Post Partum Depression 2
The way to the Hospital de Vall d’Hebrón became eternal. It would be impossible for me to go back to another appointment in that place, too far, too difficult to get to, I couldn’t keep the route in my mind, I was lying in the passenger seat while Pancho was driving.
As soon as I entered the old infirmary ward, now a psychiatry unit, my heart was racing and I felt vertigo as I entered the elevator with old, noisy and clumsy metal doors that closed with a stunning aggressiveness. How could the ugliness of a place hurt so deeply? How could a hospital be so bleak? I felt like I was entering a postwar madhouse. Someone ever read “The twisted lines of God” by Torcuato Luca de Tena? I had read it when I was 14 and immediately that. I began to tremble with fear thinking that I was falling into a trap and they would leave me there forever.
Being a public hospital it was normal for the waiting room to be full, but Dr. Bruguera did not keep me waiting, he received me in his small office with a kind and silent look. I entered distrusting him for being a man. He began by asking me about my past but I couldn’t connect with the person I had been before and I had to look at Pancho to help me answer, I myself didn’t know who I was or who I had been.
After hearing my answers and seeing how my body, my face, my eyes, my hands, my fingers spoke, he gently told me that we had to start a forceful treatment, I couldn’t go on like this. Always in a low, slow, soft voice and a serene look. After listening to me for a long time, he said it was clear that was going through a postpartum depression, which had not been treated properly for a long time. He, being the head of psychiatry, said that he had to refer me to a postpartum specialist who could see me on Monday. I felt more fear. Another man, another stranger. It was Wednesday. I would start treatment that day and he wanted to see me again in two days to see how I reacted to the medications.
I wanted him to tell me that I was going to get out of this fast, with some pill, his words went through me like a stake, I had known for months that I was not well, but I refused to admit that I was so sick. Now it is easy to look back and understand everything, at that time my brain and my life were a blurry and very dark cloud. That’s what depression is: denial, lying, and self-betrayal. Self sabotage.
I couldn’t stay seated, I got out of the chair, knelt down and lay down on the floor, on those cold, icy, ugly and old tiles, like everything in that hospital. I could not keep any part of my body vertical, I needed ground contact, being on the ground I felt that I could not fall lower, and I burst into a cry of fear as I hugged myself in a fetal position. Dr Bruguera kept calm and told me that he understood how I felt.
He spoke to me from his chair. He and Pancho were sitting, I was a remnant of a woman curled up on the floor crying and asking for help without being able to speak. He said that I needed to rest, that I had to be patient because the treatment would take a while to take effect and I replied that it was not possible, that I have two children, a lot of work, that I cannot sleep, that I cannot rest. That I can’t even think of spending another day of my life like this.
He said, Catalina, if you can’t rest at home, I’ll open up some room for you here and you’ll stay here while the medications take effect, I don’t have any beds left over, but I’ll find you one anyway. I asked how long. He said he didn’t know, maybe a few days or a few weeks. A part of me wanted to accept his offer because I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want the children to see me like that, I didn’t want to see them and feel their burden on me again. I felt asphyxiating when I saw them, claustrophobia when they approached, when I heard them cry or when they needed something from me. The feeling of being the worst mother on the planet and wanting to run away without knowing where. Run away from my own life. I felt I was a monster.
I didn’t want to continue being that unbearable wife who called Pancho crying every time he went out to teach, begged him to come home right away because she wasn’t capable of being alone with the children. I did not want to be that inert mother who had no energy at all, who crawled on the ground and lived in permanent fear. I hated myself as a woman, as a human being, I so very angry with me. I felt that my life was a continuous mistake, that all the decisions I had made were wrong, having undergone so many invitro treatments to have two children that now I was not able to take care of or bear. Extreme exhaustion I just wanted a dark, silent cave to crawl into.
But if I stayed in that bed that he offered me … I thought of the screams of the neighboring beds, of people who would be worse off than me, and the fear that I would feel in that ugly place, that surely at night it would be hell of people yelling their demons in their faces. Maybe if I spent the night there I’d scream at the top of my lungs too.
I begged him and Pancho not to leave me there, I wanted to go home. He told me calmly, go home, start the treatment, try to rest and you can always come back here if you wish. If cannot rest at your own place, I will open a place for you here whenever you need it.
I came home trembling and walked as best I could to the pharmacy, with my formula that seemed more like a market list, 7 pills a day between anxiolytics, antidepressants, hypnotics. I couldn’t look the pharmacist in the eye, the same one who sold me every week all sorts of sleeping medicine, anything I could get without prescription, which I prescribed myself, surely he had already detected the depression in my face months ago. Now he had medical confirmation that he was crazy. He, as if selling chicken breasts, gave me my bag full of boxes and I went home to confront my army of drugs. That same day I started the treatment.