About six months ago I started feeling like I was not myself. I began to feel easily irritated (I know what you're thinking- how much worse could that get?), stressed over day-to-day things, extremely angry at culture issues that I've already gotten used to and worse of all, stated feeling a kind-of despair about being a wife and mother. Weird, right?
I tried to find cause of these new mood swings and for some reason decided to take a look at the information on some fertility medicines I had been on just a few months prior to all this. (We tried 4 fertility procedures within the span of about 7 months last year). Well, whadda you know? A side-effect of the cocktail of fertility drugs I was on said they could cause depression or mood swings. Well. No baby AND depression. How did I feel about that? ...depressed. Is that irony?
I tried to take flour and sugar and rice out of my diet as much as I could and I began roller blading every day (when it wasn't raining) and I began to feel a little better- but it wasn't a huge change and it wasn't a "sustainable" life-style. (We live in the land of rice and noodles... and I love sugar so....)
So back to square one. I had hormone levels checked, said progesterone was too high and estrogen was too low. Talked to some doctors and finally went to Shanghai to see a GYN about a possible hormone imbalance but after asking some questions the doctor said it wasn't a hormone imbalance.
It was depression.
What.
No I'm not.
I have nothing to be depressed about.
Sure, we live in a foreign country far from our family, we probably can't ever get pregnant again, we're in the process of adopting three or four children from two different countries, and I have the duties of staying at home with an almost-two curly headed tornado and teach four classes a week at the local college.
Ok I have a lot on my plate.
BUT... on a normal day, I feel very supported, I regularly skype with my amazing, encouraging family, I manage to keep it all sorted because we have great friends here who will drop anything to help, and I'm a very happy mostly-stay-at-home mom and a very spoiled wife. Sure there are days I miss my family and all I want is a Chick-fil-A sandwich and a strawberry-lime slushy from Sonic. But depression?
So she gave me a truckload of Zoloft and told me a little bit about depression. So I took a half a dose for two days until I could get home and read up on Zoloft.
Although it is an amazing drug and works for a lot of people, I simply didn't feel comfortable taking it. I wanted to be seen by a mental health professional (I think a lot of my friends want me to see a mental health professional, too. ha!) before committing to such a serious drug.
So I stopped after only ingesting one whole pill, and asked a few friends and some family to pray that this just be taken away so I wouldn't have to be medicated. I sent a few emails about finding a good counselor near us, but then a funny thing happened.
I went three days without feeling any mood swings or despair. Then five days. Then a whole week. Then two whole weeks had gone by. Now almost three.
It's gone, at least for now.
God answered my prayer and just took it away.
I feel like I can't express enough what it feels like to be healed from this. I can only liken it to being in the throws of labor pains and then the epidural kicks in!
Some days I would feel so exhausted I didn't want to get out of bed, the sight of dirty dishes in the sink would send me into an anger tail spin, Joelle would grind my nerves and I would lay awake wishing I had never come to China, wishing I had never had Joelle and wishing I had never married Scott. One day I was crossing the street and half-way across a guy came to a complete stop in his car to stare at us. I urged him to hurry up and continue so I could finish crossing and then along comes a maniac driver was speeding towards us and was going to swerve around the stopped car- where Joelle and I were standing. He stopped just in time to see us (the onlooker still hadn't moved) and all hell broke loose from my mouth. I yelled at the first car for stopping to stare at us like we were animals and then yelled at the second car for speeding and now everyone in the intersection had stopped to see the foreigner yell. I walked Joelle to the curb and kept yelling, now in English, for when I am so emotional I can only think in my mother tongue, except to yell "YOU'RE ALL CRAZY" in Chinese. I was literally in the grips of insanity.
My friends at the drink- stand nearby still like to tease me about it and several of my friends have said "Hey, I heard you were scolding people in the street!"
I had began looking for an excuse- any excuse- to go back to America. One day Joelle was abused on the playground by another child and I told myself "One more time, and that's it. I'm not standing for this." (As if kids in America aren't school- yard bullies) I began seeing that our apartment was simply not fit for human occupancy. I pounced on Scott about every sock on the floor, every time he was a minute late, every crunch of potato chip grated my nerves.
And now all of that is gone and I'm back to my regular, only slightly irritable self. I praise God because some people live with this terrible condition for years and find that medicine only gives them slight relief. Mine lasted only half a year.
The mind is so precious and yet so frail.
Sometimes I wonder if God lets us experience physical chains that bind us so that we can understand the depth of what it means to have our spiritual chains unbound. May I never forget the pain so I can thank Him every day for how He heals and protects.
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