Why Your Postpartum Recovery Shapes the Next 40 Years | Mikaela, Naturopath

Naturopath and doula Mikaela joins us to unpack something most new mums never hear: your postpartum recovery isn't a 6-week window, it's a foundation that shapes your health for decades. She shares a confronting story about a woman who never fully recovered after an unsupported postpartum, explains why thyroid and iron issues so easily get missed after birth, and reminds us that our fertile years are our healthiest years, so what gets depleted now needs addressing now, not later. 

This is part 1 of a 3-part mini-series pulled from our full conversation with Mikaela.

Connect with Mikaela Duffy
https://mikaeladuffy.com.au/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Inside Mama's Circle. Today we have Michaela who is a naturopath and nutritionist chatting with us about all things health, wellness, and nutrition postpartum. So welcome Michaela, thank you so much for coming today. Thank you. So, first of all, I just actually want to hear a little bit about you and the space that you're currently working in and your why.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Okay, so I've been working as a practitioner for about 18 years now, and I guess that's evolved a lot over that space of time. I've always been in women's work and have a background as a jeweler and working in the postpartum space, pregnancy, fertility, and now I'm a menopausal woman myself working in the menopause. So I work in clinical practice, but I also offer Zoom consults for people around the world and I do home visits and I offer those mainly to um postpartum moms or for those who've experienced a loss, a pregnancy loss, or you know, an infant loss, as a way to help to bring the village to them and to bring my services as a practitioner. So I'm a naturopath primarily, and that means that I work with Hudders Medicine and herbal medicine, but I'm also a body worker, and so the body work I do is using traditional herbal medicines and practices such as compressors and applying herbs to the body in a really nourishing, warming way, and abdominal massive work, and so that helps to kind of align the body, improve circulation, and basically bring the body back into balance as well as allowing a healing process to happen because we release a lot of emotions, particularly through our belly, and to work with the belly in a really gentle, safe way is a really profoundly medicinal thing that we can do for all women, but especially when they're in that early postpartum phase.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, wow. So you've obviously worked in a lot of different women's space in your in your professional life. What has prompted you to want to sort of like not target but work more with postpartum women in the neuropathy space?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I think it's just it's something that I the first 10 years of my clinical practice, I was working in a family wellness centre, so I saw a lot of pregnant women, a lot of new mums, a lot of babies, probably a third of my clientele were babies and children. So it was very natural for me to move into that space. And I always I think if I had my life over, I would have been midwife in my twenties. I still would be doing what I do now, but I would have done that prior to training as an astropath. I've always had that interest, and I find the more I work with women, the more I see just how that postpartum period, and we're talking about you know, years, not just a six to twelve week period, which is what is often considered, you know, a long-term strategy to really set the foundations for women as they go into the rest of their life. And I'm so aware now that as I'm you know seeing working with women as we're aging too, that time in their life is absolutely crucial that they're getting nourished and supported in the way that they need. It sets up their relationships, it sets up their their mothering, and and how they look after themselves, and then essentially how they then go on into their forties, fifties, and beyond. And we can often stem health conditions back to that postpartum time where women, you know, didn't get the support they needed, things got missed. You know, the body is in um a huge state of transition, and there's a huge burden and load on the body as much emotionally as there is physically, and so if that isn't being um addressed and nourished at that point in time, that women can you know potentially never really fully recover from that. And so that's the driver is just how much the emotions and the physical are completely connected, and so to do that work then is absolutely essential. In the way that traditional practices have always been done in many cultures, you know, that post-partum period is crucially important that women rest.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

It's almost like sacred, right? So, yeah, that's a really nice word for it. Yeah, because honestly, you see in a lot of other cultures that the women aren't allowed to go out, and people kind of perceive that as oh, you know, like I was out and about and I was just getting back onto it, but it's actually not about just being able to bounce back, it's actually about cherishing that moment, nourishing your body, and really recognizing the transition that it's gone through.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Absolutely, yeah. And just remembering, you know, like the estrogen levels of a woman when she goes into pregnancy, like are 30-fold what they are any other time of life. Wow. So after birth, that oestrogen plummets, there's a huge shift going on. Like, we can't underestimate just how much that throws somebody around. On top of sleep deprivation, birth recovery, lactation, breastfeeding, potentially, you know, who knows the village they may or may not have around them. There's there's so many different factors. So for me to be able to go into somebody's home or support them online or or in clinic and be able to look at the the scientific clinical side of things, but also the very gentle, nurturing, traditional, intuitive sort of things to make sure that she's held exactly how she needs to be because we're also completely different.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, I love that that whole kind of it's almost like going back to basics, right? Like that back to basics of supporting that mother in her space in that moment, you know, warm broths and things like that. I would love to just go back a step and talk about how you're saying that you see the knock-on effect sometimes years after what does that look like? If you can just give us a little bit of an insight.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Somebody that really sticks out in my head, and this was quite an extreme example, and this is early on in my clinical practice. She had had a really rough pregnancy and was literally, you know, vomiting every day, almost constantly. She says her memories of her pregnancy were being on the kitchen floor with her face on the cold tiles. She was literally vomiting all the way through the labor and with a bucket, and the moment the baby came out, she stopped. That's how profoundly, you know, but she told me she never recovered because she'd gone straight then into being a mom. You know, she'd had her conventional blood test done, and it was like, well, nothing was so far out of range that you are a diagnosable disease state. She was completely exhausted, and we're talking 10 years, 10, 15 years down the line, her child was already a teenager, and she said, I know that that was the pinnacle point, and I have never been okay. So, all of those years she's been so unwell, and that can be a much less extreme version, it can be a low-grade, something's not right, and I know it, but nobody seems to be able to find something, you know, and that's very typical in things like an iron deficiency or the a grumbling thyroid, or the thyroid actually needs lots of iron, and iron would be lost through childbirth and through the blood. But you know, that that is responsible for our vitality and our overall energy and focus and ability to cope, but it's very vulnerable postpartum, and those are the things that can get missed because it's so nuanced, and we don't often do the full thyroid panel under Medicare, so might just see one aspect of that and it never gets picked up. And that person can be suffering with that, literally suffering for years and years, and just saying, I know something's not right, but they keep getting sent away. So those are the things that it's being that detective and being able to say, Well, okay, what's happened, when did it start, and then we start to unpick and and tease apart all the clues to find what could be going on, and absolutely it can span back to motherhood or the early days of motherhood.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

That's amazing. I was mentioning in one of the other podcast episodes of an orthopedic surgeon who was telling a story from her perspective that what she sees commonly in clinic when so a woman in her sort of sixties, seventies comes in with a broken hip. But what they notice, and and this actually depends on how quickly they will recover with what they missed during their life, whether it's incontinence from postpartum, whether it's iron deficiency. So this poor woman is sort of you know injured, and her body is so broken almost that it actually is really hard to repair at that point in their life. Yes. And that's what she was saying. She was saying that you know you really need to take care of your body because you're gonna have so many challenges physically, and making sure that if you are having any issues, do pursue it, do ask those questions, do seek further additional support and help.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yes. And it's also really important to remember your fertile years for any woman are your healthiest years, like that is when you are in your optimum health, right? So if you're getting depleted at that point in your life and it's not being regenerated, fixed, addressed, supported, it's only going to get harder from that point because the body starts to lose collagen or the ability to digest and absorb nutrients efficiently or calcium from the bones. Like all of these things are natural aspects of change in and going through in the stages of life. So if we're depleted at that most fertile, most healthy, we really need to remember, you know, it's so easy to be bold, isn't it, when we're younger and we just think we're invincible. But actually, we have to address those things now because it's the payoff in the future, so it's long-term foundational work.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

I think I'm definitely starting to notice that more as well because my mom is now, so she just turned 68 the other day, and she's had some health issues, and it's made me kind of really realize investing more time and effort and energy into my health so that I have that ability to recover quicker, I have that ability to bounce back, well not bounce back, but but get better quicker, recover quicker from illness, from sickness and things. So it's made me kind of really realise a little bit how much of what we do now impacts what happens in the future and that longevity later on too.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Absolutely, absolutely. And now I'm in my 50s, it's like I'm so aware of that so much more, and looking back, it's like, oh, it could have even done differently. But this is how we are as human beings. We often have to get pushed to you know a crucial place or a little bit of scare to actually you know make us do something, and that it's trying to get away from that and just understand it doesn't have to be hugely profound things, but the small things that all fit together are the things that give us that foundation and change our life, and that goes for emotional support as much as the you know, the practical physical stuff.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Thank you so much for spending time with us today. If this podcast resonated with you, please feel free to leave a review, share with a mum that might need it, and we're so glad to have you part of it.