Changing Meds for a Safe Pregnancy

 It's been a while since I've written. I experienced what I could refer to as a depressive espisode, or I could just call it pregnancy. Don't get me wrong, pregnancy is a huge blessing, but during those nine months my mental health truly suffered. 

Even before the nine months, I was starting to suffer. There were many difficult stages in the last year or so of my life. And here I went into this thinking I had been through the worst.

Two months into marriage my husband and I met with my psychiatrist to discuss our desire to have a baby. Unfortunately, the medication I was dangerous for pregnancy. I was taking an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer. 

The mood stabilizer could cause very serious and scary birth defects. I'd been taking this drug cocktail for around 10 years, so the consideration to change anything was not something we treated lightly. The doctor advised me how to slowly wean of the medication and get to a point where I was no longer on it. 

Decreasing my medication had a major impact on me. At the time, work was difficult, but the added change of not being on an antidepressant hit me hard. I was worried I'd have to quit my job. I preimptively took a 2 week leave of absence for mental health. 

It was a very hard choice - putting my job at risk - but I wanted to take precautionary steps and not let my emotions get to a place that would put me in the hospital (something that happened more than once in the past). I got some good rest during those 2 weeks and I was able to return to work after they ended. 

That was November 2019. One year later, November 2020, my daughter Lucy was born. That was one of the longest most difficult years of my life. It wasn't just covid. It wasn't just sickness from pregnancy. It wasn't just change mental health medication. It was a deep, dark depression and I am so thankful I survived.