Fighting Postpartum Depression
|
|
|
|
|
Page 5 of 8
Groping for an explanation
In a matter of seven weeks, Melanie was admitted three times to the psychiatric units of three different hospitals. Each stay followed the same pattern.
She deteriorated, then, as her discharge date approached, she seemed to get better. When she went home, whatever progress she had made disappeared.
Her family ricocheted from hope to despair to frustration. Carol says she once chased a doctor down a hallway, trying to get some sort of explanation for what was happening to her daughter. Melanie's aunts assured themselves after each hospitalization that this time she seemed better. Sam told himself to be patient.
After she was discharged from Michael Reese following a five-day stay, Melanie stopped eating again. At meals, she daintily wiped her mouth with a napkin after each bite. Afterward, her aunt Grace would find the crumpled napkins full of food in the trash.
When Carol took her back to a hospital, this time to the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, Melanie told the doctors she hadn't eaten for a week.
She wanted to eat, she said, but she couldn't swallow.
She was admitted overnight for dehydration and released the next morning for a scheduled appointment with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist changed her medication and decided to start her on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), more commonly known as shock treatment.
Once considered violent and inhumane, ECT has quietly regained popularity among many psychiatrists as a safe and effective treatment for severe depression and psychosis. In ECT, electricity is used to cause a short, controlled seizure in the brain while the patient sleeps under general anesthesia.
No one knows exactly why these seizures may relieve the symptoms of mental illness but they often do. Typically, someone will undergo five to 12 sessions of ECT over two or three weeks.
From the start, Melanie hated the treatments. She said it felt as though her brain were on fire. When she came home from the first ECT, she crawled into bed, exhausted.
Her aunts Vera and Grace crept upstairs to check on her. She was curled up in a ball, so small and thin she barely made a lump beneath the blankets.
Then, after her second treatment, Melanie came back to herself.
She started talking and laughing. In the recovery room, she drank half a dozen glasses of orange juice and ate packets of cookies and crackers from the vending machine, consuming more in three hours, Sam thought, than she probably had in the previous three weeks.
Because ECT can affect short-term memory, Melanie didn't know where she was or what had happened to her.
"I have a baby?" she kept asking Sam. "I have a baby?"
After three hours or so, she slipped back into her silence. There was little improvement after her third treatment and when it came time for her fourth session, she refused.
"It's killing me," she told her husband.
By Mother's Day, she was back on a psychiatric ward, at UIC.
Before she was a mother herself, Melanie had once celebrated Mother's Day by buying flowerpots for the children in her neighborhood and helping them decorate the containers for their mothers.
This time, she sat on her hospital bed, blank-faced, when Carol brought Sommer to see her. In the nine days she had been hospitalized, she had never asked her mother about Sommer and now she had to be told to take her into her arms.
Melanie had resumed the ECT treatments and started another combination of medications. But her weight continued to drop. At 5 feet 6 inches tall, she now weighed 100 pounds. Whenever anyone asked her how she felt, she said she thought she would never get better.
|
Top
|
E-mail
|
|
|
Last Updated( Mar 18, 2010 )
|
reviewed by:
Harry Croft, MD (Psychiatrist)
|
|
