034 - Childbirth With Parosmia: One Mom's Triumph Over Long Covid (with Hannah Higgins)

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SHOW NOTES:

Picture this. You’re pregnant with your first child, figuring out and learning about everything for the first time, gearing up for a natural labor and taking care of your body the best that you can, and just before you’re about to give birth, your taste and smell change for the worse-they’re completely distorted in the worst way, making it extremely difficult to eat, which is exactly what you'll need to do after a marathon labor and while trying to nurse your new baby. You’re sleep deprived, so sore, beyond exhausted mentally, emotionally, physically, and legitimately starving, and yet you must go on for the sake of your child. This isn’t my story, though it has its similarities. This is Hannah’s story, and how she navigated having parosmia from the end of her first pregnancy, through her baby’s toddlerhood, and beyond. She’s been a source of light, encouragement and hope for me through my own journey, and I hope, even if you’ve never experienced anything like parosmia, that she can encourage you as well, because we all go through hard things, we all suffer, but we can all grow and learn from them and come out better and stronger on the other side, leaning on Jesus our savior and hanging on the truth of His word to get us there. 

Hannah's website where she has tons of parosmia resources can be found by clicking here.

You can also find Hannah on instagram, here. 

Want to connect with us? Have a question?
Shoot us a DM at @surrenderedbirthservices on Instagram, and give us a follow while you're there!

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Surrendered Birth Stories.

Birth Stories, Birth Education, and the Pursuit of Surrendering It All to God.

Let's get started.

Hey, everybody.

Hope you're having a great week or great day, morning, noon, night, whenever you are listening to this.

It's springtime, it's beautiful.

The weather has been wonderful here lately, except for the pollen.

Wow.

I am not really prone to allergies, especially seasonal allergies.

That's always been my husband's deal.

But wow, this year, for the first time at 35 years old, I am suffering from seasonal allergies.

I just went to take a walk with a couple of my kids this afternoon, and I could not even get down our street without having to sneeze and blow my nose several times.

And it just kept going the entire walk.

I couldn't stop sneezing, my eyes were itchy, like I couldn't stop blowing my nose, and it just kept going even like when I got back in my house, it finally calmed down a little bit.

But wow, it's beautiful out there, but it is like attacking my whole face.

And that's never happened to me before.

So I'm not really sure what is going on.

And same thing with my son, my almost three year old, he's about to turn three.

He's never had allergy issues before either.

And his poor little face, I mean, his eyes are swollen, and he's got these red marks all over his face and these rashes all over his skin.

And it was day one of like the pollen falling from the sky.

He was outside kind of playing in it.

And I mean, man, he is blown up.

So I'm not sure how you guys are out there.

Hope your pollen allergies aren't as bad as this household, but it's been a season.

That's for sure.

Looking forward to the pollen being gone in just the warm weather being here.

Okay, well, if you are here for the first time, welcome.

We're glad you're here.

Happy you're here.

Excited that you're here.

This Birth Story podcast is such a passion of mine.

I love telling birth stories.

I love hearing birth stories.

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So, we just want to get the word out, you know, we're in our first year and we just want to tell as many people as we can that there is a place where you can find Jesus and birth stories all in one.

Okay, now this week, if you haven't listened to last week's episode, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to that first before you listen to this week's.

So last week's episode was actually the story of my fifth child.

It was his birth story, and it was really long, but it actually really kind of intertwines with this week's story.

So last week in my birth story, I mentioned a girl named Hannah Higgins.

I found her on Instagram, and she actually suffers from something called perosmia as well, which is something that I have and that I dealt with with this past pregnancy.

But she's actually the one who taught me what it was and who gave me some tips and resources to really get through it.

And I mean, I still have it, and so does she, but she's come a really long way and just gives me hope and encouragement.

And she was a big source of information and just, I don't know, just relatability and everything with me through my story.

So this week, you will get to hear her story because she actually had a baby in the middle of having prosmia as well.

So picture this, you're pregnant with your first child, figuring out and learning about everything for the first time, gearing up for a natural labor and taking care of your body the best that you can.

And just before you're about to give birth, your taste and smell change for the worse.

They are completely distorted in the worst way, making it extremely difficult to eat, which is exactly what you'll need to do after a marathon labor and while trying to nurse your new baby.

You're sleep deprived, you're sore, you're beyond exhausted mentally, emotionally, physically, and you're legitimately starving, and yet you must go on for the sake of your child.

This isn't my story, though it has its similarities.

This is Hannah's story and how she navigated having perosmia from the end of her first pregnancy through her baby's toddlerhood and beyond.

She's been a source of light, encouragement, and hope for me through my own journey.

And I hope that even if you've never experienced anything like perosmia, that she can encourage you as well.

Because we all go through hard things, we all suffer, but we can all grow and learn from them and come out better and stronger on the other side, leaning on Jesus, our Savior, and hanging on the truth of His Word to get us there.

Welcome to another episode of Surrendered Birth Stories.

I am very excited for our guest today.

I'm going to let her introduce herself, but it's someone that I think maybe you're my first, no, probably not my first, but one of the first guests that I have never met in person and have only ever seen online.

So this will be really fun, but go ahead and introduce yourself.

Let us get to know you a little bit.

Tell us who you are, about your family, and about your life.

Oh my gosh.

It's been a long time since I've introduced myself, so I hardly know what to say.

My name is Hannah.

I just turned 32.

I live in Texas, and I am a wife of almost eight years, which is really hard to believe, and a mother to the sweetest, almost three-year-old in the universe.

He is literally the best thing that's ever happened to me.

I have done many things.

I used to be a wedding photographer.

I worked in direct sales for a little bit, did a little influencer work, and then recently wrote a cookbook, which was incredibly unexpected.

But out of everything I've ever loved or done, I'm the most obsessed with music and am currently dreaming about a future in songwriting.

I love singing at my church and writing songs for them.

So I've been working on that and trying to grow in that skill while being a stay-at-home mom.

So that's kind of what has my attention right now.

But yeah, it's a little bit about me.

That's cool.

So do you lead worship at your church?

I do.

I'm on the worship team once a month, and we have a lot of super talented musicians and singers at our church.

So we have like a different team every week.

So there's like four teams and we just rotate each month.

And then my husband plays guitar once a month, so we trade off.

So one week, I'll sing and he'll be with our son in the mornings, like getting ready for church and they'll come.

And then another week, he'll do his thing and I'll do the Higg thing.

So we trade off since we don't have anyone to watch our son in the middle, or in the morning while we're rehearsing and things like that.

But we both love music, very different tastes, but we both enjoy the art itself.

So, but yeah.

That's really fun.

My husband is a worship pastor, so he is leading every Sunday.

And I know that life very well.

Yes.

At least from the taking care of the children while your husband is serving life.

I know that.

Yes, I have made a point ever since becoming a mother to take notice of all the spouses who are obviously like making a sacrifice at home while their spouse is at rehearsal or is leaving because it's just as much of a ministry to be at home with the kids while your spouse is serving as it is to be up there serving.

And I just never really understood that until I became a mom.

And so I make a point to like go up to all the moms and be like, thank you for letting your husband serve being home with the kids.

Like, it just used to feel like automatic, like, well, duh, yeah, he's I mean, he's serving, so of course, where wouldn't she be?

Like, where else would she be?

But I'm really grateful that Jonathan also partners with me and lets me get up there and is so good with Hunter.

And so anyways, yeah, we met in the choir at our church.

So our whole story is wrapped up in music and Jesus.

Oh, love it.

Well, as much as I want to hear that story, I am super interested in the birth story of your son.

So can you tell me what it was like finding out you were pregnant with him?

So we had in 2019, we had decided to start tracking and all the things.

We were like, let's just see what happens.

And I think we tried for about six months, and I started realizing that it was just not working with my mental health.

It was really becoming very formulaic, and it just wasn't what I wanted.

And we were kind of in a stressful season of life.

And so we decided to stop doing that.

And I tried really hard to pray about open-handedness.

I struggle with wanting to control pretty much everything.

And we were paying off debt at that time, and I kind of made the decision, like, I would really, really love to see if maybe we can pay off debt before we start our family.

So I kind of got that idea in my head.

And then with, you know, no warning, the pandemic kicked in early 2020.

And we had all these plans to, after we got done paying off debt, like, go to Jamaica, celebrate, like, being debt-free, and then maybe go on some dates, like, because we could finally afford to go on nice dates.

And we hadn't up until that point in our marriage.

And we just had this whole idea of, like, what else could we do before we have kids when the pandemic happened?

And we were like, OK, so I guess we're, like, organizing closets and doing yard work instead.

And we obviously were home alone a lot together that year and wound up finding out we were pregnant that August, August of 2020.

And there's so many cool things about that timing.

Very, very unexpected.

We were not.

I was not thinking about when I was ovulating.

I was not tracking anything.

And the day before we found out, I actually hosted a baby shower for one of my closest friends.

And they had not planned their pregnancy.

They were very shocked by their pregnancy.

But I was like, you know, I'm so supportive.

Like, I'm so excited for y'all.

Like, we were trying.

Y'all were not.

Y'all got pregnant.

We didn't.

Like, and but I love them and I was so excited for them.

And so I hosted her baby shower and ate all the snacks.

And when I got home, I was like wiped out to a level that I could not understand.

I was so tired.

Then my stomach started hurting.

I started realizing that like my stomach just felt like upset.

I was like in the bed all day afterwards, had the like curtains closed because like a light was like affecting me.

And I think it was maybe like the next morning when I like looked at my calendar and I was like, wait, because I guess I thought I was going to start my period.

And I looked at the calendar.

I was like, I'm like a few days late.

And so I was like, why not just take a test and see like rule this out?

I ended up being pregnant and I could not believe it.

Like it felt like it was like I just had like an out of body experience.

Like I even like I didn't do anything cute to tell my husband.

I just took it right into the bedroom because he was still laying in bed.

It was like Sunday morning and we weren't going to church because it was pandemic.

And we were we were just lounging around.

I just and I just showed it to him.

Like I videoed him and I just showed it to him.

And he just looked at me and it at it and we were just dumbfounded.

There wasn't this like exclamation of like excitement.

There wasn't like happy tears.

It was just like, what?

When we were like most not thinking about it, that's when we got pregnant.

A couple of years before that, we had a really awful health scare.

My husband found out his dad had been diagnosed with Huntington's disease, which is a terrible neurological degenerative brain disease.

That's basically like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's kind of all like tied together.

Can't really imagine anything worse.

And we found out about that on August 6th, two years prior.

And when we were trying to figure out what that meant for us, we realized that Jonathan had a 50% chance of having that gene, that genetic mutation.

And if he had had it, then I would have chosen not to have children, because not to have biological children, because they each would have had a 50% chance of inheriting it.

And it's a devastating and incurable disease.

And so we went through a period two years prior where we were doing all this testing, waiting to see if Jonathan had inherited that mutation from his dad.

And I just grieved a lot during that time of, I don't know what the future is going to hold.

I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to be a mom.

I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to have a baby.

And so anyways, long story short, Jonathan ended up testing negative for that genetic mutation, which means he will not develop the disease, neither will any of our biological children.

And the day that I missed my period two years later was August 6th.

And so it's pretty wild.

Like I feel like the Lord has always really worked through details with me, because I'm a very detail-oriented person, so I sort of pay attention.

And to think that two years prior, we thought August 6th meant that we would never have kids.

Two years after that, I missed my period.

And hello, August 9th, positive pregnancy test.

So even though in the moment, we couldn't really process what was happening, and we couldn't even appreciate it really because we were just so shocked.

The more that I processed it and thought about it, the more I just saw the Lord being in those details.

And we weren't ready for it.

We didn't know what the heck was about to happen or what we were getting into.

But I'm so grateful that God was strong enough to pave the way for us and provide an opportunity for us to grow in our faith and together through our pregnancy.

We needed that, and it was scary to go through it in the pandemic, which we'll talk about more.

But it also gave us a really unique time to bond while we were expecting our first child and not be so distracted by the normal busyness of life.

And we were together a lot, and so we had a lot of time to think and dream and talk.

And he didn't miss anything that I was going through.

So it was sweet and a little bit scary, but I guess probably all pregnancies are.

So you were together a lot.

So did you end up talking about, I mean, either leading up to getting pregnant or once you were pregnant, did you talk about like what kind of birth you guys wanted to have or had you thought about what kind of care you wanted or who your care provider would be or like what route you guys would go?

Jonathan has always given me space and allowed me to make decisions for myself when it comes to almost anything.

He has always wanted me to feel safe and supported.

And he knew that in the years prior to us getting pregnant, I had been making a lot of changes within our household regarding what kind of products we were using, regarding how we were eating, obviously with money.

We were doing so much changing after we got married, trying to basically form this foundation that would be healthy and wise for starting a family.

And while I was cleaning up our lifestyle, learning more about sort of natural ways of doing things, I learned a lot from other women about pregnancy and childbirth and all the different options.

And I was kind of the last of my close friends to have my first baby, and I hosted a lot of baby showers.

And so I heard a lot of stories about how things went for different people and sort of what route they took.

And there's a wide variety of options.

And where I live, there pretty much was an option, no matter what I would have chosen.

I could have found exactly what I wanted.

But one of the things that helped me the most was listening to the Birth Hour podcast, which is another podcast that talks about birth stories.

And so once we kind of got into planning mode, I listened to that podcast all the time.

It was like a minute to me.

And the most encouraging thing about that podcast to me was there are a lot of different ways that this can happen.

There are some things you can control.

There are a lot of things you can control.

And there are a lot of ways to end up with a healthy baby on the other side.

So I definitely wrote down like Plan A, Plan B, Plan C.

They're like my first choices.

If this doesn't work out, we can move to phase two.

If that doesn't work out, you know, these things are fine with me too, just in case I wasn't going to be able to speak up for myself.

But it was really important to me to find care providers who were just like Jonathan, who would listen to me, believe me when I would share about what was going on with my own body, and then supported all my desires and efforts to approaching childbirth as naturally as possible.

I knew I wanted to have a midwife.

I knew that I also wanted to have an OB who was super prepared in case the worst-case scenario happened.

I wanted to birth in a hospital with a really good NICU.

I grew up with lots of health issues and I'm no stranger to hospitals or doctor's offices.

And I think there was just something deep inside of me that almost expected like I've never done this before.

I'm the only girl in my family.

Like, I don't know how this is gonna happen for anyone with my genes or my health history.

So I just wanna be in an environment where like no matter what happens, we're as close as we can be to the right kind of help.

And I know a lot of women don't feel comfortable in hospitals.

And so they choose not to birth in hospitals because it makes them anxious.

For me at the time, it was the complete opposite.

It was like being in a hospital made me feel comfortable.

It didn't make me feel itchy.

It didn't feel sterile to me.

I just felt very cozy there.

And so, and I knew that about myself.

And so the team that I chose was a midwife and an OB.

I also had a doula.

And they let me have a doula.

And unfortunately, my doula is one of her children, tested positive for COVID the same day that I ended up starting the whole process.

And so she was with me via FaceTime.

It was a very unique situation.

But everyone listened to me.

They read all my notes.

They knew that it was important to me to keep the room quiet and to turn the lights down low and have my essential oils diffusing and have my earpods in with my music or whatever.

Everyone was so respectful of my choices and my wishes.

And I knew that I was building a lot of trust with them throughout my pregnancy as all my appointments came and went.

I just felt really safe with them.

My midwife was amazing, and we'll talk more about her later.

She's a rock star.

So honestly, I basically was like, I need everyone.

I need everything and I need everyone.

And I need it in a hospital, okay?

So that's what we ended up going with.

Well, no, that's great.

That's what I tell people all the time when it comes to what location you're going to birth in.

I say, where do you feel the safest?

Where do you feel most comfortable?

Where are you going to be able to just, you know, not be worrying about anything else?

And for some people, that's home, and for some people, that's a hospital.

So that's where that was your place.

So through the pregnancy then, even though it was during the pandemic, was it a pretty smooth pregnancy?

Or did you have any complications at all?

I would say God knew what was coming later, and He gave me, I think, what was the most comfortable pregnancy that I could have imagined, especially leading up to like maybe the last four to six weeks.

I like took forever to show, and I ate everything that I wanted, and I just lounged around my house.

I was still sort of working remotely at that time, but it was just very chill, and because we weren't doing our normal life, we weren't running errands all the time and going to see friends and going to church in person.

It was just very like, it was restful in a lot of ways because I was just at home most of the time.

I definitely was, I think, more sad than I realized because of the social isolation aspect of it.

All my friends, all my close friends who had children at that point had gotten to experience their first pregnancy and first baby in normal circumstances.

And so they were able to share their pregnancy with friends and be able to go out without wearing a mask and took their husbands to their appointments.

And I wasn't experiencing any of that.

And I think at some level, I was like, well, it doesn't matter.

I'm still pregnant.

I still have to do this.

It doesn't matter if I'm sad or if I feel isolated or my extroverted self isn't really getting all the social interaction that she would prefer.

This just is what it is.

And that was one of the first ways that God used all of this to help me loosen my hands on control of my life, was just getting me a pregnancy in the midst of circumstances I never would have chosen.

But it gave us good opportunities to rest and think and chat and talk about whatever was to come, as much as we knew of anyway.

I will say that towards the end of my pregnancy, I was very uncomfortable, which is very common.

I had a lot of pelvic pain and pressure, awful trouble sleeping.

I popped some ribs out of place, trying to push myself, turn over in bed.

I felt like a whale at the end.

And about six weeks before Hunter was born is when my porosnia started to kick in.

So I contracted COVID when I was about six to seven months pregnant and tried really hard not to freak out about that.

I got that from my family at Christmas time.

That was their gift to me.

And the case of COVID itself was fairly mild.

I was not that worried about my symptoms because the virus itself was not difficult on my body that I could tell at the time.

And I got over it, and I just tried to be positive and move on.

But I lost my sense of smell and taste for a couple of months.

Tried really hard not to freak out about that.

And then about six weeks before Hannah was born, that's when my sense of smell kind of started to come back, but it was very distorted.

And I didn't realize it at the time that it was COVID related.

There wasn't a lot of information out there about distorted taste and smell.

There was a lot of loss of taste and smell, not a lot of distorted yet.

And so I was really confused.

Was this a COVID thing?

Was this a pregnancy thing?

Hormones?

Is my body just preparing for labor?

And it's asking me to hold off on the pizza so much?

What is it doing?

I was kind of trying to communicate what was happening to me, to my care team.

And they were like, well, you had COVID and you're pregnant.

We don't have that much information about how COVID's going to affect pregnant women.

And so we don't really know what to tell you, but maybe try some vegetarian sources of protein if you can't have meat right now.

And so I was kind of convincing myself it was a pregnancy thing and willing myself to get to childbirth in hopes that maybe if I gave birth to Hunter, it would get better.

And so that was probably the most complicated part of my pregnancy, which had nothing to do with the pregnancy itself.

I just didn't know it at the time.

And so that was sort of the beginning of what would end up being the most difficult realization during my transition into motherhood, which is that food is going to be really hard to come by.

You're not going to be able to smell your baby when he's born.

And all of the ways you learn how to nourish yourself and heal in natural ways are going to be a lot harder on the other side of giving birth and losing sleep.

So that was just a little taste of what was to come, but I didn't know what it was at the time or what had caused it.

And so I was still sort of living in La La Land, waiting for Hunter to get here and see what else happened to my body.

So when the distortion first started and you said about six weeks left, were you able to eat anything?

What could you find that you could eat during the end of your pregnancy?

Yes, it came on very slowly.

So I started noticing I was really big into breakfast tacos when I was pregnant.

I made breakfast tacos almost every morning with bacon, eggs, cheese, and flour tortillas.

I craved heavy protein and salty savory my whole pregnancy.

And looking back, I'm just so grateful to the Lord for that because I had overcome an eating disorder in my early 20s.

I had learned what it meant to care about nutrition over calories, and I had worked so much on the way I was viewing myself before I got pregnant that I wasn't so concerned with my weight the way that I might have been a few years prior.

And I let myself eat when I was hungry, and if I was craving something, I let myself eat it.

I wasn't eating salads and being like, oh, I don't eat it.

I let myself eat, and I'm so grateful to the Lord for that because I didn't know at the time that I was going to need those reserves big time after Hannah was born.

And he knew that.

So the distortions came on really slowly.

The sausage or bacon that I was using on my breakfast tacos was one of the first things I noticed was starting to taste metallic.

And I just kept thinking, like, I guess the meat that I bought at the store is old or like something wrong with it.

I noticed, like, our trash can was bothering me more than normal.

And I could just smell it stronger than normal.

And coffee also was something that I had been drinking throughout my pregnancy.

I was trying to limit myself to one cup a day.

And then towards the end, it started taking on a much stranger, more unfamiliar taste.

And so those were the first few things.

But I could still eat, I think, like chicken at that time.

And things were, like, starting to fall off the safe list.

But I didn't know it.

And so I was able to eat, honestly, plenty up until the point that we entered the birthing experience.

I remember at my last appointment with my OB, I went and got my membrane swept.

And then I went to Torchy's Tacos, and I got, like, some chicken or pork taco with a bunch of, like, spicy salsa on it and jalapenos and some queso.

And I remember eating it and being like, this tastes rotten, but I'm going to eat it anyway.

And just, like, not understanding what was happening, but just forcing it down.

And eventually I got to the point where I could no longer force things down.

So it definitely ramped up.

It was ramping up, and I didn't know it.

And I'm glad I didn't, because sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I agree.

Only because I've gone through it, too.

But, okay, so let's talk about the end of your pregnancy then, or rather the beginning of labor.

So how did things start for you, and how far along were you, too?

Yes, so like I mentioned, I decided on my due date at 40 weeks to have my membranes swept.

It was just one more thing that, you know, I had read about, heard about, that people tried, tried to go into labor.

At that point, I had not had any Braxton Hicks contractions, no contractions whatsoever, and my body was not showing any signs of going into labor on its own, other than the fact that I was ready to feed a baby for sure.

My body was like, hey, is there a baby around?

Anybody?

But other than that, there was nothing else going on letting me know that my body was getting close, but my pain and discomfort and overall exhaustion was like through the roof.

So I was ready to try whatever.

I was eating all the spicy things.

I was doing evening primrose.

I was doing the red raspberry leaf tea, bouncing on birthing balls, whatever, and had my membrane swept, and that didn't end up kickstarting anything.

So I lasted another week, and still nothing was happening.

So I made it to 41 weeks with no contractions and had my membrane swept again.

That time, it was with a different doctor, and it was quite traumatic, and I will probably never ever do it again.

I think it may just be the way that my body is wired.

It just did not respond well to that.

So anyways, that didn't work.

That's when I just kept eating spicy foods, and I was feeling very discouraged.

And the next day, I had an appointment at the hospital for like basically, you know, we know you have to start in the next week, so we're going to have you come in and do all your paperwork so that you don't have to do that whenever you come in in the case that you do go into spontaneous labor, and we're going to do an ultrasound scan in the hospital.

So that was at 41 and 1, and I went in.

Maybe they set this up without me knowing.

Maybe they didn't.

I don't know.

I was by myself.

Jonathan was at work, and they did a scan and asked me how I was doing, and they saw a lot of material floating around in the amniotic fluid.

My placenta was definitely starting to kind of decalcify, and my fluids looked low to them on the scan, and they knew I was exhausted and discouraged, and they knew everything I had been doing to try to kickstart labor, and they also knew I had had COVID.

And so they weren't really sure why I wasn't showing any more signs, and my midwife happened to be on the floor.

She came in, looked at everything, talked to me, and was like, Hannah, I really think that you should stay and that we should try to induce.

My first choice would have obviously been to let my body go into labor naturally, but I wasn't sleeping.

I was angry every day.

I was starting to not be able to eat, and I wasn't showing any signs that was going to happen, so I was getting very, very discouraged.

And she knew that if we were going to induce, I wanted to try with a Foley bulb, so not with Pitocin and no drugs, just basically let's insert a catheter through your cervix, blow up a balloon, and see if we can trick your body into starting to contract and kickstart labor.

So they already had, you know, that was Plan B, so they knew all my preferences for Plan B, and so I called my husband, told him what she said, that we were gonna induce labor, told my parents, and Jonathan left work, met me at the hospital after he went home and got all of our bags that were already packed, and we kind of just settled into our delivery room and accepted that like, okay, well, from the get-go, things are not gonna start off the way that we planned, but we were so excited.

I was honestly just ready to experience progress towards having the baby.

I had done all the work, I had done all the preparation, I was so tired and never expected, never could have ever prepared for being that tired when it starts.

I don't know why I had this idea that like, if you're healthy and young and fit, like when you start labor, you'll be like, carved up and like rested and like ready to go.

But like after experiencing that, I now understand that for most women, it's like, no, you're literally at your breaking point when labor begins.

It's like a marathon after you've run a marathon.

So that is how we ended up getting started.

And it's a wild story from there, but definitely didn't start how I expected it to.

Okay, so how did it go then?

Did the Foley ball work?

How dilated were you when they inserted it?

So when they looked me over, I was one centimeter dilated.

This was again at 41 and one.

So one centimeter dilated, and Hunter was at zero station.

So that was encouraging to me that he was low.

I just wasn't dilated.

And so basically all of the signs pointed to he's at a good position to try the Foley ball.

So they inserted the Foley ball, which was more painful than I expected it to be.

But once it was in, I was fine.

And about 30 minutes later, I started having minute long contractions.

So I went from having literally zero to minute long contractions.

And those lasted for almost five hours.

So it was like, it just went from nothing to like, you've never had a contraction before, but here's what it's like.

And so like literally right off the bat, it was hands and knees, leaning against the window sill, leaning over the couch.

Like I was, I went from not being in labor at all to like, whoa, am I having a baby?

And that was wild, but we got into a good rhythm with it.

And I just was like, we're just gonna ride it out, see what happens.

She told me from the beginning that they could wait 12 hours with the Foley bulb and see where I made it to.

If I progressed to five centimeters, it would fall out on its own.

If I didn't, they would have to come and move it.

So unfortunately, after those five hours of minute long contractions, I kind of stalled out.

Everything sort of stopped.

I took that opportunity to sleep and lay down and Jonathan fell asleep and we just rested.

We weren't really sure what was happening, but we just took the opportunity to rest.

And so they checked me after 12 hours.

And unfortunately, I had not progressed at all.

I was still at one centimeter.

And that right there was probably like the biggest mental hurdle I've ever, I had ever had to face at that point.

Because I wasn't expecting to basically exercise for five hours and not like make any progress.

So I was pretty discouraged at that point.

That was in the middle of the night.

We started around 3 p.m.

So that was around 3 a.m.

And so they did the next thing on our list, which was start pitocin.

I didn't want an epidural.

At the beginning of that process, I wanted them to start me on as low grade pitocin as possible to just see if it would trick my brain and my body into contracting on its own.

And I just wanted to delay the, what do they call it?

The cascade of interventions.

I really, really like I had, we had already intervened more than I had wanted to.

And I was trying to just do like one thing at a time and just space them out.

So I knew like what was working, what's making the difference?

What is my body responding to?

And so we started pitocin.

I labored for another 12 hours after we started pitocin, and I was able to progress to four centimeters.

But at that point, they had already cut off my food, and so they weren't letting me eat.

I was exhausted, like exhausted.

I was in a lot of pain also.

They had to up the pitocin every so often.

I asked them to give me as much time in between each increase as possible because I really wanted to give my body a shot and but at a certain point, I was looking at Jonathan with tears in my eyes telling him, I feel like I'm going to die.

And Jonathan is so, so different from me.

I am a deep feeler.

I express things loud and deeply, and he is like a steady, calm rock.

And I needed that in a partner because I'm all over the place.

And he does not crack easily.

He internalizes a lot of stuff.

He's an internal processor.

He does not talk through his feelings very much, and he definitely does not cry very often.

But when I told him I felt like I was going to die and was crying, like tears were in his eyes while I was looking at him, and that's when I was like, okay, okay, okay.

Bring us the epidural.

I cannot do this anymore.

If he's cracking, seeing me crack, like we just met this moment of like, we gave it our best shot.

We thought that these other ways might work, but now it's to the point where I'm torturing myself for no reason.

And if I had been progressing and there had been this sort of like give and take of like, okay, I'm working hard and we're seeing progress, I think I could have mentally kept going, but there just wasn't that.

I was just stalling out.

And so at that time, I did not know anything about the mind-body connection.

I didn't know anything about how trauma or COVID or technology or chronic stress and all these things that my body had been trying to process for so long were in the way of my body, being able to do what it's supposed to do in labor.

And I'm very grateful we were in a hospital, very grateful for modern medicine.

And obviously I would have loved to have given birth without interventions, but I'm very grateful they were available and thankful that the amazing anesthesiologist who was on the floor that day was able to come in relatively soon.

I think she was there within about 20 minutes and she placed it.

And within a couple more contractions after that, I was like giving people the peace sign.

I was like cracking jokes.

My body felt warm.

And I went from being like literally feeling like I was going to die to being like cool as a cucumber again.

And I was very relieved in the moment to be free of that pain.

And I know a lot of women don't like to discuss birth and pain, but I have just, man, after the years I've experienced, I now understand the human brain experiences feeling differently if it's been severely traumatized or if it's dealt with a lot of chronic stress or if it's just been ill enough over the course of time that your perception of feeling might be stronger than other people.

So I definitely think pain is involved in childbirth for a lot of us, maybe most of us, and especially if you are messing with things, with interventions, it is going to be an unnatural level of pain.

And so anyways, I was grateful for the also unnatural reliever of pain at that time and basically just rested for hours and tried to recover from what we just experienced and was having them bring me apple juice and cranberry juice because they wouldn't give me food, but they would give me basically sugar on ice.

And I was like, well, if that's all I can have, bring it on.

I need some calories, something to recover from what just happened.

So that was about 24 hours in to the induction.

So we rested for a few hours.

Jonathan rested for a few hours.

I did keep progressing, which was encouraging, but I ended up spiking a fever at one point and Hunter's heart rate rose quite a bit at one point.

So because they could not rule out infection, they then had to put me on IV antibiotics, which I was like, great.

Wait, had your water broken yet or had they broken your water yet?

I don't think any of my water had broken, but I think that because of the Foley bulb insertion and how, I mean, I was already 24 hours in, a lot of fans had been around, I think that that was just their protocol.

And at the time, I wasn't really prepared.

Like I didn't have any framework for like, oh, I didn't realize they might offer me antibiotics, but it was hospital protocol because of my fever, unfortunately.

And I think his heart rate changing kind of worried them a bit.

So anyways, I was like, well, at this point, what all haven't we done?

Stick me with whatever you've got in this room.

And I was just honestly trying not to worry.

I was trying so hard not to panic because I didn't want to end up in a C-section.

I didn't want to freak my body out any more than it already was.

And I was trying really hard just to trust the people that were in the room that like, we might do some things I didn't want to do, but maybe we can avoid the knife.

At that point, that was pretty much my only goal.

I was like, healthy baby, alive mom, no knife.

That was my only goal.

So anyways, at some point, we realized that Hunter's head was not directly over my cervix.

It was off to the side.

There was like a little lip of my cervix in between.

I don't know, something was just off.

It wasn't that the pitocin wasn't working.

It was that his position was not putting enough like gravity on top of like right down on my cervix.

And so I wasn't progressing very quickly.

And so eventually that evening, we were into the next night, I was progressing, his position was off.

So she came in and was like, hey, I've got some ideas for how we might could speed this up and get him into a better position.

She obviously knew I was tired and was not able to just like sleep sleep.

So she brought in like a sheet and rolled it up.

And she was like, we're going to try something called the robozo method.

And I was like, I don't know what that is, but that sounds very mid wifey.

And I am here for it.

At that point, my epidural, my epidural honestly could not have been better.

It gave me a few hours to rest, but then it started wearing off.

And I was able to be on all fours.

I was able to be on top of a peanut ball in the bed.

I had control of my body.

I went numb for a little while, but it did wear off.

And that's one thing that I think maybe is a misconception about epidurals.

And I know it all depends on how it's placed and how good your anesthesiologist is.

And I've had some people get epidurals, and they feel half numb and half their body feels everything about childbirth.

So they're very sensitive, I think, to how they're placed.

But I told them from the beginning, I don't want to be totally numb when I give birth.

If there's a way to not give me too much medication, but just enough to take away this, that would be great.

I still want to be able to feel when I'm having contractions.

I still want to feel pressure when baby's head is moving.

I want that if that's possible.

And somehow, I was able to get that.

So she came in and she had me get on all fours.

At this point, I had an IV of antibiotics.

I had a catheter in, because I had an epidural.

I had an epidural.

And then I had like a baby heart rate monitor around my belly.

So I was like, you know what?

At this point, the hospital gown is a joke.

Like, why do I even have this on?

So I just take off the hospital gown.

I am completely naked.

And she has me get on top of the peanut ball on the bed.

And she wraps this sheet around my hips and just kind of starts shaking me back and forth.

And I just, I look back to like my first six week appointment when I first had found out I was pregnant and they were confirming the pregnancy.

And I had never, you know, had an ultrasound before and they had an internal ultrasound at that time.

And I was just like, I was so shy and so like, I feel very like vulnerable having y'all examine me in all these ways.

And then I picture myself 41 and almost three at that point and naked.

And she's just shaking my whole body with this sheet.

And I don't have any problem with it because I'm like, my goal, my only goal is to take care of my baby.

I will do anything to get this baby out the healthiest way possible.

So we did that for a while.

It was like so calm because it was like at night.

And like, I just felt like hospitals at night, they do get a little bit quieter and more peaceful.

And there weren't as many people coming in and out.

And she had Leon Bridges playing on her phone.

She just had like really like soulful, calm music playing on her phone.

And I was kind of humming and singing along to that.

And she had me sit in different ways.

She let me relax for a while, and had me just like flip from side to side with like a leg over the peanut ball just to kind of like let gravity sort of do its thing.

Eventually I was on all fours again, and she literally just put her entire hand into me and tried to move his head over.

I mean, it was like we were doing everything possible to get him into the right position.

And as unexpected as all of those stages of labor had been up until that point, I was really grateful for that.

Maybe it was an hour, maybe it was 90 minutes of midwifery care because that was what I thought my childbirth experience was going to look like.

Using gravity, having control of my body, like working with my midwife, like her giving me ideas and me saying like, do you feel like this is like, just that communication and not like teamwork and trying to use everything about my body as well as everything, you know, gravity to our advantage.

And it felt very redemptive even in that moment that like, sure, I didn't expect to have an epidural while all that was happening, but I also didn't know I could have an epidural and also be on all fours.

Like God found a way to sort of give me sort of what I wanted and a lot of what I didn't want.

So eventually his head got into a much better position and she left me to rest because she kind of felt like we had made enough progress to maybe let my body kind of kick in and do some work on its own.

I lay down, closed my eyes, and then the nurse left, and we were just in the quiet.

And I woke up from like a really short nap, maybe it was like 30 minutes or an hour, and I felt so much pressure in my butt.

And I was like, this is new.

Like, I don't, I'm not feeling pain, but I definitely feel pressure.

And I sat up and I was going to call the nurse and my midwife, and then she just walked in.

She just was coming to check on me at that exact time.

And I had just woken up and just felt like something's happened, like something is different.

So she checked me, and I had progressed to nine centimeters.

So they lifted the hospital bed up to where I was kind of in like a sitting on a throne position and had my feet up high and really was letting gravity do its thing.

And so she had me do a couple of practice pushes.

And at that time, she was like, oh my gosh, I can already see his head.

And I was like, oh my gosh, it's like actually happening.

Like after all this time, after all these techniques and all this intervention and all this worrying about, am I going to end up in a C section?

And just a lot of faith, a lot of praying, a lot of texting people asking for prayer.

She finally said like, it's time to start pushing.

So they laid me back on the bed again.

I kind of wish I would have been able to birth sitting up like that, but they had me lay back.

Jonathan was right beside me.

They brought the NICU team in because they had been such a long labor and because of the whole fever situation and his heart rate thing, they just wanted Ben in the room to look him over after he was born.

So I was again, completely naked.

I have been one of the more modest, more shy girls that I know for most of my life.

But in that moment, I was scared of nothing.

I was not fearful at all.

I was so excited and I felt so confident in myself, even after that much energy, expending that much energy just get to that point.

I was like, my core strength is one of my best assets, and I really feel like I'm going to push this baby out so fast.

I didn't have any fear, and I was so grateful for that.

I trusted her.

They turned on the only light they turned on my entire childbirth experience, and it was like this super warm, glowy light that basically lit up my midwife like an angel.

Her hair was just glowing, and the nurse was right beside her, and they were so calm.

They had olive oil out and warm compresses, and they were just ready.

And I felt so safe, and even though so much didn't go according to plan, I was so proud of myself for the decisions that we had made, especially with our care team and being in a hospital.

I just felt like, yeah, this was a crazy ride, but I feel so safe right now.

I feel so okay to push this baby out because I know the NICU team is there.

I know my midwife is a rock star.

I know my husband loves me and is going to hold my hand.

And I was like, it was all worth it because it was in this moment right now when I'm actually bringing him into the world where I need to have all the confidence in the world and feel like no matter what happens during this, he's going to be taken care of.

So it was a moment unlike anything else I've ever felt in my life.

And I've never felt so confident and unashamed of my body, which I'm so grateful for.

So anyways, I basically just told my midwife to tell me to slow down if needed, otherwise I was going to like take it home.

I was like, I was ready to knock it out of the park.

And so after that much labor, I was just, I was ready to get them out.

So it was, I think 10 or 11 minutes of me knowing when I was contracting.

I wasn't in pain, but I could feel the contractions coming on before I could see them on the monitor.

And I knew when to push.

Once I did like one round, I was like, I've got this.

I just pushed in between pushes.

I was making jokes.

And then about 11 minutes later, he was in my arms.

It was so crazy.

Like, it was like a high, like nothing I had ever felt before.

And as much as I would have been grateful if a C-section was needed, just to make sure that he was safe, I was so glad I got to experience that, like a vaginal birth and them like lifting him up and me seeing his little weird purple alien looking body and then them putting him on my chest.

It just, I don't think my brain and my heart knew how much I could love anyone or anything until that moment.

And Jonathan was there.

He wanted to watch and see all the things.

And I told him to take pictures because I wanted to see later and that was weird.

And we were just overwhelmed with joy.

And so they let us do skin to skin for a minute before looking him over.

And then they gave him back to me and they helped me with latching.

And he was honestly for being so small.

I mean, he was for being 10 days late.

He was born 10 days after his due date, after 34 and a half hours of labor at 1.34 in the morning.

He only weighed six pounds and 13 ounces.

I was not expecting that.

I really wasn't.

And so that was wild to me.

He was also born with a true knot in his umbilical cord.

So about four inches from his belly button, there was a knot in the cord.

And I tried really hard in the moment not to freak out about that or think too much about it.

It's not that they're uncommon.

It's just they can cause complications.

And I don't know if maybe the knot in his cord was keeping some of the nutrition from him that I was trying to give him with all my pizza I was eating.

And that's why he was so small, or if it's just because the area inside my body at that time wasn't very big, I don't know, but he was a lot smaller than we anticipated.

So for being so tiny, he did manage to latch pretty well right off the bat.

And then they gave us, I think, an hour or an hour and a half with him, and then had to take him to the NICU, because that was hospital protocol for the whole fever and antibiotic situation.

And so anyways, they took him there for a couple of hours, which was sad, but gave us some time to eat.

And get transferred over to the recovery area.

So it was wild.

He came so fast, and then he was on me, and then he was gone.

And then I was walking over to the bathroom and looking back at the bed.

It was like a murder scene.

I'm like, oh my gosh, what just happened to me?

I felt so skinny.

I remember looking in the mirror and being like, oh my God, you look so good.

And then realizing later, I was just delusional.

I was so delusional at that time.

But yeah, Jonathan left to go get us a water burger, which would unfortunately turn out to be my first full, like, oh my gosh, I cannot eat this.

This is so disgusting moment.

I was starving, of course, because hello, I had just given birth.

But that was sort of the beginning of the realization that giving birth was not gonna fix my problem with borosminas.

So.

So when they took him to the NICU, was everything okay then with him?

Yes, he was fine.

It was just a protocol thing.

And we, at that point, were so tired that we didn't know what to expect.

And we're just sort of following their lead when it came to care.

They didn't find anything wrong with them.

The next day is when he did all his like hearing and all that testing they do in the hospital just to sort of make sure that everything's fine.

He was in perfect health.

And so that first night, once they brought him back, it was just learning about nursing, learning about nursing on an empty stomach and no sleep.

It was like, man, we jumped right into what felt like Jumanji at the time.

Just, I have never pushed my body this hard.

I've never had to, but now I don't have a choice because he's counting on me.

So I was very committed to learning how to nurse really, really, really not into the idea of them like trying to supplement with formula or give him bottles.

I made that very clear, like I'm going to figure this out.

I think part of it was, I knew there were a lot of benefits bonding wise.

I knew for me, psychologically, there were a lot of perks to try to nurse him if we could figure it out.

And I was underneath it all, I think very nervous about birthing a newborn in the midst of COVID.

And I knew I had antibodies from my experience with the virus.

And so I wanted to pass as many of those onto him as I could.

And so anyways, we just, we started learning how to nurse.

I was exhausted.

I had nothing to replenish my energy with.

My arms felt like they were gonna fall off from learning how to hold him.

I had like a nursing pillow, but I didn't know how to use it.

And it was just, it was like sink or swim.

It was just survive or die.

And I decided I'm gonna survive.

It's not gonna be pretty, but we're gonna figure out how to survive.

So let's talk more about parasnia then and how that really played into your postpartum.

Because just like you said, I mean, for me personally, after I give birth, there's always like some big specific meal that I want, that I'm craving.

That I'm like, oh, with my first, it was like bang bang shrimp from Bonefish Grill.

Like that's what I want.

And I think my second, I got like this huge breakfast sandwich and with all of the things on it.

Like just, there's always some big meal.

So you hadn't eaten in a very long time because you were birthing and had the epidural and everything.

And they were just letting you suck on juice.

So you're already hungry.

And then you just ran a marathon with your body by going through labor.

So now you're even more starving.

So then you go to eat this, what you think is gonna be post-birth amazing meal, and what happens?

I think what happened was I took like one or two bites, realized it tasted horrible, decided not to eat the burger.

I might have been able to eat some fries.

I was really excited about my Coke.

I am not a soda drinker, but when I was pregnant, holy cow, I craved Coke like a drug.

I wanted ice cold Coca-Cola all the time, which is like terrible for your body, but I wanted it.

And when I sipped on the one that Jonathan brought me after labor, it just tastes of like chemicals.

So I basically had like a few bites of what he brought me, and then I just didn't eat the rest.

He had brought some snacks with us.

Most of them are very protein heavy, like beef jerky and peanut butter, protein bars and things like that.

And I just tried those, and I would take like a bite or something of each of those and be like, I don't know what's happening to me.

I don't know why I can't eat this, but I just, I can't eat it.

So the best description I could say was that I just snacked and would order stuff from the kitchen in the hospital whenever they would come in and ask us like, what do you want for breakfast?

What do you want for lunch?

And almost everything I ordered, I just couldn't eat.

I couldn't, I didn't have enough energy or brain power at the time to categorize like, what is it in all these things that setting me off?

Is it the meat?

Is it the vegetables?

Is it the seasoning?

Is it the, what is it?

And so I think what I did was basically pretend or lie to myself that like I wasn't hungry.

It's almost like I reverted back to my eating disorder days where I just carry on even though I'm hungry and just accept that like I'm going to live, it just may not be comfortable.

I think I was able to eat fresh fruit at that time and maybe like yogurt.

And so I kind of caught on to like some of the things I could eat.

I realized really quickly that coffee was a hard pass.

So I wasn't drinking any coffee.

I think I might've been able to eat grilled cheese at that time.

And so I ordered some of those from the hospital cafeteria, but it wasn't this like free for all, like just give me any food and I'm just gonna like pound it.

It was already to the point where I was so disgusted and everything sort of made me nauseous and confused.

And so I just really didn't eat that much.

I was starving internally and I felt terrible, but I was so happy because Hunter was there and kind of got caught up in like, well, what are the nurses asking me to do?

Someone's coming to check on us.

Hunter's getting tested for this.

My mom was coming to meet him.

And I just sort of let myself and my own needs kind of fall to the wayside.

And that would catch up to me eventually, but it was definitely not ideal.

We had already prepped some food and some meals put in the freezer.

We had a meal train lined up with people from church.

And my parents were in and out the next couple of days, just wanting to meet Hunter and check on us.

And almost everything that anyone brought was a no-go for me.

And so I think I was just in pure survival mode and I didn't have time to cry about it.

I didn't have time to research what was going on.

I was just learning how to nurse a baby.

I started taking caffeine pills because I had no energy and couldn't do coffee.

And I think I kind of survived on like plain pasta with some butter and salt.

Like I was, I just, I very quickly found like, what is the go-to source of calories?

I could do dairy, and so I would drink like glasses of milk just for fat and calories.

I could eat ice cream for a little while.

At some point, I threw all ideas of nutrition out the window and was like, I don't even care where the calories come from.

I don't care if it's candy.

I don't care if it's soda.

I don't care what it is.

I just, I have to have something going into my system because there's so much coming out.

Those were dark days.

I am, I sometimes question, obviously, like why God allowed the birthing of my first child to overlap with this, but Hunter's life and his face was the reason why I didn't want to give up.

Like seeing him every day, holding him was like, okay, I'm not sure if I would really care to stick around that much if it wasn't for my child, but my child is here.

And so therefore I do have to stick around.

And I had never gotten to that place psychologically before, where I didn't really feel like there was much hope for the future, but I definitely got there in those early weeks postpartum.

And I was voicing those things to people, but it's almost like they weren't hearing me or they weren't like taking me seriously.

They didn't understand perosnia, they had never been through it, they didn't know how it was affecting me physically and emotionally because they got to smell their newborn and they've never been surrounded by the smell of rotting flesh.

They got to eat their meal train and not watch their husband eat it while they starved.

They could not relate.

And I quickly realized like, okay, my birth was very different than my mom's and my step mom's, they can't relate.

No one that I know has perosnia and they definitely don't have perosnia and a newborn, so they can't relate.

And it was like, I was just feeling further and further and further isolated.

Like, I had this community ready to support me.

I had a family that was excited about this baby.

My husband is supportive, but none of them know what's going on with me.

And so therefore none of them can help and everyone was doing their best, but it was very quickly becoming like, I'm gonna have to figure this out on my own.

I'm gonna have to go get mental health support.

I'm gonna have to go get tested for things and see if we can find like a holistic way to approach this.

But it was much more difficult to get help than I ever could have thought that it would be.

And at some point I had to just decide like, I'm gonna survive this, like I'm gonna survive.

But I was very hungry and I only gained, I gained about 40 pounds when I was pregnant.

And by the time Hunter was nine months old, I had lost 60 pounds.

So I was 20 pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight, which put me at 120 pounds, which I'm five foot seven, 120 pounds for me, was like prepubescent.

It was like, that's how much I weighed when I started my period when I was 13, you know?

And I was now 20, 29.

And so it was very scary.

I was seeing sides of myself and fitting into size clothes that I had never even dreamt of fitting into as an adult.

And I was getting complimented all the time for my weight loss and how good I looked and all of that triggered my eating disorder.

So it was just, I felt like I was in literally like my version of hell.

All these things I thought I had overcome and prepared well for, felt like they sort of turned on me in that season.

And so that's when I decided I needed to go to Greek counseling and start approaching everything from like a mental and spiritual health perspective.

So how many weeks postpartum were you when you realized, okay, I need help?

Or how many months or like how far after he was born, did you realize that this was serious?

I think what actually did it for me, which this is what happens.

This is a coping mechanism and a thing that I think I learned a long time ago.

My dad actually got COVID a few months after Hunter was born.

And he came closer to dying than he ever has.

The symptoms wrecked him the first time he had the virus and he was on oxygen and in and out of the like ER.

Like it was just, it was so scary.

And there I was like, hadn't slept in three months, nurse losing weight, constantly bothered by all these like long-term symptoms.

And then my dad got really sick.

And I think that that was one of the things that triggered my emotions the most, because I started thinking what happens if my dad dies?

Like it was like, I feel like I'm gonna die.

No, I feel like my dad's gonna die.

There's this baby.

What if we both die?

And he doesn't get to know, it was just like one thing on top of the other.

Around that time also is when I decided to start posting more openly about my experience on social media because I couldn't find anyone in my real life to relate to me.

So I started posting on Instagram.

And one day while Hunter was napping and Jonathan was gone, I made this reel about prosnia.

And honestly was just fed up with this symptom.

I was really sad.

I was really not okay and really tired of not being able to find anyone who would validate like just how disruptive it was.

And so I made this really short reel and it ended up going viral.

And I gained like 20,000 Instagram followers in a couple of weeks.

So this was all around the time that my dad was sick and almost dying, about three months postpartum, all of a sudden I was getting like a hundred DMs a day from strangers around the world, begging me for help saying like, I'm dealing with this too.

I didn't know what it was called.

Thank you so much for speaking about this.

And it was like, all of a sudden I went from thinking, no one can relate to me to like, there are so many people out there that can relate to me.

And when I sense that other people need help, I find a way to help them.

It doesn't matter how like, bad of shape I'm in.

I will go get help if it means that Hunter will be taken care of.

I will post on social media if it means that 20,000 people feel less alone.

I revert to, don't worry about yourself, help these people.

And that is when I was like, you know what?

I think I might could use some support because look at all these people, they need me.

So therefore, I need to go get help.

And again, like God knows me.

I've learned throughout the process of motherhood and through all of this, like God knows me on an intimate, physical, physiological, mental, emotional, spiritual level.

He knows how my brain works.

And so he's like, Hannah needs help.

Hannah needs a lot of help.

And she needs to learn how to ask for help, but she doesn't know how, because she never learned how.

So what I'm going to do is put some like chaos around her, and she's going to try to help those people.

And in the midst of trying to help those people, she's going to then realize, okay, it's okay that I go get help, because if I go get help, I can be there for these people.

Not thinking at all about, you deserve to go get help, because you're an individual, and you're worth helping just for the sake of your own well-being.

And so it was around three months postpartum.

I emailed my church and was like, I think I need counseling.

I am not handling my emotions well.

I'm not doing well with my husband being gone.

He was commuting at that time and was gone about 13 hours a day.

So he would help me during the nights with feeding Hunter, helping with diaper changes, like whatever he could do.

But he would leave at like six or 6.30 in the morning and would not be home until five or 5.30, or whatever math.

Anyways, I was home way too much alone at that time.

And so I started grief counseling and met the most wonderful woman at my church who knows so intimately how grief can affect our minds and our bodies and how doubt in the Lord can affect our thought patterns and our mental health.

And so I did that for I think about nine weeks.

And after that, it was suggested to me to consider trauma therapy.

So like with a professional away from our church, like someone who, she actually went to our church, but who had been like, you know, clinically trained.

And so after completing grief counseling, that was like around the holidays.

And that holiday season, I decided to get off social media because I realized I had been pouring out a lot.

I had been sharing a lot of information, trying to help people.

We were preparing to move.

We had been building a house during that year.

There was just so much going on.

And so I decided to get off social media for about six weeks.

But right before I got off, someone messaged me and told me about something called a stellate ganglion block.

And I, was that you?

Yeah.

That was you?

Yes, that was me.

You were the very first one?

Yeah, because you didn't know what it was.

And I remember I found out about it through the Facebook Prorosmia support group that you had told me about.

And then I had seen you posting about all these other things that didn't work for you, but I hadn't seen you mention that at all.

And so I popped on to say, hey, have you done this?

Because I'm going to do it.

And you should give it a shot if you haven't yet, especially because the guy who was doing it was a lot closer to you in Texas.

Well, that is awesome.

What a fun full circle moment.

This shows you how many people I've messaged over the last few years.

I was going to say, you've got tens of thousands of people who probably messaged you.

So it's constant.

It's like I don't even, I just treat everyone like they're my friend.

And because we were all searching for the same solution to the same problem, but I lose track of who kind of connected me with what.

But so that was on my radar.

I didn't research it too much.

But when I got back on social media around February of, I guess that would have been 2022, there had been more and more stories started to be posted in the Facebook groups.

And there were more people sharing testimonies of like positive changes.

And so that is when I decided to like actually look into it, make phone calls, and see if they could get me in for an appointment.

And I called David Gaskin's office.

They had an appointment on March, Friday, March 4th.

And I was like, again, I love dates.

And I was like, what if this is God's way of telling me to march forth and like, go get my healing?

Sometimes I think a little bit too much into things.

But I made the appointment.

I was still nursing Hunter at that time.

I have a friend, a really close friend who lives near his office.

And so we just planned a trip and went down and tried the SGB.

And unfortunately, it makes so much more sense to me now that I understand the mind-body connection and how much my body was in fight or flight just from lack of sleep, nursing, starvation, COVID, then the vaccine.

On top of all my childhood stuff that I had not yet addressed, it makes a lot of sense that it did not work for me.

I think that the brain has to have the right neural pathways in place in order for that sort of treatment, for PTSD to be successful.

At the time, I didn't know that, and so I didn't really gain anything from that first appointment.

And in a few days, it took me a few days to start spiraling emotionally and grieving the fact that this thing that had worked for other people wasn't working for me.

Because again, isolation.

It was like, how come nothing that I try is the same as it is for so many people?

How come my body and my brain are not reacting to these things the way that it feels like most people are?

Like, what is it about me?

And at that point, I was in despair.

Like, I was just fearing.

I just was living in complete and total fear because Hunter was about to turn one.

I still hadn't been able to enjoy food since he had been alive and couldn't lose any more weight without being scarily skinny.

I was bruising by sitting down in chairs because I was so low on iron.

And I just didn't see how God was going to sustain my life.

I didn't feel like he cared about me.

I didn't feel like I was seen.

And part of me wondered, like, is this kind of like where it ends?

Like, was my purpose to give birth to Hunter?

And then is this going to take me out?

Like, through mentally or physically?

Like, am I going to literally starve to death?

Am I going to end it one night when I lose, you know, all my self-control?

Like, I just felt really hopeless.

And so thankfully, though, I was building that practice of, like, looking for help, asking for help, like voicing.

Like, Jonathan's like, do whatever you need to do.

Ask whoever you need to ask.

Like, I don't know what you need, but like, if you need anything, just ask anybody.

Like, I support you.

So, I reached back out to my church and said, I think I need, I think I need to look into EMDR.

After I posted about my failed SGB, I think I had like 3,000 people watching my Instagram stories that weekend because they were waiting to see if it was going to work for me or not.

And after it failed, I brought up the mind-body connection and trauma because David and I had been speaking and several, a handful of people said, have you ever heard of EMDR?

Have you ever heard of EMDR?

Have you ever heard of EMDR?

And I was like, no, but dang, seems like y'all have, and seeming like something that was worth looking into.

And so that's when I started Googling and learning about mental health and learning about trauma and learning about how it affects our bodies, learning how even though we're trying our best, if our neural pathways were affected by fear or loss or grief, sometimes our body is just not going to heal and it's not going to respond the way that we want it to, to what we want it to.

And so I called or I reached out to my church, got a referral really quickly, got into basically an intake appointment with a professional EMDR certified therapist and started meeting with her like two weeks later.

And from the first session, I experienced anxiety symptoms relieving, my ability to write songs came back, I took really good naps, I stopped feeling anxious whenever Jonathan wasn't home at night.

Like I had all of these things that were happening to me all the time that I didn't realize like what was causing them.

And it's because my, the fear center of my brain was completely activated.

And when I started EMDR, that all started to change.

And the road to get there was tragic.

And also I'm so grateful that I started it and that God cared about my soul and my life and my future enough to get me there because I would have never admitted that I needed trauma therapy.

I have written off everything I've ever been through.

I was like, well, it could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

I've learned to like overcome.

I've done a lot in my own strength.

When I was getting older, I finally learned how to trust in the Lord with a lot of things and follow his leading.

But once I became a mom, I reverted back to a lot of my old anxious ways.

And of course, because I was starving, I was just trying to control anything that I could.

And when I started trauma therapy, I started like releasing my grip on control again.

My anxiety started to lessen.

And so many things that I have not been able to do or enjoy for so long started coming back.

And although it wasn't affecting my senses directly, it was affecting, definitely was affecting my health positively.

And so I kept going with that and just finished up two years at EMDR at the end of 2023.

So I did it for about almost two years, which is a lot.

It's a lot of therapy, but it was very productive.

So how did you get from the point of does God see me?

Does he care to having your faith restored in him?

Well, let's see.

While I was doing EMDR, the first spring and summer, so spring and summer of 2022, my taste and smell was not changing all that much.

But because I was experiencing some relief with my postpartum anxiety and depression, I started learning how to appreciate other things besides food and besides smells.

I had worked with essential oils for years, and I love food.

And so the fact that those things were taken from me temporarily were really discouraging, but I learned to appreciate music again and appreciate going on walks, even though grass smelled weird, and I wasn't able to smell the flowers the way that I was before.

I tried with everything in me to learn how to be grateful again and to try to enjoy moving into a new house, decorating a new house.

My senses weren't working in a lot of the ways that I wanted them to work, but I was still alive, and I did still have Hunter, and I did have a supportive husband.

So I tried really hard while I was in those early days of therapy to practice gratitude and have conversations with people I needed to have conversations with.

And eventually we learned that we could make homemade pasta and homemade pizza.

I could control the ingredients in all my homemade pizza sauces, and I could control the toppings.

And so we eventually learned how to make homemade Alfredo pizza.

And that was like the one food that felt like homemade, warm, nourishing.

We put like basil on it.

I could do hot honey.

I could do balsamic vinegar.

And it was like this one thing that I could make and know like this is delicious, it tastes great, and it's gonna feed my body.

And so that summer, we ate more pasta and pizza than anyone should, but it was so good.

And it just felt like the beginning of the healing process.

That October is when I had the idea of writing a cookbook.

I had not experienced a lot of changes in my senses yet.

And I thought, well, I am eating enough to survive.

So I wonder if I could write like basically how to survive this for people, give them ideas for what they might could eat that might help them weather their darkest days.

That October, like a couple of weeks after, I came up with the idea for the cookbook.

I found out I was pregnant again.

And that was also very unexpected.

I couldn't believe that my body even had the ability to conceive a child after all that I had been through and all that I was working through.

And it was shocking.

And we kept it to ourselves because we just didn't want to tell anyone until we knew that everything was okay.

And unfortunately, within, I think, three weeks of finding out I was pregnant, I started to lose the baby.

And that was another, like, why do you keep giving me things and taking them away?

Like, why is this so hard?

Like, why can't you just let us get to a plateau, basically, is what I kept wanting.

I didn't know what to do because I had never lost a baby before.

And so I reverted again back to sort of my old ways of like, well, I'll focus on this cookbook because it'll give me a way to help people.

And I did not know at the time what was coming for me, which was my body was going to start grieving whether I wanted to or not.

I didn't want to admit how heartbroken I was or how devastated I was emotionally.

I was just trying to hold it together for Hunter and keep trying to show up to be a mom every day.

And my back went out soon after the miscarriage.

I got really sick for six weeks and never drew any connections to like, you're sick with grief, but you will not admit it.

So I kept myself really busy.

I was waking up at 5 a.m.

every morning working on the cookbook.

I could hardly sleep.

I was having nightmares.

I mean, it was just, I had opened up all this trauma in my brain in therapy and all of that was circling around.

And again, I was sort of at that place of like, I'm just really not sure if God loves me.

I don't see this happening to people around me.

I don't feel like they're constantly walking through fire.

I don't feel like they're having this many physical and psychological and emotional issues come up at one time.

Like, it just felt like, I think it felt like God was abandoning me, and it just triggered all my abandonment wounds.

And so I just started getting angry.

I didn't realize I was getting angry, but I was.

I felt miserable every single day.

I didn't know how to be vulnerable about it with my husband or with friends.

I started drinking too much.

I had never been in a season where I was leeching for alcohol to numb my feelings.

But I got there in that season, and that was a low for sure.

I kept processing things in therapy, and of course we were talking about the miscarriage, but I didn't realize the effect it was having on my body for a few months.

But all that time I was working on the cookbook.

And so I know to a lot of people, it is a beautiful thing that I made.

The book is well put together, and all my OCD and my attention to detail and my photography background and my home decorating skills and all of my aesthetic preferences, they all come into play in that product.

And I am proud of it.

I think if people could see though what was happening behind the scenes and how devastated I was emotionally, they would understand that it was more of a coping thing for me than anything.

It was my way of, again, not knowing how to take care of myself and so therefore taking care of other people.

Remembering how hopeless I felt in the early days and after I had given birth and feeling so far from the Lord and feeling so confused about how I was going to make it.

And I just kept replaying that in my mind.

And I just tried to write people a roadmap out of it.

And at the end of the day, I had to accept that everyone's healing process is going to be what it's going to be.

And God's sovereign over everything.

And if people are going to suffer, they're going to suffer.

And if He's going to heal them, He's going to heal them.

And if it's going to be through the SGB, it'll be through the SGB.

And if it's going to be through time, it'll be through time.

But at the time, I was so, I felt so out of control that doing what I could to encourage people and doing what I could to help them kind of feel heard and see was kind of my way of dealing with my own grief and suffering.

The miscarriage happened in November.

I was in a very dark place in December, in January of 2023.

David was going to be really close to where I live, doing like a seminar for other CRNAs, and I reached out to him and asked if I could come see him for another SGB.

He let me come for free and be the guinea pig at his little seminar.

I warned everybody before we got started that I was a very difficult case, and it's very likely that it was not going to work for me, as it had not the first time.

But to my surprise, about 10 months into EMDR, my second round of SGBs was actually very successful.

And in a matter of five minutes, I went from not being able to eat any onions or anything with onion powder or any meat to being able to eat like Chipotle steak and Chipotle grilled onions and peppers and nacho cheese Doritos and a granola bar with nuts and chocolate on it.

I could not believe it.

I couldn't believe that it had actually worked.

That these like little stepping stones of like trying to regain my mind-body connection and trying to pave those pathways in my mind that connect my senses and my body and my brain and my mind, it actually worked in relieving stress from past trauma.

That was super helpful, and I was in a dark place.

I mean, I was trying to take steps towards healing, but I was also really trying to like mask my pain.

And I thought I was in a healthy place that summer, but the miscarriage sort of derailed me from that, and God was kind and generous enough to allow that SGV to work, give me some food back so that I could feed myself for the first time since my kid had been born.

So that was almost two years after Hannah was born.

And it was then that I started to feed myself a lot more, eat a lot more, nourish myself a lot more.

I was still finishing the cookbook, but all of a sudden all my recipes I had written tasted way better because I could enjoy them a lot more, even without all the meat and onion and garlic that I had excluded, they still were more delicious after that.

And I think although our hope should always be in the Lord and not in our circumstances, I think God knew I just needed a sign that like this was going to get better.

Like I had to see a sign that my body was not going to physically die.

Like I needed him.

I needed it to work and he knew that.

And so I think that slowly started the process of me trusting him again, feeling seen by him.

And after finishing the cookbook, I got off social media for an extended period of time.

We went on a vacation.

My parents volunteered to pay for Hunter to go to summer childcare because they knew I needed rest.

I was at a state of burnout that I didn't even realize how bad it was until I was able to eat again.

It was like once I felt nourished for the first time after not feeling nourished for almost two years, that's when I realized how bad it had actually gotten.

And so we pulled out all the stops.

I stopped working, got off social media, had help with Hunter for the summer, two days a week, and we just, we tried really hard to rest.

And all throughout last year, it was like God was telling me like, it wasn't anything you needed to do, Hannah.

It was things you needed to let go of.

It wasn't that you weren't working hard enough or that you weren't trying to be healthy enough or that you weren't like seeking healing from external sources hard enough.

It was that you were trying to work when you didn't need to.

You were on social media when you didn't need to be.

You were trying to save 20,000 people while you were dying inside.

You were trying to make everyone else feel better after your miscarriage instead of realizing that you deserve to grieve.

You were looking to help other people when you really needed to care for yourself.

And you're trying to fix other people's problems when you had plenty of your own.

And instead of bringing your problems to me, you were almost starting to look to the world to be able to help you with them instead of coming to me, your heavenly father, and grieving with me in my presence.

You were trying to show up and grieve for other people, and what you really needed to do was go into your closet and fall on your knees and cry and grieve with me.

I didn't realize at the time how long it had been since I had been that vulnerable with God, since I had just, instead of processing externally with my husband or with my friends or with my small group or at church or instead of serving him or instead of declaring my faith, knowing that things were going to be okay, knowing that God had a plan, I didn't realize that a lot of my intimacy with the Lord was missing.

And after becoming a mother and then dealing with porosnia, I didn't know where to fit it in.

I didn't know what it was supposed to look like.

I didn't know when I was supposed to do it.

I didn't have the energy to meet with the Lord.

And I guess I was using those as excuses.

I just got everything turned around.

My priorities had shifted so much.

And through the pandemic and the loneliness that came with that and the isolation, I was trying to stay connected to the outside world in some way.

And what I really needed to do was disconnect from the outside world and reconnect with Scripture and confess to the Lord all these many, many ways that I didn't trust him anymore.

I think I was ashamed that I had let myself get to that point that as childhood trauma stuff was coming up and as marriage was getting more complicated and as motherhood came on the scene and as Baraznia kicked in, and as I lost a baby, I think I was ashamed because it had been so long since I had been honest with him about my anger, about my fear, about my self-consciousness, about my lack of equipping for all these roles he had put me in.

And I think I was running from him, honestly, which is so weird.

If you think about all the things I was spending my time doing, small group, church, therapy, Christian therapy, I was seeking him in some ways, but I think in the most important way, spending one-on-one time with him, reading his word and remembering who he even is and that he's perfect and that he was with me that whole time.

And I think I had become ashamed of all the ways I had doubted him and was scared that the suffering that he was allowing in my life was going to last forever.

And I was ashamed of the anger I felt about that.

And I didn't want to be faithless, and I didn't want to be unfaithful to him.

But my shame and my fear was sort of keeping me in a loop of running.

And eventually, when I hit that burnout feeling after the cookbook and that summer when I was getting help with Hunter, I just started realizing I needed to let go of a lot.

I needed to have some really honest conversations.

I needed to ask for some accountability, and I needed to start letting go of things.

I needed to stop expecting myself to have a career just because that's normal in today's day and age for mothers.

I needed to realize that God had provided for us financially and that no amount of extra income on my end was going to be worth the damage that was being done to my mental health trying to be a stay-at-home mom and have a sort of entrepreneurial career.

I, in September, ended up giving up alcohol.

I just had a glass of wine with dinner one night when we had company over, and then the very next day I just woke up and was like, I think that I'm done.

I think that I'm done with alcohol.

It wasn't this like really formal thing.

I just felt like the Lord was like, you don't need it anymore.

I was taking more and more breaks off social media.

I was posting less and less.

I was sort of opening myself up to be a servant to others less and less.

And I was sort of paring down how many emails I was sending, how many Zoom calls I was hosting, and started warning people like, all right, guys, I think at the end of the year, like, I'm going to take an extended break off of social media.

As much as this community has served me and has helped me, I can't say any more than I already have to help y'all.

Like, I think we finally uncovered, like, everyone's nervous system is different.

Everyone's immune system has been affected by different things.

Everyone's neural pathways have been affected differently by trauma and life experience.

And I wish there was a silver bullet that was going to help everybody.

I wish there was a treatment that was going to, like, fix this for everybody and that we could find it and cure it and solve it for everyone, but at some point I had to realize that that just wasn't going to be the case.

And instead of being a martyr and letting myself literally kill myself in order to help everyone on the internet, I had to look at Hunter and think the best thing for him is that I step away and basically turn down every source of noise, every source of outside voices, every source of distraction, every source of cultural input into my life and get in the word of God and learn to pray again, learn to cry again, learn to be honest with him.

And so I started giving up all these ideas of who I needed to be to be successful, to be a good wife or a good modern woman or whatever.

And I just accepted that, which is the hardest thing for someone to do, I think, who has ever experienced abandonment or has grown up as a child of divorce, which is that you really are like God's daughter.

He really did see you.

He really was with you.

He really does care.

He really does love you.

He really did make you the way that you are for a reason.

He can use anything to bring him glory, but he doesn't expect you to push beyond unhealthy limits and sacrifice your family and, you know, kill yourself trying to help other people if he's giving you a family to love.

And at the end of the day, I am worth taking care of whether my body and my time and my energy benefits anyone else.

And I had never, ever believed that before.

I had never honestly believed that I was taking care of or that I was worth taking care of unless somebody loved me.

Like I just on my own, I did not believe I was worth taking care of.

And it took trying to love other people for so long to the point of burnout that I finally realized I think I'm worth loving just because I'm human.

I think it's okay for me to step away and pursue my own mental health and emotional well-being just because I exist and it honestly might be the best example I could leave for the audience God gave me.

And it definitely was the best thing for my family.

And so it's been quite a journey.

I cannot believe how bad I let things get and how vulnerable I had let myself become to the lies of the enemy and to the lies of our culture about what it means to be a woman or what it means to be successful or a contributing member of society.

I was letting a lot of those voices control me for a long time.

And eventually, I decided to revert back to my most pure, most innocent inner child and let myself start singing, writing a lot of songs, and I even started horseback riding lessons again last summer.

I rode horses a lot when I was a kid.

My dad actually sold his place and his horses the same year that I got married, and so it felt like a really big loss that I never really processed, that access to horses and riding.

And so I decided last summer to start riding again.

Again, Jonathan was very supportive of that and wanted me to do whatever I needed to be happy and find joy and connect to myself and strengthen my mind-body connection.

There's hardly anything more therapeutic for me than being around horses.

And so we've been doing all those things.

I've been riding all winter.

I got to ride on a sunny day this weekend, and it was so nice because I've barely been able to feel my fingers throughout the winter.

It's been so cold and windy.

I feel like a lot of what I felt was stolen from me in my childhood, the belief that I was worth caring for and that it's okay to learn how to take care of yourself.

I'm learning that now when I have a child, because the last thing I would ever want Hunter to grow up believing is that he's not worth taking care of, or that God has forsaken him, or that he's not worthy of love.

And when I look at him, it's like I'm seeing myself as a child, and I'm learning to be gentle with myself.

I'm learning to nourish my body again.

I'm learning to trust God again with my healing process.

I'm learning to trust him with the future.

I'm learning to dream again.

And I think what was needed this whole time, even before COVID, even before the pandemic, was to let go of the past and trust God with the future.

But it took so much suffering for me to finally wake up and realize that my brain was trying to process what was lost and left behind when God was always like, you ain't got to worry about that, because guess what?

We're not staying there.

We're moving forward.

I've got different plans for you.

And yes, childbirth wasn't what you thought it was going to be.

But look at this beautiful boy that came out of it.

And of course, you would have never wanted to lose a baby.

But after you lost that baby, I gave you songs.

And I always have a plan.

No matter what obstacle comes your way, no matter what loss, no matter what grief, no matter what suffering, there is another side to it.

And even in death, God is still sovereign, and we're going to be with him.

So there really is no losing if you're following the Lord.

And I had forgotten that.

I had let myself start to believe that I was missing out on things because I was comparing my body to other women's bodies.

I was comparing my birth story to other women's birth stories.

I was comparing my long COVID experience with people who got COVID and survived it and didn't have any problems.

But the Lord has taught me to keep my eyes on him because my experience is going to be different.

My story is going to be different and unique.

But he has a plan.

And so that's kind of where I'm at currently with all of it.

I can't tell you how much it means to me personally.

Like the gift that you have just given me by sharing that story beginning to end.

I realize that not everybody who listens to this, and probably 99.9% of people who listen to this won't have porosmia and won't be able to relate to that specifically like I can.

But the women who are listening are mothers or want to be mothers and love the Lord or want to love the Lord and are going through something hard or will go through something hard.

And all of the honesty about your journey that you've been able to share with us, not just from the practical aspects of pregnancy and childbirth and postpartum, but also, and more importantly, your faith and how it was a roller coaster.

And it wasn't just that you were this quote unquote perfect Christian the entire time, just trusting the Lord the whole time, living in joy.

But that you're there now and that you made it there.

And that even though it was really hard to get there, that you are with him again.

And in his word again and praying again.

And what a better place to be than in the dark, really.

Yeah, I mean, the thing that I can't believe, and I've done, I did like a summer Bible study last summer that covered like an overview of all of scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

I did a study on Galatians and Ephesians last semester, and now I'm doing a study on, what are we doing?

Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon.

And I'm so grateful for the opportunity that I've been given to study God's character, the overarching story of scripture, and then these letters of Paul writing letters to these churches and basically testifying to God's faithfulness and the ministry of Jesus and who he is as a real person and what he's doing and how they should be living and what they should do and should not do.

And what's crazy to me is so much can change in this life.

We are so weak and fragile, and we can have the best intentions with our health and still suffer most of our days.

It's crazy how weak our bodies are.

It's also incredible how much they're capable of creating human life.

It's this crazy juxtaposition of like, wow, this vessel can be used for such great things, and it can also have so many cracks in it and be spilling over water all the time.

But what's awesome, and what I think I understand now more than ever, is like God, the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same all the time.

They are the only things that are the same.

Everything else is going to change.

From the decisions of the people around you to the habits of the people in your house to your own habits, to your weight, to the political landscape, to the economy, to general safety viruses or culture.

I had gotten to a point where I was trying to find stability in adulthood or in marriage or in finances or in motherhood or in my own health.

And he had to let me walk through so much suffering and a lot of mistakes made in that suffering.

Thank you for pointing that out.

I do not want anyone to think I was this holy angel.

If it's your will, Lord, let me suffer every day.

I was like, are you kidding?

Shaking my fist at the heavens.

And then the Lord brought me to the story of Job, and he reminded me there's this verse in Job where he's like, where were you when I established the world and the story?

Like, where were you when I wrote all of time into being and when I created all of this?

You weren't there.

I was.

I know how the story ends.

You need to trust me.

I'm the creator.

I'm the storyteller.

You are a part of a story that you don't have control over.

And my nervous system literally feels different.

My habits have changed.

I am so much gentler with myself because I really do think for the first time in my life, like my mind, maybe not the first time in my life, but at a deeper level now, a more mature level, knows that there is a God who created me.

He was with me in all the darkest days of my upbringing.

He was with me when I made decisions in early adulthood that led to some difficult days.

He's been with me in marriage.

He's been with me in pregnancy and in the pandemic and in prosmia and postpartum.

And he was with me when I considered taking too many pills.

He was with me when I was crying out for help on my bathroom floor.

He's with me when I, you know, started feeling my baby slip from my womb.

He was with me, and what I was not doing was fixing my eyes on him.

I was looking to the world.

I was looking to Instagram accounts.

I was looking to influencers.

I was looking to other moms.

I was looking to our bank account or a number on the scale or other people's perception of me or their opinion of me to tell me what I could put my hope in.

And at the end of the day, we don't need any of that.

All that stuff can change.

Anything can change at any time.

God is the only thing that stays the same.

And so the advice I would have given my former self when I was pregnant, which I probably wouldn't have taken because I would have been too stubborn, and I didn't have enough experience yet to know how much all this was going to affect me.

But would be to read my Bible and fall in love with God again as creator and father and study his track record for faithfulness through highs and lows, hills and valleys.

Really push all my chips in on God's character and not on my preparedness or my obsession with organization or list making or plan writing.

Really, really, really meditate on the fact that God is in control.

And yes, the world is broken and we're broken and hard things happen and unexpected challenges arise, but God's in control.

The anxiety that was coming my way was something I had never experienced and it would have been alleviated had I gotten off social media and been in my Bible.

Yet, where was I on social media?

Becoming a parent has been the best thing for me because of the way it's taught me to loosen my grip on control.

I remember feeling anxiety right after I found out I was pregnant because I wanted to protect the baby inside me but didn't really have the ability to.

Wanted to sustain the pregnancy, but didn't really have control over that and wanted to start preparing, reading books and all these things.

But God ultimately is the one forming the baby in there.

He does it how He wants.

We can plan for our birth preferences, but God writes our birth stories and He controls the outcomes of all those things.

And at the end of the day, even in the worst case scenario, God can glorify Himself through obedience and faithfulness and testimonies, even the worst kind.

And He's in control of all of that.

So if glorifying God is your heart's desire, if it really is, if you really believe that that's like the point of existing, is to glorify God in the hills and valleys and the suffering and the success and all the things, He knows that, and He is going to use you.

He gets to choose how He's going to use you.

In my case, He used my big mouth, my sort of likeable personality, my ability to access social media and use it well, to gather people together and collect resources and share stories.

But I think He also is using me to potentially have people consider maybe we're focusing on some of the wrong things.

Maybe we are giving too much of our time to technology or to the influences of the outside world.

Maybe we're depending on someone else's relationship with God to guide us more than we are looking to God Himself to guide us.

And we can't really lose anything from giving up distraction and time sets and getting in the Word of God and praying and confessing before Him and asking Him for help and direction for our lives.

We just can't lose anything that matters.

And that helps so much when we're trying to process the way our lives might be more difficult than we would choose or more challenging.

Especially when we lose and grieve and suffer, to know that He's in control is something that I don't know how people function without.

I truly do not understand how anyone is walking around in the world not believing that there is a God out there who loves them.

And I really hope that if there is anyone out there who's a mom or pregnant or postpartum or thinking about getting pregnant who does have prosnia, that you would just know, one, that you're not alone.

There are a lot of women out there who have been through this too.

And there are lots of resources out there now that weren't there when I was going through it.

And so between my Instagram and my website and YouTube channel and Cookbook and then so many other Instagram pages that have popped up and Facebook groups that have been created over the course of the pandemic, there is so much support for people who are walking through this.

And I hope that hearing my story gives you hope that you will survive, you can improve.

I'm still not 100% recovered, but I have so much hope that like over time, things will come back slowly.

And I'm so grateful to be able to eat enough to have energy to be a mother and ride horses and write songs and sing and do my day to day stuff.

I do go to bed a lot earlier than I used to, but I'm just accepting now that I'm like an 85 year old woman in a 32 year old body.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Yes.

Well, I will link all of your resources as well in the show notes because the amount of help that you gave me with my Parasmia journey is unmatched to anybody else or anything else other than Jesus himself.

So your cookbook is still one of two that I typically turn to.

So I'm also very grateful for that.

If there is anyone out there, they will definitely benefit from your resources if they have not already found them.

So I will put those in there for sure.

I truly can't thank you enough for giving us your time today.

I really, really, really appreciate it, and this will be an extremely special episode in my heart forever.

I'm so glad to hear that.

Thanks again for joining us today.

You can reach me at Surrendered Birth Services on Instagram or email me at contact at surrenderedbirthservices.com.

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