My Mental Health.

If you have read any of my previous posts, you will know that I am the mother of two beautiful children. My son is 3 and my daughter is just coming up to 10 months. I love my children more than I could possibly imagine but that's not to say it's not challenging. You get spoken to about 'baby blues' and post natal depression and you never expect it to happen to you, but sadly after my first was born I became depressed and I didn't get help until he was 18 months old. I suffered in silence for that long and I regret not getting help sooner. I began taking my anti-depressants and I started to feel a bit more like me again... then I fell pregnant with our daughter. 

As far as pregnancies go, my second was pretty normal bar my severe anaemia and my labour which resulted in an emergency csection. When my precious girl came into the world, she was very poorly. Both mine and her temperature sky rocketed and we had to stay on a ward on our own in fear of us giving whatever we had to other new-born's. After our temperatures went down we went to the poorly baby unit- this is where we were told that our gorgeous little girl had sepsis. I didn't fully understand how serious that was, nobody really explained it to me. It wasn't until we left the hospital and I did some research that I realised it was actually life threatening. She left the hospital 2 days after being born, then we realised she was jaundice. She soon got over all of her illness' and infections and life seemed to be pretty good again... then my Nana passed away. 

My Nana was one of the strongest women I've known, she battled cancer for multiple years but she finally just gave up the fight. In a way, I was happy that she was no longer suffering but I never got the chance to say goodbye when she was still here, I kick myself every day for not going to see her. I hope she realises how much I loved her and how I much I miss her and that I would love nothing more than to sit in her front room on a summers day with the electric fire on, sweating from my eyelids if it meant I could just spend one last afternoon in her company. 

It's now July and as much as I have tried to deal with how I'm feeling without the use of medication, I've finally given in and sought help for my second battle with post natal depression. On one hand, I'm glad it's only taken me 10 months to get the help I need and to come to terms with it, but on the other hand I just wanted to be able to say that I didn't need help this time but things don't always work out how you want them to.

I've had a rough year, some of my close friends will know the extent of my bad year. All I ask for anyone who is reading this, to be nice to each other. You never know who's going through a bad time and just needs someone to be kind to them. Also, don't be afraid to open up about Mental Health, it has such a stigma around it that people just don't want to talk about it, I almost feel as though it's a burden, I don't want people to worry about me so I don't talk about it that much. But you need to talk about it if you want to talk about it, don't suffer alone. 

Thank you for reading! 

B x