Where to start...
I've told you all about my last (as in most recent bc this momma ain't done yet :) pregnancy and how I was symptom-free of PMDD. My PMDD symptoms began to subside a few cycles before I actually conceived. It's taken me this long to really come to terms with all that has happened to my body, and my mind.
In short, it was a combination of natural healing and spiritual healing. No, I don't think some Omnipresent being swooped down and saved me. By spiritual I mean, I was finally being true to myself. I have continued on that path and have continued to get better, to heal, to be free of PMDD. Yes, I really am living without PMDD.
This experience has been eye-opening because for the longest time I felt I couldn't trust myself. Even in the "good weeks", I was unsure of who I was, if my feelings really belonged to me, and what decisions I should make for my future. This made having a relationship, children and a career very hard, as so many of you know.
So, I had a beautiful pregnancy. I soaked up so much knowledge in those nine months to prepare myself for another birth. I really dug deep into myself to find out who I was, what was I about? I found that my love of the divine feminine is still there. My desire to help other women was as strong as ever. But instead, my focus shifted from helping women with PMDD to helping women prepare to give birth. I had no idea at the time just how much my life was about to change.
First, some back story. I've suffered through too many lost pregnancies in the past, and the last left me feeling very empty. I never really healed from that experience. The last one is also when PMDD took hold of my life. It was immediate. Within the same month, I was a different person. A volatile, angry, rage-filled person. Instead of giving myself time to heal from that trauma, I jumped into a relationship.
Now, I can't say I regret that move, because I'm still in that relationship today and have a beautiful family to show for it. It all had to happen the way it did to get me here, and I've accepted that. In fact, I praise the way it happened. All the struggle was worth it. I am helping others. I am bringing new discussions to the table. I am opening eyes, and my experience has helped others overcome PMDD. I know in my soul I was put here to do this. I just know this won't be my only accomplishment, either.
I digress... Back then, I didn't make the connection between mind and body and spirit at all. I didn't realize that this trauma that occurred to my body would affect me so deeply or for so long. I looked at it as being strictly medical. As they say, when you find yourself lost, the best thing to do is go back to square one and start over on a new path. That's really what I had to do. I had to confront that part of my past and go down a different road. One that acknowledged what happened in my life. One that gave myself time to grieve that event and move on from it, even if it was years later.
Surely, though, that would not heal PMDD alone. But it's part of the bigger picture. My spirit was broken. And I truly think part of me longed for that child, even though I was busy and wrapped up in a million other things in my life. Even though my relationship was a disaster over many years, I still longed for that baby on some level. I didn't go through each day thinking that, though. Instead, my focus was solely on how to heal this medical mystery called PMDD. It was all about blaming my cycle and my hormones.
I needed that confirmation and proof. The solid science. I felt empowered by learning what science could teach me, such as the effects of estrogen and progesterone on our moods. I needed concrete answers. I felt strongly that they were the only answer for PMDD. Boy was I lost.
On top of emotional wounds and letting them heal, I started seeing a chiropractor during my pregnancy to help me heal old nerve damage from an epidural I'd received in the past. That damn shot was just one of the many reasons I was confident that natural birth was the only path for me. This is something I'd known for years. I didn't want to be numb and escape my baby's birth when that time came. I wanted to revel in it, bathe in it, take it all in. I wanted that other-worldly experience again. I'd received an epidural with my second child, but it came too late. So, I felt everything. However, I think the key to enjoying a natural birth is really being prepared for one. The women who are forced to go through it without any other option when they were wanting drugs don't tend to have the same pleasant experiences. That birth experience also helped to heal me. I felt more connected to my inner goddess than ever before.
Postpartum, I worried some about my PMDD returning. I knew it had gotten better before I got pregnant. So, I wondered if that would persist, but I also told myself it was probably a fluke because I was excited every month when trying to conceive to find out if we were pregnant. I had a very difficult postpartum period and this concerned me. I worried that all the trauma going on would bring me down into a depression.
When my baby was just four days old, I started passing kidney stones. Great timing, eh? There were more than twenty of them in just one kidney! I needed to be admitted to the hospital and have surgery the next day. This would mean being apart from my baby and I couldn't bear it. Plus, we were trying to establish breastfeeding. Luckily, my midwife swooped in and saved the day by getting us both admitted to the oncology ward (cleanest area of the hospital so safest for babe). I will forever be grateful to her for this.
The drugs they had me on made me so tired. Opioids are not my friend. I took them for a couple days post-surgery and that was it. I believe the combination of the trauma, being postpartum and coming down off those drugs is what sent me into the baby blues. For about a week, I had no interest in the baby and it broke my heart. I would hold him and feel nothing. I was numb. I was terrified that not only would PMDD come back, but I would develop postpartum depression, too. I knew the odds were higher for me. Then I reached out to my friend, who happens to be a doula, and she asked if I had started taking my placenta pills yet. I said no, because I was worried about taking them alongside the drugs I was on and so I'd waited. She encouraged me to take them, so I did. By the next day, all the clouds had lifted and I felt like myself again. I still think those pills we a savior for me and I have the remainder of them in my freezer should hormonal issues ever come my way again. I will definitely be encapsulating future placentas, too.
Things got better. I was breastfeeding, but we had a terrible time of it. My son was born with tongue and lip ties (also related to MTHFR). Apparently, pediatricians and the like are not trained on assessing for these. So, they said he didn't have them when he did. It took us until nine weeks to get him diagnosed and have the ties revised. By that time, he was used to the flow of the bottle. I'd had to pump 8-10 times a day every day during this period. It was exhausting and I hated not having that bond with my baby like I had with the others. This couldn't knocked me down into a depression again, and I think it would have for the old Danielle with PMDD, but I stayed committed. I wanted to breastfeed at least two years and just because I wasn't going to be able to breastfeed in the traditional sense didn't mean my child shouldn't benefit from breastmilk. So here I am 19 months later still exclusively pumping and patting myself on the back for it.
If that wasn't enough trauma postpartum, I also had a low milk supply. It would turn out that I had retained placenta in my uterus causing this. But by the time I got it removed at 11 weeks postpartum (another surgery) my supply was established and nothing worked to get it back up. I started noticing after that surgery that I was having hormonal surges. Specifically, I knew my estrogen was up, because I kept getting large amounts of egg-white cervical mucus (estrogen is what causes this consistency). I had my hormones tested twice and it was confirmed that my estrogen was higher than it should be for a breastfeeding woman, as was my progesterone during one of them. When breastfeeding, you produce a hormone called prolactin, and this typically suppresses estrogen and progesterone (which are the sex hormones that ebb and flow during our menstrual cycles). My estrogen and progesterone were clearly competing with prolactin. I assumed my cycle was probably tying to come back. It would figure that my hormone would dominate. That said, a question was looming in the back of my mind: why weren't these hormonal surges giving me PMDD symptoms?
It was just four months postpartum — the same time as both of my other children — when my period returned. I remember going to my fiance and bawling. He was sympathetic, but said to me, "well, if you notice you haven't been moody or anything." He was right. My first period caught me by such surprise because I had no symptoms leading up to it. There was no way for me to even expect it might be coming. I bled for a few days very heavily and that was that. And this is the way the next four or five cycles after that point would process, too. There were no mood swings, fatigue, cravings, etc. My period came back and my PMDD did not.
At this point though, each period was knocking my milk supply down further. After the bleeding stopped, I couldn't get my supply back up to the same level that it was at before I bled that month. So, I started taking Domperidone. I've discussed this quite a bit in the PMDD support groups on Facebook as a potential treatment for other with PMDD that they may want to discuss with their doctors.
Domperidone is far safer than Reglan (which crosses the blood brain barrier and often causes mental health issues of its own). It is used off-label for breastfeeding because it has the side effect of increasing prolactin. It is safe for babies and even prescribed for them for other issues. Within a week, my milk supply more than doubled. The reason I think it could be a possible treatment for women with PMDD is because it shuts off your cycle and suppresses those sex hormones due to the high prolactin. So, it's not a cure by any means, but it is a quality band-aid that comes with little to no side effects, which we cannot say about drugs like birth control and Lupron. Of course, the trade off would be that you may lactate. How much is variable depending on how high of a dose one takes, but one could theorize that if a woman started with one 10mg pill a day and slowly increased to see how many it takes to shut off her cycle, she may barely produce any milk or at least would not produce a full supply. I'm still waiting for one of my PMDD friends to have the nerve to try it out, but a few are interested. Of course, I am no doctor and strongly encourage you discuss such with your medical provider beforehand, but it's compelling, and it's cheap!
So, I healed from my past trauma. I visited a chiropractor. I took placenta pills. I still take probiotics and quality methylated food based vitamins. I eat a whole foods diet. And I have found myself free of PMDD.
Before you ask, I am absolutely curious as to whether it will return when I fully wean from breastfeeding. I think it's only natural to have that concern. I've asked many other women what their experiences with breastfeeding have been, and I've only found one that is like me. All the others found that their PMDD returned as soon as their period did, regardless of whether they were still nursing or not.
We know that the hormones wreak havoc on inflammation in our bodies, so it is amazing to me that breastfeeding has benefited me the way it has, because prolactin is known to be inflammatory and not a protective factor by any means. Yet those estrogen surges didn't cause me any symptoms. My periods have caused me no symptoms. I'm not living my life expecting it to return. There has been too much evidence for me that hormones are no longer affecting me for me to truly think it will. But sure, the fear is there. I was on a higher dose of domperidone, but have begun to slowly cut back. I want to wean over a very long period of time, because going cold turkey can cause mental health issues (imagine that, the medical establishment will acknowledge that going off of a drug that affects your hormones sharply can cause you to become depressed and anxious, but they can't wrap their heads around our natural hormone cycle doing the same lol). I was taking 120mg at one point and am now down to 90mg. Still, I have no symptoms, though I am showing signs that my androgen hormones are spiking a bit more now (greasier hair, oilier skin and so forth).
I will surely keep you updated when I do fully wean, which won't be for a bit yet. Regardless, if it returns, I feel far better equipped to deal with PMDD now at this place in my life. In a nutshell, when women ask me how to deal with PMDD (and they often look quite confused by the answer) I tell them, accept it. Embrace it. It's true. Your cycle is a gift, not a burden, and the more you look at it this way, the more your ability to heal from PMDD will take shape. More on that later.
Love to you all,
Danielle
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