Since I'm up early, I figure I'd take you all down with me...
I saw this article as I was checking the news this morning. I heard about it before, maybe I'm just in a mood right now that it bothers me more than normal. I dunno. I just sometimes can't figure out what makes people so nuts.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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1 comment:
Wow. That is truly horrible. But I can tell you exactly what was going through her head - she had post-partum depression. I am sure of it. Because I remember telling my mom, "She just won't be safe until she doesn't fit in the microwave anymore..." when MG was little, and while I was kind of kidding, the fact that I'd even say something like that jokingly.... Yeah. Very, very scary.
The difference is that I had the resources to get help (eventually, but not after I did a whole lot of irreparable damage to my marriage and my family, that I'm still trying to fix), and many other women don't.
It's a tragedy, certainly, and I believe that the woman is responsible for her actions, regardless of what was wrong with her, mentally, at the time. However, I think it illustrates that doctors and hospitals and communities in general need to give more support to new mothers (particularly first time mothers), and find better ways of screening women for PPD. I would've gotten help sooner if my doctor had recognized that I wasn't ok, and things would've been better sooner. If there were some kind of check in place, where someone comes to your house and makes sure that you're ok and you're coping, at say, 2 weeks and 1 months after birth, this woman and her child would have had a better chance. They do this in England throughout the baby's first year, and there's no reason (except money) that we couldn't do the same thing here.
At MG's well baby visits, we were so focused on her, we didn't talk about me at all. She had some medical stuff going on, and my doctor was a new doctor, so he might not have been as aggressive about treating me as he should have been. Lots of reasons why it happened, but it did, and thank God we're ok. But a "well family" visit in the home of the new family... that would be intrusive, sure, but could catch so much more.
Love,
Amy
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