Have you had a Traumatic event – either recently or in the past?
Death of family member; friend, teacher, pet, lover, divorce, physical pain or injury, illness, war, natural disaster, terrorism, moving, parental abandonment, witness death, rape, domestic abuse, prison, or other – Have you just dealt with it, or received help?
Or are you like many who just “sweep it under the rug” with the hopes that it will just go away, or that it will get better?
I’ve had many events and never in my dreams did I think I would ever need help. I know many of you reading this will agree that you or someone you know have at one point-or-another have suffered, or experienced one of the above.
As stated above I’ve had many events, but I will start with the most “recent” one(s) just to give you an idea of what I’ve gone through and what it took to overcome some of these problems, and what I had to do.
How it started
The most recent one started in 2009, I was feeling so sick that I kept going in/out of the hospital and to the doctors and the doctors just kept telling me it was nothing, just stomach flu, constipation, acid reflux, etc and they would send me back home with medication, drink lots of fluids, etc.
A few months went by I was feeling the same when all of a sudden I felt like my stomach was just going to burst, I was rushed to the hospital where I was told that it was my gallbladder 🙂 and that it needed to be removed.
I was so scared, and unprepared especially because I had my little one who at the time was only 6 and was just crying and crying making it harder for me to deal with this.
Well, as I was getting my gown on, getting ready for the pre-op and having some tests done and my kids and hubby sitting there waiting for me to go into surgery then all of a sudden minutes later the doctors came to tell me…
“Sorry ma’am, but we can’t do the surgery because it’s not your gallbladder, it’s your pregnancy”…
My what??!!!
The pregnancy
Yes, you are pregnant and that is why you are having these pains.
It left me baffled of course because we thought we were done having babies and the thought of having to start all over with diapers, sleepless nights, crying the feeding, etc, and all the problems we were going through I didn’t know if we could go through it – especially because of all the problems I’ve had in the past with my pregnancies…
I couldn’t believe that this was happening, but couldn’t believe that this baby was causing me so much pain and I felt horrible that I cried and cried and didn’t know if it was happiness, scared, afraid, or shock, it was just too much for me to bear, especially because of all the issues I had with my other babies.
So, I put on my big girl panties and said to my husband “we can do this, if this is what God wants, then we will find a way to get through it!”.
3 months into the pregnancy I started to feel even worse, the pain, headaches, I couldn’t keep anything in, I was in/out of the hospital and all the doctors could say is “Mam please prepare yourself, your baby might not make it!”. This went on for 5 whole months – yes! 5 whole months going into the clinic to get my fluids until it came a day when they could no longer find my veins and they had to put in a shunt and of course, that didn’t go well, it was so painful and discomforting that they had no choice but to remove it.
To make matters worse I was also going on a 1 month and 1/2 half of no sleep (sleep deprivation), I was going crazy, then my body was itching all the time, it felt like it was burning inside, and I couldn’t handle this pregnancy to the point I felt I was going to literally go crazy.
What cholestasis?
I knew this was NOT NORMAL, so my husband and I pressured the doctors to please run some more testing, so they did and found out that I had a case of severe Cholestasis apparently my case was one of the severe ones because none of the medication or treatments that they had for this was working for me and since I was pregnant and the pregnancy was a risky pregnancy they couldn’t remove my gallbladder which is one of the procedures that they could do!
So yeah, they say 1 out of 1,000 pregnancies suffer from severe cholestasis 
So, yeah I was a lucky one 🙂 – I guess!
This pain got to the point where my husband could no longer care for me; help with the business, care for the kids, and handle the day-to-day issues, so he talked to my doctor and had me checked into the hospital until I gave birth.
All this made me so mad and hurt, felt deserted, isolated, angry, etc., at the time…” I hated my husband”, I couldn’t believe that he was doing this to me, I felt like he no longer loved me, I felt like this baby was tearing my family apart.
While in the hospital I remember trying to sneak out of the hospital, I wanted to run away, I wanted this baby out!
Words can’t describe how miserable I was and how much I hated myself for feeling like this – especially knowing I was going to have a Baby Girl, the little girl I always wanted.
Well, they even made me a “Medication Cocktail” (don’t try this at home, only under the care of your treating doctor) trying to get me to sleep and get some rest especially because I was getting closer and closer to giving birth, so I needed my medication.
This is the little miracle baby that was inside my tummy, my precious princess.
Well, thank God everything worked out fine, I had my baby girl, but then…
I had to deal with the fact that she was a premature baby and that they had to leave her in the hospital until she could eat on her own. That was so devastating for me because I felt like if only “I could have kept my big girl panties on and held on to this pregnancy full term, instead of crying and begging for them to take her out, my baby could have come home with us…
I felt useless, I felt like part of me was staying in that hospital, like I could not breathe, sleep, eat but I also made my little ones feel worse, torn apart, I felt like I was being selfish!
But, thank God after 3 weeks she was finally home with us, but I never dealt with that Trauma, we never talked about it at home, we never sat down to find out how this whole episode made my children feel, or how my husband felt, we just “swept it under the rug”...
part two soon to come, this is NOT the end of this horrific nightmare – stay tuned!
