I'm A Medicated Mom, And I'm A Better Mom Because Of It
I was playing trains with my two-year-old son the moment I realized my life-long struggle with anxiety was no longer within my control, and I needed help.
I’d been having panic attacks that felt like heart attacks all month, ever since my OB-GYN had cleared me to try to have a second baby after a serious health scare earlier that year.
Earlier that day, the trains day, I’d had some pretty profound chest pains, but I brushed them aside, like I always did, as “probably not” a heart attack.
That evening, as my son and I peacefully built bridges and connected tracks in his bedroom, he suddenly looked at me and started crying. In all likelihood, he was having a toddler moment, probably pissed that I hadn’t built the train station to his exact but un-communicated specifications.
About that health scare...
But his crying startled me so much, this is the thought that popped into my head: “What if that really was a heart attack earlier today, and I actually died, and he’s scared of me because I’m a ghost?”
Now, I’ve always been a fairly pragmatic person, so the fact my mind went there scared me as much as the thought that it could be true. I called my husband to come upstairs and play with my son, walked to my room in a fog, lay on the bed trying to breathe, felt my hands and feet go numb as they often did those days, and tried to take comfort in the fact that the cat was looking me right in the eyes, so I probably wasn’t dead.
Until, I thought: “Don’t cats see ghosts, though?”
I called my doctor the next day and started taking Zoloft, an anti-anxiety medication, by the end of the week. A little more than a year later, I’m eight months pregnant and still take my little yellow pills daily, with no plans to stop any time soon.
I’m a medicated mom, and I’m grateful every day, because I...
