Liz’s Birth Story, Part 3

Liz’s Birth Story, Part 3
by Liz Martin

When I wrote my birth story, it came out in two parts – the actual birth, and then what happened in the few days after. I thought I was done writing my birth story, but it seems that it needs a third (and final?) part.

If you read the first two parts of my birth story, (Part 1 & Part 2) you know that I was transferred from my birth center to a hospital for a postpartum hemorrhage when I lost almost 1/3 of my blood. I received excellent care, and 24 hours later I was feeling great. At 48 hours postpartum, however, it appeared I was having complications, and after a five-hour ER visit, I was diagnosed with mitral stenosis. The mitral valve in my heart was narrowed, or calcified, and was unable to pump through all the fluids I received for the treatment of my hemorrhage. Fluid was filling my lungs, causing my heart to race and making it difficult to breathe  – my heart was failing and literally drowning me. I am so fortunate that this was discovered, and that I was given a procedure to open my mitral valve. While needed, it separated me from my son for four days, which limited our skin-to-skin time and breastfeeding. The hemorrhage and separation, along with postpartum depression and anxiety, would negatively impact my ability to breastfeed – a deep wound from which I am still healing.

Because of the procedure I received for my heart, my mitral valve was open, but moderately-to-severely leaky – better than stenosis but still not great. I was told I would need a mitral valve replacement in 3-10 years, along with my aortic valve, which was also leaky. My doctors believe mitral stenosis was a condition I developed after having untreated rheumatic fever as a child – an illness that was misdiagnosed as HS Purpura and not treated with antibiotics.

I’d had some strange symptoms in the years leading up to my diagnosis. I have been bad at sports since I was a child – I just thought I wasn’t athletic, but having a dysfunctional heart probably had more to do with it. Any cardio would wipe me out, I always finished last in gym class, breathing heavier than everyone else. I was always overweight as a child and had been told I was just out of shape. I was out of shape, but my heart was the underlying issue. Eventually in my teens I just stopped exercising. 

In my early 30s, I started getting a racing heart and fluid in my lungs when I drank alcohol. I was actively doula-ing and didn’t drink when I was on-call, so I just thought I felt terrible when I drank because of a decreased alcohol tolerance. Even when it worsened and I couldn’t sleep at night after drinking because I couldn’t breathe, I drank so rarely I would feel concern in the moment, but then forget about it. I put off going to the doctor, wrongly thinking it wasn’t a big deal.

Snorkeling should have been the death of me. I’ve never been a strong swimmer, and I’m not great at the swimming/breathing combo. When I was in the Peace Corps in Tonga from 2003-2005, I felt like I could do anything, and on a number of occasions, jumped into really deep water to swim or snorkel. It was more physically strenuous than most things I would try to do, paired with deep water being my greatest fear – I blame Jaws. But I was in my early 20s, so my heart – while under strain and beating really hard – still managed to function okay. In 2005, I went snorkeling in deep water off the coast of Australia to see the Great Barrier Reef. I couldn’t keep up with my group, my heart was beating at an abnormally high rate, and I just didn’t feel right. I thought I was freaking out because of the deep water, but looking back, some smarter part of my brain was telling me to not put my heart through the strain.

I went to Panama in 2014, and while snorkeling, my lungs filled with fluid and my heart started racing really fast. Again, I thought it was the fear of water and that I didn’t know how to use a snorkel mask properly. I came back from the trip with what I thought was pneumonia – lots of fluid in my lungs, a terrible cough and a fever. I thought I was just getting too old to kick it in tropical climates. But my heart was 10 years older than when I was in Tonga and Australia, and it just couldn’t keep up with the strenuous activity of swimming. A person smarter than me and with health insurance would have gone to see a doctor, but I just got multiple treatments of acupuncture and after a week or two I felt better.

On my honeymoon in 2016, my husband and I went snorkeling in Tulum, Mexico. This time I was in a shallow lagoon and was swimming for less than five minutes when my lungs filled with fluid, I couldn’t breathe, and I started panicking. The tour guide had to pull me in on a lifesaver and give me oxygen. I was taken back to our resort and went to the clinic where they gave me a shot of antibiotics and steroids in my butt three days in a row. After treatment, I felt better. A person smarter than me and with more body awareness (I had health insurance this time, thanks to my hubby) would have gone to the doctor when I got home, but instead I just went ahead and got pregnant!

I was healthy and low-risk throughout my pregnancy. The midwives did hear a heart murmur when they listened to my heart, but they said that was normal in pregnancy. I had a normal and uncomplicated (although long and intense) birth, and I was told mitral stenosis doesn’t cause postpartum hemorrhage. But the hemorrhage did lead me to discover that there was actually something wrong with my heart.

In April 2019, I started going to therapy. Since Harrison was born, I was exhausted, foggy, irritable, depressed, anxious, stuck, lacking joyfulness. I’ve probably had depression for most of my life. Most people who have babies will experience some form of a mood disorder after giving birth, and my already existing depression just exploded, and was coupled with anxiety. By early 2019 I felt like I was losing my mind and decided I needed help. It’s been almost a year since I started therapy and it’s hard to explain how much better I feel. My tendencies to clam up, not share my feelings, over-think, and over-stress were exacerbated by all I was dealing with during my postpartum recovery. I wasn’t myself in so many ways and suffering because of it.

Therapy has helped me to find myself again. To feel excitement and joy, to have clarity over my thoughts and emotions, to have confidence in my abilities and knowledge. I also returned to yoga a few months ago. I’ve been doing yoga off and on for 10 years, but had basically stopped completely since Harrison was born. Now in the quiet of the morning, I do a 45-60 minute yoga session. This has added to my mental clarity, inner strength, calmness and ability to be still, my ability to sit with my breath. Through yoga, I’ve rediscovered my breath, I’ve rediscovered my shoulders, I’ve rediscovered my ribcage, my belly, my hips, my legs, my feet. My connectedness to myself needed a physical manifestation, and I found that in yoga.

Since my heart procedure in 2017, I’ve had to have follow-up echocardiograms – every six months, and then every year. When I went in early 2019, my valves had stayed consistent at a moderate-to-severe level of leakiness. My doctor was pleased that my valves hadn’t worsened, and that a valve replacement wasn’t in the near future.

Last week I had my annual echo. I dreaded going because the echo procedure, while relatively benign, always brings me back to the first time I had one – when I was trapped in the ER with an oxygen mask, slowly suffocating, coughing up fluid, sweating, missing my baby. I cried on the way there, feeling all those feelings again of being separated from Harrison, of it negatively impacting my breast milk, that horrible lost and hollow feeling of wanting my baby on me and not being able to hold him.

But this time I got different news. My valves had actually improved – they had gone from moderate-to-severely leaky to mild-to-moderate. My doctor said he doesn’t see it very often, but it does happen – the heart feels that the valves aren’t functioning properly and will remodel itself, different parts of the heart will strengthen itself to correct the valve. That’s the term he used – my heart “remodeled itself.” I don’t think it will ever completely heal itself to the point where I won’t need valve replacements, but my heart had, little by little, started to heal itself.

I can’t ignore the poetry here. Giving birth, becoming a mother, showed me (or punched me in the face with) all the ways my heart was broken, dysfunctional, literally drowning me. But the love I feel for Harrison and the love he feels for me has healed me. It’s love that is absolute, unquestioned, assured. There is no wondering, it just is. It’s healed some of my body image issues – my body is perfect to him. It doesn’t matter what my breasts or belly look like, it didn’t even matter to him that I couldn’t produce all the milk he needed.  To Harrison my body is home, it’s love, it’s comfort, it’s security.

Motherhood broke every part of me, but it also eventually gave me the strength to get the help I needed, so I could find myself again, find my body again, heal my metaphorical heart. And most important to me today, motherhood has helped to heal my actual heart. *

*A note on the photos I used for this blog article:
These photos were taken in March 2018, when Harrison was about six months old. I was just about to end my maternity leave and go back to work part-time as a massage therapist. My postpartum depression and anxiety were in full force during this time – as was the secrecy I used to deal with it. This is just a gentle reminder that parents can have postpartum mood disorders and still look happy – we don’t always know what people are going through.