Everyone told Sinead Corcoran Dye that having a newborn was a bubble of bliss – and after a traumatic pregnancy, she was hoping they were right. Instead, a few weeks in, Sinead was admitted to the Mother & Baby unit at Starship with her daughter Vivie, in the grips of severe postnatal depression. Now, Sinead has turned her experiences into a book: It Nearly Killed Me But I Love You, and in this chapter, she shares exactly what it was like to be in the MBU.
‘WELL, IF YOU WEREN’T DEPRESSED BEFORE you sure as shit will be now,’ my husband laughed. But the laughter was hollow.
Earlier that day my midwife had told me she thought I’d be sent to a lovely respite centre out in West Auckland. She had shown me pictures of the accommodation – cute little brick cottages with cosy rooms fitted out with cream linen armchairs, white wooden cots and ensuite bathrooms.
I was nervous about going somewhere I’d never been before, on my own with our two-week-old baby, but thought the centre looked nice – like it would be restorative. I assumed it would be like that wellness retreat Nicole Kidman ran in Nine Perfect Strangers, and me and other mums would don robes and drink green tea and do healing circles.
But that was not where I was sent when postnatal depression stuck its claws deep inside me.
Much like her birth, I don’t remember much from the first week after Vivie was born. I remember being delighted that I could hold food down for the first time in nearly a year, but the rest is a blur of attempting to breastfeed and hating it, countless visitors at Birthcare that I wanted to leave as soon as they arrived, and a baby in a bassinet next to me that was a total stranger.
She didn’t look how I imagined she would. Now as I write this, with my laptop on one knee and her sleeping in my lap, she’s the chubbiest three-month-old in my mums’ group – with cheeks so big she looks like a chipmunk. She’s identical to how I looked at her age, and exactly what I thought she’d look like.
But she was slim and dainty when she was born, with an elfish face I didn’t recognise – probably because she was born early. I had pleaded for a C-section at thirty-eight weeks because I couldn’t go on any longer; I had been in hospital on an IV drip for dehydration every few days and was mentally exhausted.
While I felt a duty to care for her, I also felt like I was babysitting and that her real mum was coming to pick her up at some stage. Even now, three months on, I still often feel like I’m playing house. When I take her for walks in her pram, I’m convinced people think I’m the nanny.
A week after we got home from Birthcare, I started getting sick again. My initial post-birth oxytocin high had worn off – I had constant headaches, I was either freezing cold or drenched in sweat, and my vomiting came back.
I became convinced that there must have been a complication with my C-section, that perhaps they had left an instrument inside that was poisoning me.
When my daughter woke me crying in the night, I simply could not get up to feed her. I was confined to bed, paralysed by the sound. I would put earplugs in and pretend I couldn’t hear her.
My husband took over looking after our daughter in the night so that I could sleep and try to get better. But despite sleeping twelve hours a night – unheard of for a mother with a newborn – I would wake up more exhausted than the day before.
I remember crying to my husband saying something was wrong with me – but as a third-time dad, a literal old hand, he tried to reassure me that ‘this is just what having a newborn is like, you’re supposed to be tired’.
It wasn’t until his mother came to meet the baby that my pleas were taken more seriously: she told him he needed to take me to the doctor because my skin was grey and I ‘wasn’t right’.
One of my mum friends also stepped in and confirmed this wasn’t normal. She explained that mothers are biologically programmed to be able to get up to feed their babies in the night – no matter how tired they are – and that the fact I couldn’t meant something was wrong.
My husband took me to a GP, who checked me over thoroughly and said nothing was physically wrong with me. That’s when I burst into tears, convinced she was missing something, convinced I was being poisoned and I was going to die. She hugged me and told me I needed to go see my psychiatrist – that this was likely a mental-health issue. I cried harder, saying she was wrong, because I wasn’t sad, I was sick.
‘What about the headaches? And the vomiting?’ I cried.
We went straight to my psychiatrist. It took less than five minutes for her to diagnose me as suffering postnatal depression. It was severe, she said, and she was calling Starship Hospital to arrange a bed for me in the Mother and Baby Unit (MBU). Not the lovely brick cottages with linen rocking chairs for mums who just need a bit of R & R; a specialist unit, with only three beds for the mums with the most critical cases of PND in the northern regions. A unit where babies are admitted as patients as well, tiny victims of a condition that affects about 15 per cent of new mums.
On arriving at the ward, I had to hand my bags over for inspection, like at airport security. They combed through my possessions, including my daughter’s tiny onesies. They took away sharp objects (RIP my nail scissors) and all medications and even confiscated my phone charging cord. They reluctantly gave it back to me a few hours later after I assured them I wasn’t suicidal, in fact I wasn’t even depressed – I was just sick, remember?
My husband and I were then given a tour of the facility. While I understand the public health system is horrendously underfunded and they had obviously done as much as they could to make the ward cosy, it was worlds away from the respite centre my midwife had shown me, let alone the townhouse Stu and I had lovingly furnished when we moved in two years ago.
The ‘living room’ was similar to a hostel’s – a shared kitchen and bathroom, a couple of worn-out couches, a TV and a few toys for the children that had to stay there with their mothers. The ‘outdoor area’ was a patch of grass overlooking a construction site and a carpark.
My room was small: two single beds with just a hospital sheet on each, a single window, a changing table and a bassinet. It felt like a prison cell. And I felt guilty for thinking that when I knew I was lucky to be in a ward that could only take in three mums at a time.
On a different floor of the hospital, where I had delivered my daughter two weeks earlier, the heating had been cranked up high to keep the babies warm – so I had expected the same here and had arrived in a t-shirt and shorts. But the heater in my room was apparently broken and it was freezing. I would later spend the night walking out to the nurses’ station every hour to ask for blankets, only to be given more sheets. I understand that’s probably because they’re easier to launder between patients, but that knowledge didn’t help the fact my husband and I shivered all night – despite pushing the beds together and gripping onto each other, pretending we were back home in our California King.
Dinner had been a piece of fish and mashed potatoes, which was cold by the time we were brave enough to venture out into the living room. I didn’t eat. I made jokes instead.
At this stage we were both still laughing at how dire it all was, because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, etc., and it truly was so grim it was almost funny.
For a while.
In hindsight, I think I was the one that kept cracking the jokes because I was trying to make the whole experience feel like an inane sitcom episode. Despite how awful it all was, I was trying with all my might to make it as fun as humanly possible for my husband, because I felt so guilty. Guilty I had made him spend a fortune on IVF. Guilty I had not been able to contribute financially to our family for a year because I’d been so sick. Guilty that instead of cuddling on the couch with our newborn baby, he was now in a depressing psych ward with a wife who couldn’t get her shit together, who was always costing him money and causing him problems.
The next morning, I met the psychiatrist. She was going to start me back on the medications I was on before I fell pregnant, before I was pulled off them because they weren’t pregnancy safe. I swallowed my pills then insisted I was fine to go home now, ‘I promise’.
She explained that while I was free to come and go as I pleased, they highly recommended I stay a few days ‘just to talk a bit and get some rest’. I ignored their recommendation.
I didn’t belong there anyway! I was fine – definitely fine now I had my meds back.
The staff were reluctant to discharge me but let me leave under the condition that my husband did not leave me home alone at any time.
We went home that afternoon, but the next day, in an attempt to ease some of my guilt, I convinced my husband he should go to the pub to catch up with friends and blow off some steam and that ‘I was fine’. Just an hour after he left, my two-week-old fell off the couch while I was in the kitchen making bottles. I called an ambulance and we were rushed back to Starship – but this time to the ER.
As a doctor examined our daughter, asking us questions on how the accident happened, I turned away and left my husband to answer while I scrolled Instagram. Stu was understandably disturbed by this behaviour, but I explained through tears it was because I was so terrified they thought it wasn’t an accident that I was scared of saying the wrong thing.
‘Well, scrolling through Instagram while they question you isn’t a great look, then,’ he said.
He seemed angry but I know now he was scared. He, too, had thought that when the baby was finally born, I wouldn’t be sick anymore and he would have his wife back.
My phone rang. It was one of the nurses from the MBU, checking in to see how my day was going. I explained what had happened – that I had only turned my back for a second and Vivie fell – while sobbing and begging her not to take my baby away.
The nurse reassured me that one accident absolutely didn’t mean I was in trouble, and that no one was taking my daughter anywhere.
They asked to speak to Stu and told him that while they couldn’t force me, they strongly recommended I be readmitted to the ward for a few days, particularly after such a distressing accident. They were worried about what it would do to my already out-of-control anxiety and feelings of failure as a mother. They also explained that if I returned to the ward, they would be able to accelerate my meds to a higher dose much faster than if I was at home – where they couldn’t monitor me.
After six hours of observation, our daughter was given the all-clear – she was okay and thankfully hadn’t suffered any injuries from the fall. We went home and I packed my bags for my second stint in the MBU.
This time, I came prepared: duvet, dressing gown, slippers, essential oil diffuser, eye mask and laptop. All the home comforts. But my husband couldn’t stay with me this time – he had to be home with our other children. When it came time for him to leave
the ward to pick the boys up from school, he hugged me tight and cried.
I was silent. I felt abandoned and resentful.
The next few days and nights blurred into one. I locked myself in my room with our baby, watching Netflix on the laptop, only creeping out to the kitchen when I needed to make up formula. I was smiley and charming to the nurses, convinced that with my beguiling smile and ‘utterly sane’ small talk in my Peter Alexander silk pajamas and designer slippers they would soon realise I didn’t belong there.
The nurses agreed to look after my daughter during the night so I could catch up on sleep. That had been one of my non-negotiable terms on returning to the ward. I remember waking up with a headache around 3 a.m. during one of those nights and going out to the nurses’ station to ask for Panadol. I saw a man I’d never met before sitting on one of the couches, feeding my baby a bottle. I walked back to my room. One of my mum friends later said she couldn’t comprehend how I could leave my baby with a stranger and just walk away, and I replied, ‘because at the time I thought she was probably better off with him than me.’
Another night, one of the nurses helped me give my daughter her first bath. While she gently led the routine, she asked me to check the temperature of the water. When I said I didn’t know, but I thought it felt okay, she grinned at me and said ‘See, you do know. You know your baby, and you’re doing a great job.’ I felt five years old with my first report card, a big sticker and an A+.
On one of the days, my friend Anna came to visit us in the ward. She had flown over from Sydney and we had been planning her visit for months. We were meant to spend the afternoon on my deck, drinking rosé and eating a cheese platter.
I called her the day before she was due to arrive and explained where I was, that plans had changed, that I was so sorry. When she arrived at the ward, she looked sad and nervous, like she was visiting someone very sick in hospital.
Then I remembered that she was.
I felt ashamed that I had brought her here. I pride myself on being a great host, and this wasn’t what we had planned. But ‘come in anyway, sorry about the mess’. I took her to my little room, and she gave me a box of presents for me and my daughter: new fluffy slippers, chocolates, relaxation tea, face masks and a little baby book and rattle – plus a stack of frozen dinners her Auckland-based mum had made for my family.
While I perched on the edge of the bed, she sat in a rocking chair near the window, holding my daughter. Whenever people come to visit new babies, they want a photo to share, so I took one of them together and sent it to her.
‘That chair kind of looks like the one we have in the lounge at home so it’s fine for you to post; no one will know where I actually am,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not for Instagram,’ she said. ‘It’s just for me, so I can look at it all the time and think of her and think of you.’
That’s when I stopped trying to be a great host.
Instead, I lay down on the bed and quietly watched my great friend cuddle my baby with the sun shining down on their faces.
On the last day of my stay in the MBU, the psychiatrist said that my medication dosage was now at a high enough level that I could go home. I called Stu excitedly, and he said he’d pick me up as soon as he could leave work.
I packed my bags, put my daughter in her car seat and sat on the edge of the bed waiting to be collected.
Then the nurse who had phoned to check in with me on the day we were in the ER came to my room and told me the plan had changed, and that I had to tell my husband that I needed to hang around for a few more hours because there was ‘some discharge paperwork to organise.’ I’d soon discover that she was trying to stall our departure.
She wanted a chance to talk to me alone – without my husband around and me desperately trying to make the whole nightmare silly and fun.
‘Sinead, you’re so charming, and you’re so funny – you’re an absolute pleasure to have here. But I can see that behind that lovely smile and the jokes, you’re a very sick girl – and I need you to be real with me now.’
That’s when I cracked.
I’m not good at lots of things, but I am a really good communicator ‒ it’s my whole job. I’m not shy, I’m confident and I tell the truth, and I ask for help when I need it. I had told the truth this entire time; I had told all those people over and over again that I actually didn’t feel very well at all. And when help came, I told those helpers the truth – that the help wasn’t helping and that I was actually feeling quite a lot worse.
But they always said, ‘you’re doing really, really well.’
It’s hard to remember exactly when, but maybe one of those days I remembered that I’m also so charming and so funny and maybe that will make them like me, so they’ll really want to help me. Somehow, I still ended up there and I didn’t know why. But I think she was the why.
She held my hand while I cried. I told her that maybe I didn’t love my baby, and maybe I never would, because she’d made me so sick. I told her that whenever I carried Vivie down the stairs, I gripped the handrail with all my strength because I was so worried about slipping and dropping her – but that I also sometimes had intrusive thoughts of hurting her, and that I felt like a monster.
I told her that while I initially thought having a baby with someone who already had kids would be great because they’d know what to do, in reality it meant every time Stu gently critiqued how I was changing nappies or swaddling our baby – trying to be helpful of course ‒ it landed like a brick and shattered what was left of my already dwindling confidence as a mother.
When my husband arrived, the nurse took him away for a ‘quick chat’. I think she must have told him that right now, I needed lots of praise to build my confidence up. Critiques weren’t life or death; they could wait till I was in a better place and better equipped to receive them.
We went home.
A few months later, my intrusive thoughts were more manageable. I was taking my meds every day. And my daughter had started laughing and smiling and only wanting to be held by me – and I think that’s when I really started to love her. I think I needed her to show me she loved me before I could let myself love her.
One day, I want to raise money for the MBU to help more mums like me. I want to buy them nicer couches and duvets for the rooms. I want to take my baby back to see that amazing nurse, to show her how big Vivie’s gotten – and show her I’m better now. Most of all, I want to thank her for seeing me.
Extracted from It Nearly Killed Me (But I Love You) by Sinead Corcoran Dye, published by Moa Press, RRP: $39.99.
