10. Dr. Anikó’s Postpartum Story: Miscarriage, Childbirth & Mental Health

In this deeply personal episode of Nourished with Dr. Anikó, Dr. Anikó opens up about the sacred realities of the postpartum period. She shares her honest story from the emotional highs of childbirth to the devastating pain of miscarriage and how these experiences reshaped her understanding of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and mental health.

Key Takeaways: 

• The emotional complexity of postpartum recovery
• Coping with miscarriage and navigating pregnancy after loss
• The mental health challenges that often go unspoken
• How meaningful support can transform the postpartum experience

Episode Highlights: 

00:00 Introduction to the Postpartum Period
02:07 Discovering Pregnancy: A Personal Story
04:54 Navigating Pregnancy and Birth
07:01 Challenges and Triumphs of Breastfeeding
09:18 Experiencing Miscarriage and Loss
11:39 Pregnancy After Loss: Anxiety and Hope
16:55 Postpartum Mental Health and Support
22:07 The Sacredness of the Postpartum Period

Whether you're a new parent, a practitioner, or simply someone seeking to understand the depth of this season, Dr. Anikó’s vulnerability offers wisdom, comfort, and connection.

Affirmation Resource Mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belleruth-naparstek-acsw-bcd-969a8126/

PLEASE NOTE: This episode is not for everyone, as it discusses pregnancy loss and mental health crisis. Please skip it if this does not feel like the right fit for you right now. If you or someone you love is having a mental health emergency, call 988. For maternal mental health support that is free, confidential, and available 24/7, call 1-833-TLC-MAMA  Love to you all!

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Anikó: [00:00:00] Hey y'all. Welcome back to Nourished with Dr. Aniko. Today I wanted to talk about the postpartum period, and obviously this is going to be the first. Obviously this is going to be the first of many conversations about the postpartum period, both because it is such a rich topic and also [00:01:00] because it is an area of professional expertise for me, and then also just deep personal reverence. I was going to say interest, but it's more than that. It's reverence and so I thought what better way to start this conversation than by sharing a bit about why the postpartum period I.

It is such a deep place for me to offer my support to people, why it is a place that I find so meaningful to work in and why it is such a sacred time of transformation that unfortunately not everybody gets to experience in the same way, because a lot of us don't have the support that we need all the time to get through the postpartum period in a way.

That leaves us feeling supported and restored and transformed, right? So, so often it [00:02:00] ends up being a time of decimation and isolation and, and a really deep loneliness. So I'll start with my story. So, um, picture it, I'm chief resident and I have been feeling kind of. Not super well for a few weeks. I think I might have the flu.

And uh, my husband went to the store, I think to get me some medicine or something, and then kind of on a whim I texted him, Hey, could you get me a pregnancy test? I don't really remember when my last cycle was and. You know, a lot of people have kind of made fun of me about that over the years. Like, Hey, aren't you a doctor?

Like, don't you know how this stuff works? But I will say that I spent a lot of my residency years and even before that, but especially in residency, I. Learning how to dissociate from my body and my [00:03:00] body's needs, right? It was not the time when I was eating, when I needed to, even using the bathroom when I needed to.

So I wasn't particularly connected with my body anyhow, so he went and got the pregnancy test and I remember we, neither of us really thought it was going to be positive. It was just kind of like a covering all our bases situation. And he like took a work call. I mean, we were so blase about it. We really did not think that it was going to be positive.

And then I took the test. It turned positive in like 33 milliseconds. So I don't know if you've ever had the experience of that with a pregnancy test or even sometimes with a COVID test, it'll turn positive, like so fast, and you're like, yep, yep. That's a, that's a, that's a positive test, and you of course need to wait the full 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever the test says, but like sometimes it just turns positive, fast, and that was the case for me.

And he was [00:04:00] taking this call outside and I remember just pounding on the door and being like, it, it's positive. Oh my God. It's positive. And we were delighted but super shocked. And you know, we were not even thinking about it, but. We were ready. You know, I was in my chief resident year. It was in so many ways the perfect time, but we had not been planning for it.

But it was a wonderful surprise. And then when I went to the OB gyn for the first time, I was almost through my entire first trimester of pregnancy, um, which is why the test turned positive so quickly. 'cause my HCG levels were so high already. 'cause I was obviously still in early pregnancy, but not as early as people usually, um, use at-home pregnancy tests for, at any rate.

That pregnancy went really smoothly. Um, obviously I was not [00:05:00] ignorant of all the things that could go wrong. In fact, I was studying from my pediatric board exam while I was pregnant, which was a challenge from a pregnancy brain perspective as well. 'cause it took me so much more time to absorb the same amount of information.

My brain was just not focused in that way that it had been prior to my being pregnant. And I was studying literally all the diseases, everything that could go wrong, every genetic illness, right, that presents in childhood or in utero. So I. I was really having to either worry about everything or worry about nothing, and I got to the point where I was like, there is so much, literally so much I could worry about.

I'm just gonna have to let it go. I'm just gonna have to surrender and just hope for the best, you know. And we had a couple moments of nervousness in the pregnancy 'cause there was a [00:06:00] couple sort of extra tests we needed to do where they weren't quite sure how the heart was developing. There was some concern about different organs developing and it all ended up, ended up being fine.

And then the birth was this wonderful, like, magical experience. Um, it was a water birth and I did it unmedicated because everything kind of went smoothly. Um, just luckily, you know, and, uh, it was just a transcendental experience and this is not what everybody says, but I love, I love giving birth. I always say if I could give birth a hundred times, I would, I think it is the most power, powerful spiritual experience that I have ever had.

The. Privilege to experience in my life. There are certainly other ways to connect with the beauty and the depth of the universe, and this is one of them. So it [00:07:00] was really a beautiful experience. And then breastfeeding was a little bit tricky. Um, but I had a really good friend, one of my best friends. Had her second baby right before I had my first until it was wonderful to be in the same season as this really good friend, and also that she'd already done it, so we would go and breastfeed in the park together, and I was such like a newbie as far as me, myself, breastfeeding.

Right. I obviously knew about breastfeeding, but as a doctor, I knew about breastfeeding. I wasn't. Doing it yet. Um, and my baby was a little more distractible, so I had the whole nursing cover and she just kind of whipped it out and breastfed and I was like, wow, you can do that. You know? 'cause I just, I didn't know how to do it.

And I also was feeling kind of modest. I mean, that eventually went way out the window. The modesty thing, the modesty train left, left the station. Um, but anyway. And so the other thing [00:08:00] was that we ended up traveling that year with our baby. Our child was about four or five months old when we started to travel, and we traveled basically until they were about 13 months old.

And what we did was we traveled around the world to see our various family both. In the country and then outside of the country. So we were really surrounding ourselves with people, and this wasn't intentional, like we wanted to go see family, but we weren't thinking, oh, we need to be by family because we just had a baby and that's what we need.

We just kind of did it, and it ended up being just a really wonderful experience. Obviously the sleep deprivation is hard, of course, but it wasn't, it didn't. Floor us, you know, we didn't get, uh, I didn't get depressed or anything like that. It was hard at times and I was so tired at times. And this baby, like did not love napping.[00:09:00] 

Um, but you know, at the same time, we were typically surrounded by family and felt pretty supported. And so a few years later we decided that we wanted to have another baby, and I got pregnant quite quickly again this time, very intentionally. Um, and then things were going fine until they weren't. I ended up having a miscarriage close to the end of my first trimester.

It was not unexpected. We had already had an ultrasound that showed that there was really no, there's nothing going on in there, and so I knew it was going to happen. I didn't want to have a procedure. I was obviously very open to having a procedure if I needed one, but I really felt like my body will take this care of this on my on its own.

And, and my body did, and I had a miscarriage. And one thing about miscarriages that I didn't [00:10:00] really know was that it was like a, it was kind of like a mini childbirth only. There's no child alive at the end of it. And so that experience was obviously. Very difficult, left me with a lot of grief and some trauma that I needed to work through, and I did work through it with the help of some amazing people in my life.

Um, I. But I think the fact that I was a pediatrician and a doctor and I really didn't know the gravity and intensity of a relatively early miscarriage speaks to the fact that it's something we really don't talk about in any real detail, you know? Um, and so that was very sad. And again, I'd had this first pregnancy ever that.

You know, I carried the baby to term and, and the baby was born and everything is going swimmingly. So it was my first real [00:11:00] brush with how scary it can be to be pregnant and to even think about being pregnant. Inviting the hope in it can be scary to invite the hope in, and I got pregnant again. I had another miscarriage and that was quite early, um, earlier than this first miscarriage had been.

So it wasn't as physically straining or difficult, but emotionally I kind of threw in the towel a little bit and uh, sort of resigned myself to, you know, we have one child and I'm so grateful for that, and I just don't think it's in the carts. And so then when I got pregnant another time. I basically spent that entire pregnancy waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for something to go wrong, every just regular ultrasound, every screening, I was just waiting for bad news, and everything was going [00:12:00] fine.

The fetus was developing fine. My health was fine. Let me qualify that. Physically, I was doing well. Mentally and spiritually I was not. Okay. And since those systems aren't divided in any human being, right, I was not. Okay. I appeared okay because I looked good and my blood pressure was good, and my sugars were good, and I was gaining the right amount of weight, and I was active.

I was even like dancing in parades. You know, I was feeling pretty energetic, but on the inside I was a mess. I was so anxious, I was so fearful. I was kind of living in this state of freeze a little bit, where I was just so scared, and I remember feeling so guilty that this fetus was developing in this like soup of cortisol inside my body, and I knew that was not good for.

That [00:13:00] little being, you know, and I remember apologizing and just saying, I, I'm so sorry. I wish it were different, but this is where I'm at. And I just was having to listen to these affirmations. They were pregnancy affirmations. Uh, put a plugin for Be Ruth Nappers stack. She's amazing. And she had these pregnancy affirmations.

I found the guided meditations to be too scary. They were too visual. They were connecting me too much to the being inside me, and I couldn't handle that, but I could do the affirmations. The affirmations were all like, everybody is healthy. You're okay. And that should have been. Assigned to me if I had been paying attention in that way, or if I had been around anybody to know, to pay attention in that way, or even if I had been sharing that this was what was happening for me.

'cause a lot of this was happening in private, behind closed doors. Like I wasn't going around talking [00:14:00] about how petrified I was. And when I say that like frozen feeling of fear, where it's just stuck. And then I had the baby and another amazing, very different childbirth. I always think it's so amazing that.

Beings come in with their full personality. Like if you looked at my children today and I would describe their childbirth to you, you would immediately know which one came which way? Same. I just felt very connected to the universe and it felt like I, I was just so, again, right after I had the second baby.

The second live birth 'cause I do, I do consider those two, two other pregnancies. We call them our angel babies in our family, and I. I right after I was like, we [00:15:00] have another one. Like I just love, I just love it, y'all. I just love giving birth. Anyway, the oxytocin I'm sure helps and we'll get into oxytocin in future episodes for sure.

Anyway, I. Everything went great. Um, this time, the first time I'd had these like really bad shakes and I felt really nauseous and I needed all this anti-nausea medicine. And so this time I was able to take a long hot shower to the point that my doula came in to check on me and just make sure I was okay.

And it just felt divine. I mean, it was so good and I had that wonderful combo of I delivered with. A midwife and a doula in a hospital because as a pediatrician, as somebody who has attended deliveries, as somebody who has worked in the nicu, in the picu. Hospital is my, it's my happy place. And so that's where I wanted to give birth.

So I was able to do it in that way. Uh, uh, you know, I preferred an unmedicated [00:16:00] childbirth if that was possible. And it ended up being possible, which was great. Um, so I was able to get up and take a shower. And, um, just felt really, just felt really good. And the hospital was really great. They were so lovely to me and so supportive.

And it was actually a hospital where I, um, when I was in private practice, I would see my newborns in that hospital, so they all knew me. So it was like a real comradery feeling, right? So it kind of couldn't have gone better. My parents came in time this time to take care of our older child. 'cause that was another thing that I was like weirdly annoyed about the first time, is that they didn't come in time because you know, everyone kind of thinks like, oh, the first baby's gonna come late, but then the first baby didn't come late.

Anyway, all this to say everything, everything worked out well and then

so. A couple things happened. There was a really big life change that [00:17:00] happened and it was sort of time to pay the piper a little bit, right? So I had been sort of dissociating from these feelings of fear and anxiety. Of course, it probably isn't the time to process all that while you're pregnant. Maybe not even right after you give birth, but stuff comes out as it comes out.

But now as a person that's trained in perinatal mental health, right, I know that it is a risk factor for what we call PA ds, which is Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders, P-M-A-D-S-P-A ds. It is a risk factor for developing PA Ds to have had miscarriages. I didn't know that it's a risk factor to have a traumatic childbirth.

I hadn't had that. Um, it's a risk factor to deliver multiples. It's a risk factor for there to be a really big life event, which I did have, um, in the perinatal period. So that means around the time of birth. So that could be [00:18:00] before you, right before you give birth. Right after you give birth, um, it's a risk factor to move to a new place where you are far from support and far from family, uh, in the perinatal period.

So I had a couple of these risk factors, right? Namely the miscarriages, the fear and anxiety during the pregnancy, and then this big life event that happened, uh, really in that. In that 40 day, first 40 day window, you know when you are really, really, really vulnerable. I didn't know how vulnerable, I didn't know all of this at the time.

All I knew was that I just spiraled and I was not okay, and I was in crisis, and I sought out and found an amazing therapist. Amongst other therapies. Like I even got some body work done when, uh, my, my best friend at the time bought me a package of [00:19:00] massages that was so nourishing. Right. Just to allow that nourishing touch.

Right. And I don't know that she knew that. I don't know that she knew that that is one of the universal needs in the postpartum period of loving touch. But there were ways that people showed up in my life. To help me through this and support me through this, but there was no like shortcut. Like I had to do the work.

I had to do the healing. I had to face the demons, I had to have the conversations, I had to do all of it. And it took a long time and it, gosh, it's really nice to talk about frankly, because it can be such a wonderful marker in your life to be like, whew. Glad I'm not in bed anymore. Geez. That was a lot. Um, but so that, I think that experience of having.

Moved through a time that [00:20:00] felt so blissful and transcendental and profound, like in the roots of life and the universe and the meaning of everything through childbirth. Right? And even my first pregnancy, I really felt that way. It really felt like my body was. Was having its moment. It's like this is what I was made for.

You know? And not everybody feels like that. I'm, I'm not meaning to say that every body that can have babies, that's like the pinnacle or anything like that. But I had a very primal experience when I was pregnant and when I gave birth, and even when I breastfed, that was super cool, even though, Ooh, we'll have another episode on that.

Right? 'cause there's. Man, that can hurt, you know? Um, anyhow. Um, and so I think the richness of all of that and the fact that it can be such a nourishing time of transformation that often ends up [00:21:00] with people in a state of deep isolation and despair, because I was in despair and I was in grief, and a lot of times I was in terror.

And it was really hard, and I know that for me it was deeply meaningful and obviously life changing to have the support that I needed in that time. And so it is deeply meaningful for me to offer that support to people when they need it in this time. And not only offer support, but offer that.

Opportunity to imagine into what could this look like? How beautiful and sacred could this be if you had all the support that you need right now? And to help people create that support and find that support in their lives [00:22:00] is incredibly meaningful work for me. So. I hope this gives you some insight into why I find the postpartum period to be such a rich topic, such a human experience.

Again, it's not the only human experience. You are not more or less human for having had a biological child. That's not what we're talking about. What I'm talking about is just those moments of deep presence in humanity and transformation that we.

That we are offered at different times in our lives, and the postpartum period is a sacred window of time, and I'm really looking forward to talking about this more with y'all in future episodes and talking about all the ways that we can be extremely deeply spiritually [00:23:00] nourished in this postpartum period.

Have a great day y'all, and I'll see you next time.