Blog Mumma
Brittany - Fashionable Fit Mum
This is the birth story of Brittany Noonan as told by her to Kidspot reporter, Donné Restom.
www.thefashionablefitmum.com/media
Before falling pregnant, the thought of having a baby petrified me. I suffered from intense and often debilitating anxiety and I’d always assumed that, even if I wanted to become a mother, my body would never survive the pregnancy.
I was 18 when I first remember having a panic attack. I have really bad anxiety I suffered from bad depression and eating disorders. When I experienced that first panic attack, I started to seek help.
By the time I fell pregnant, I was 25. I’d been having therapy for seven years by then. I knew myself. I knew my triggers and I knew that if I tried to put myself through a natural birth, I would end up right back where I started seven years ago. I wasn’t going to take that chance.
Pregnancy tested me like never before.
My pregnancy wasn’t planned and I never thought I wanted to be a mum. I’d had no respect for myself or my body for such a long time, and I was so scared of all the changes my body would go through, that I didn’t think I deserved to be a mum - or that I wanted it.
From the very beginning - just four weeks in! - I was extremely sick. At first I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but when I was told my nausea was because I was pregnant, I totally freaked out.
“I don’t know if I can do this! I think that I want to be a mum, but I don’t know if I can give birth,” I told my therapist the next day. “There are options,” she told me.
She found me my OB a few days later. He specialised in mental health as well as obstetrics and was my point of contact the whole way through - and I put that man through hell!
I thought the sickness would never end
It turns out I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum - extreme and chronic morning sickness for the entirety of my pregnancy - and I also developed pretty bad antenatal depression. On top of that, all the throwing up triggered my eating disorders and all of that awful, self-hate thinking that I used to have.