Ive found myself pregnant with a second baby and I’m in the process of considering my options. I suffer severe prenatal depression and anxiety and Tokophobia (fear of pregnancy).
I’m 9 weeks and the last 3 weeks have been a complete blur whilst trying to look after my 16 month old and work. Ive barely been able to lift my head from the pillow and talk to anyone some days and my son has suffered.
When pregnant with him I sought support from the perinatal MH team who assessed me and deemed me to be ‘low risk’ even with a severe phobia of pregnancy/birth. I ended up with private counselling weekly throughout my pregnancy to get me through and eventually at around 18 weeks my consultant referred me to the specialist midwife (not MH) but a named midwife who I would see consistently throughout pregnancy.
This all helped but when my son was born the support dwindled and my HV was not very helpful (being in the middle of a pandemic obviously didn’t help matters). The midwife could only support for 4 weeks after birth and the health visitor rarely replied to my messages asking for help.
My son had reflux, CMPA and colic and would only sleep if rocked to sleep, sometimes taking 30 mins for him to then only sleep for 10 mins, I was exhausted. My partner took what time he was able to off work to help me and ended up taking a few days off every month to give me w break as I admitted to him I was struggling.
At times I felt so helpless and desperate, I love my boy but it was so so hard in those early months, I struggled to bond and no one really listened, my mum dismissed my feelings and Friends who had babies at the time all seemed to breeze through with easy going babies so couldn’t seem to relate. I felt so alone.
A huge huge part of me is considering termination because in my heart I think it’s the right thing to do for my family, I don’t want my son to suffer if I go downhill, I can’t say I’ll not suffer with PND again.
Im terrified baby will be worse than my son, reflux and non-sleeper and I just don’t know if mentally I can do it as well as looking after an active toddler.
My partner works 12 hour days so it will be me on my own (with some help from my mum but she does work too).
A small part of me (when I’m not feeling depressed/overwhelmed) really wants to give my son a sibling and experience another baby but I am just terrified that this time it’ll be worse and PND will be worse and that something awful will happen.
I guess my point of my post is has anyone felt similar or suffered with PND in their first pregnancy and gone on to have a second? What support did you have in place to help?
I think because I was not taken seriously the first time around I have no faith in the system, they all seemed to think that I breezed through motherhood, I think I may have been too scared to disclose my real feelings, despite asking for help, maybe I played it down a little when around professionals.
If I go ahead and have a termination I will never put myself through this again but a part of me knows there will be regret that I didn’t try it.
I honestly feel torn!