weigh them and make sure they’re eating and maybe even get another shot. In retrospect I should not have gotten to that appointment into that with my husband. And if I had to do it again. I would say I’m gonna lie down. You can take the baby to go get a check up
P: because it was painful to manage the stairs and all that.
L: Yeah, the stairs were just brutal. I ended up popping a stitch.
P: Oh No. Oh my god.
L: but, that’s okay. I mean, the grand scheme of things. It was worth it.
P: What’s it like in the fourth trimester when you’re home?
L: Oh, yeah. So the fourth trimester be brutal for me, who loved my daughter? I think know that I had a lot of unhealed trauma from both the pregnancy and the birth that I didn’t address and being isolated in apartment–not that I couldn’t go outside but that going outside meant downstairs and eventually you know popping a stitch and hurting myself. A lot my husband took two weeks of paternity leave and to care for me and and us and the first day he went back he was let go.
P: Oh, my God that is crazy. Yeah.
L: So I had, I’m a mom, and I’m the sole breadwinner and I feel literally trapped in my apartment. So I should have seen The chips stacking up earlier than I did. But it wasn’t until it was about six or seven months old. I realized I was not well, I had severe postpartum depression. And I just had a breakdown one day where I just could not stop crying and it wasn’t that I didn’t love my child because I did I loved her so much was that and I thought of postpartum depression. The only things I thought of were very black and white. It was you had it or you didn’t. There was no gray area of you have it a little bit and then drawing on media and growing up. The only postpartum depression that I’ve ever seen talked about was that woman who drowned her kids in the bathtub.
P: Oh, wow. Yeah.
L: And I thought well, I don’t want to drown my kidney bathtub. So I obviously don’t have it
P: I brought the topic of postpartum depression to an expert. Today, we’re lucky to have Dr. Samantha Meltzer Brody, a psychiatrist who’s the director of the UNC Center for Women’s mood disorder, and the author of many, many scientific papers on the topic of perinatal, and postpartum depression. Thanks so much for coming on the show Dr. Meltzer-Brody.
Dr. Meltzer-Brody: Thanks for having me.
P: Harming your children is one small one small aspect that might present but there are probably many ways many things that postpartum depression can look like. So maybe you can define it for us.
Dr MB: Absolutely. So postpartum depression is a mood disorder that occurs in the postpartum period. However, it comes with often many co occurring symptoms, including anxiety, also, according to the DSM can start during pregnancy. So oftentimes, hear the word Peri, partum, or perinatal, used to define symptoms of anxiety and depression. That occur either over the course of pregnancy or postpartum. If we’re talking specifically about postpartum depression exclusively, oftentimes, you’re not seeing symptoms creep in until late pregnancy or they start in the postpartum period. They can have a range from very mild to very severe with everything in between. So if someone is having the most severe symptoms, they may have suicidal ideation and tenor plan. Most rarely, you have co occurring psychotic symptoms that can be associated with postpartum psychosis which is not postpartum depression. It’s a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder that is thankfully because it’s so devastating, more rare and can be associated with thoughts of harm to the baby. But then can have a range of symptoms that can include anxiety, worrying, or being able to sleep even when the baby’s sleeping because of worrying about the baby not being able to enjoy the baby feeling keyed up on edge, feeling overly tearful, feeling completely overwhelmed having difficulty concentrating. Again this can be on the more mild side to the to the severe side but in general, they are going to last more than two weeks it is not the baby blues, so most women immediately upon giving birth are going to feel more emotionally exhausted because birthing is very powerful, profound time. Most moms will get their sea legs if you will, but for the one in eight women that continue to have clinically significant symptoms or up to 15% of women postpartum. It’s much more complicated. So what you will hear the terms, perinatal or postpartum mood and anxiety disorders. You’ll hear the term maternal sort of mental health, maternal mood and anxiety disorders to sort of be more broadly inclusive. So we’re not having any one woman gets stuck on one particular symptom as you stated that doesn’t resonate with her
L: but I did and I think that there’s so many different layers of postpartum depression that people don’t talk about. People don’t understand there wasn’t even you know, the right level of support even now, looking back that I was able to get, you know, I broke down i i called my doctor and I said, I’d like a really need help. And so I did three months of intensive outpatient therapy. So I was going in three days a week to the hospital to get talk therapy and medication and art therapy and group classes and group therapy and it really just only let me heal and focus but just realize that I wasn’t alone and that there’s nothing wrong with me as mom. There’s nothing wrong with what I was doing as a parent or how I was loving or how I was living. It was literally a cat, something’s wrong with your brain and you just have to fix it or work on it. So eventually, I found the right mix of medicine
P: One tricky issue with postpartum depression is it seems like it might be hard to identify in yourself or to rely on someone else to identify for you. I’m wondering if something like biomarkers might help here
Dr MB: well the use of a biomarker is, you know, variable depending on what biomarker you’re talking about. But for example, ideally there’d be a biomarker that would show women who are either at risk or to have someone start treatment in a preventative way or start path that would prevent symptoms from happening. Or biomarkers can be used to track response to different treatment or you know, indicate that someone’s going to be differentially responsive to a certain antidepressant or whatever it may be. So they can be used in lots of different ways at this point We do not have a reliable biomarker that’s ready for primetime. And so that’s an interesting area of investigation, both looking at genetic signature, but then looking at other types of biomarkers that can either help with diagnosis or help dictate treatment to be most targeted and effective. And that’s often when we think of precision medicine, or precision psychiatry, rather than saying, you have postpartum depression and we don’t know what treatments going to be most effective for you. So we’re going to, if we say pick an antidepressant that may or may not work for you, biomarkers when they are more sophisticated, can really help guide a specific line of treatment to be most effective.
L: I’m A huge fan of Lexapro I’m like a lexa pro cheerleader. But yeah, the days are brighter and heart is healed and I’m just so full of love and of being a parent, but I think one thing I would say to everyone who’s either expecting to have a child or just had a child and it’s in the fourth trimester is there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. If you are feeling a little sad if you are feeling like you can’t make it if you’re feeling like things just aren’t adding up to help because it’s really easy and there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re doing a great job.
P: I think that’s a great message and I’m impressed that you were able to see it in yourself. And I’ve talked to a lot of women who have talked about postpartum depression and a lot of them don’t recognize it or think this is just what motherhood is, or I’m just a bad mom, or some version of that.
P: I talked with Dr. Meltzer Brody about some of the challenges inherent in identifying PPD: I’m imagining we don’t have a biomarker and we don’t know which medication would help you if you require medication because postpartum depression is really a constellation of things. And there are many, many roads lead to postpartum depression. So it’s not this this one thing. In the same way you’re describing all these different symptoms that could be sort of a postpartum depression diagnosis. Because there are many ways to get there. Is that Is that accurate?
Dr. MB: I think that there’s not going to be any one reason a woman would have postpartum depression. So in the same way, that there’s not any one type of breast cancer either, so I think one of the things we’ve seen as we get much more sophisticated in other fields of medicine in terms of precision medicine, as we get very tailored and targeted on the specific treatment, that’s going to lead to the best outcome. So 25 years ago, most women with breast cancer you may have gotten the same treatment. It turned out that didn’t work very well at all. And we now are much more specific and targeted based on you know, receptor type and hormonal responsiveness and any number of things where I hope we can get to with postpartum depression and all forms of depression is similarly so that there’s not one form of depression and that people are going to become depressed for any number of reasons and that there’s going to be obviously the psychological psychosocial factors that render someone more vulnerable, but ultimately, it’s going to be the biologic processes, right? So is it immunologic in origin? Is it inflammatory markers in origin? Is it genetic in origin? Is it epigenetic, you know, or dysregulation of the HPA axis or dysregulation of a specific neurotransmitter system? So all of these are hypotheses. It’s very likely going to be an interaction of those but also that some people differentially are going to have a specific sort of past that’s driving there’s for which a specific treatment may be most effective. Now, we are not there yet at all, but I think the hope will be that we can be looking forward to that in the next I would, I would like to say aspirationally decade,
P: generally speaking, it seems like postpartum depression is thought to arise from hormone shifts, during or after pregnancy, in particular, a big drop in progesterone but it sounds like all these other bodily systems are affected immune system HPA access other systems. So it does that contribute to why it is tricky to establish a link between hormone drops and postpartum depression.
Dr. MB: So I think that we know that all women who give birth have rising and then falling levels of estrogen and progesterone, female ganando hormones, that’s a normal part of physiology. They rise dramatically during pregnancy and they fall at the time of delivery and that is part of physiology and so there’s no difference in the rise and fall in any particular way that’s been studied for someone that has postpartum depression or not, what the current theories are, and you’ll hear the the expression, differential sensitivity meaning a woman who gets postpartum depression may be differentially sensitive to the rising and falling the normal, rising and falling in a way that someone else is not. Now, we haven’t necessarily gotten able to refine that exactly, not even close. And it’s very likely that some women are differentially sensitive to the rising, falling and they have postpartum depression for that. rising, falling and they have postpartum depression for that reason, it’s also very likely that other women have postpartum depression because of a different trigger. So, the dysregulated system is not necessarily going to be hormonally based it may be something else and so this is an active area of investigation is understanding what are all the different factors and how they interact and what may be driving that for any you know, individual person
P: In Laura’s experience she have really significant hyperemesis I’m wondering if someone like Laura, who is presenting with evidence of a sensitivity that’s really strong to changes in hormones is more likely to get something like postpartum depression because obviously her system is sensitive to these fluctuations.
Dr. MB: So there’s there’s some data and we actually looked at this in the Danish registries and published out there is data showing that women that have hyperemesis gravidarum are at higher risk of having perinatal mood and anxiety complications than women that do not have it for an individual person who experiences hyperemesis gravidarum. It’s an extremely miserable experience, and I think it is just psychologically miserable. The second thing though, it also makes sense that whatever is happening in that individual person that makes them more sensitive to have the severity of symptoms in that way. There may be something happening in their body that works differently, that may make them more susceptible to other things. So I think it makes sense in a number of different ways. But we don’t understand deeply and at the biological level, exactly what’s going on. And I think that that’s what’s exciting right now is trying to get much more precise and dive deeper into the underlying pathophysiologic processes. So if I looked back over the last number of decades in our field, it it took decades in this country for even routine screening to take place and for us to move towards seeing this as a one of the greatest complications of pregnancy. And the postpartum period to do routine screening and all pregnant and postpartum women, to have it become part of public awareness to you know, work to decrease stigma so that people could talk about it. So we could get more women screened and more women into care and over what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is pretty remarkable in terms of a positive sea change in that direction. So where we need to go next is taking our understanding of what’s driving it, what’s the underlying pathophysiology, what are continued to be novel ways of diagnosing and treating, how can we be more precise and targeted and doing that and there’s a lot of work being done, which makes me encouraged on what may come next.
P: I have spoken to a couple of people at UCSF I don’t know if that’s where you were but they were saying that they are making an effort to have way more postpartum visits that aren’t normally scheduled because it is pretty spare.
L: Once you have a baby, it’s all about the baby and then six weeks, six week checkup, they’re like, Okay, hey, mom. You know,
P: and it does seem like it’s almost entirely physical. Have your wounds healed, and then we’ll send you on your way.
L: Yup
P: You know, having been through it, which seems bizarre.
L: Great. Yeah. UCSF has they have a really good postpartum depression group. I wasn’t able to join it. But I would have if I could have,
P: Yeah I’m guessing where and from whom you get care may make a difference because there’s a lot going on in the field of postpartum depression.
The future of postpartum care may not look much like the past I asked Dr. Meltzer, Brody about new medications. One thing she talks about is GABA, which if you’re not familiar with it is a chemical messenger in your brain that has a calming effect.
It looks like in 2019, the first drug was approved specifically for postpartum depression. Is that right?
Dr. MB: Yes. So in 2019, the drug Brexanalone was approved for postpartum depression. It was the first FDA approval for a drug specifically for postpartum depression. And it’s a novel drug it’s a neuroactive steroid. So it works on GABA, which is different than other drugs. And it’s actually a proprietary formulation of allopregnanolone, which is the neuro active metabolite of progesterone. So you have levels of allo that normally rise very high during pregnancy, just like progesterone does, because it’s a metabolite of it and then fall rapidly. Postpartum. And so we were able to do the first open label study and then proceed through the double blind placebo controlled studies of using brexanolone for treating postpartum depression at at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s an IV drug. It’s a 60 hour infusion. It’s powerful. And you see this rapid onset of action within the first day and so we continue to have a robust clinical program. We’re continuing clinical trials and then there’s also an oral being drug being developed by Sage therapeutics, which is the pharmaceutical company that’s developed brexanolone And now is arann. Alone. Saran alone is also a neuroactive steroid, but it’s different. It is not an oral form of bricks and alone. It’s not an oral form of allopregnanolone it’s a bit of a different interactive stereo. And there’s been multiple positive studies showing its effectiveness after a two week course for postpartum depression, that that could be a new tool in the toolbox available in a year plus.
P: Well, that’s super exciting.
Dr. MB: it is a really nice example of using pathophysiology to develop treatments leading to new treatments and a new tool for postpartum depression. And I think that approach hopefully, can be used in lots of different ways. Who’s going to be most responsive? For whom is this drug going to be the best fit? Or drugs like this and as we get much more refined understanding what treatments are going to be best for an individual patient that will lead to the best outcomes and brexanolone works fast and it works really fast. And so that’s so important in the perinatal period in the postpartum period, and having a rapid acting antidepressant that can work within a day is powerful and unlike most things on the market, a number of current therapies that we have take time. take days to weeks to months or longer, and then we unfortunately have people who don’t respond to the current therapies. So having new tools and new treatments that can act quickly and more quickly than what we’ve previously had, and then can increase effectiveness or be more effective to peep for people that haven’t responded to other treatments is really important.
P: How old is your daughter now?
L: She’s five and a half.
P: That’s so fun. That’s a great age what she into.
L: So if you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she will tell you she wants to be a mom, doctor, astronaut scientist. So she’ll go to space, but she’ll still be able to drive her gets to school.
P: well that’s the dream isn’t it? Seems like the right ambition. She sounds busy. is very busy.
L: She’s very smart. She’s I think she’s smarter than me. She’s five and a half and I’m pretty sure she’s smarter than me. She’ll be like, Mom, do you know what the biggest magnet on Earth is and no one should be like it’s Earth. Like okay
P: I feel like she needs a YouTube channel. These are just some real nuggets.
L: We’re not gonna stage mom her yet. We’re gonna try to keep childhood in its little bubble
P: is she goes to kindergarten or is it high?
L: So we did distance learning we did like a week of online kindergarten, because we live a half a block away from our public school. We found out very quickly that Zoom learning is not the way to go. It’s just not she hates it. enforcing it was not worth it. So we are in another year of transitional kindergarten, which is private and falls under the preschool rule so it can be in person rich, she’s thriving. And moms are think of
P: I think of kindergarteners socializing. And so that’s a hard, hard thing to do. So I’m glad that you guys have worked it out so that she can be out.
L: Even in the core things to work on like she’s an only child so sharing can’t can’t even do that in person preschool now because they all have their own pieces of art supplies and paper so they don’t contaminate.
P: Hopefully next year,
L: fingers crossed back to normal.
P: So if you could give advice to your younger self about this process what do you think you would tell her?
L: Oh, I would say two things. One, I would say Laura depressed get help. So okay. Yeah, because if I got help sooner, I just think it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was. The other thing I would say is, you’re going to be a great mom, don’t worry about messing her up. In 2020 it’ll all make sense. Because I feel like everything I could have done and did do like once we had to just pause and have her home and be a family and just sort of figure it out like it’s really mattered, you know?
P: Yeah, it is nice to have her home at this age. Right because five is so fun. I remember my when my oldest was five or went to kindergarten, I missed her so much.
L: uh huh
P: And she got she had walking pneumonia for like a week and a half and it wasn’t like that was technically the diagnosis but she didn’t seem very sick. And I was like, walking around with my arms in the air like this is the best week ever to get her back. So it’s kind of nice.
L: It was sad to knock at the end of preschool when she was turned five during this when she was four and a half. And we were lucky to be like Okay, let’s see, like there’s no, there’s no school. You’re gonna stay home with mom and dad. And she’s like, great. No school home. I get to stay home with you and dad. Cool.
P: that’s Awesome. Well Laura, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story today. I really appreciate it.
L: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
P: Thanks again to Laura for sharing some of the challenges in her pregnancy and the really really about her experience in the postpartum period, her recovery and her ultimate joy. And a big thank you to dr. meltzer brody for sharing her insights on the current state of PPD and what the future may look like. I’ll link to some of Dr. Meltzer Brody’s work in the show notes if you want to read more about these new medications for PPD.
Thank you for listening.
We’ll be back soon with another story of overcoming
