02/11/2024
Oh my heart!!! 💙💙💙 Those who know me personally, know that when I was hāpai w/ my keiki kāne, and when I was in the postpartum period, I experienced debilitating perinatal anxiety. And if you didn’t know that, now you do (as it’s common for folks with high functioning anxiety to get overlooked). Like many mothers, and most mothers of color, I was never screened for a PMAD. When I told my OB that I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours a day due to intrusive thoughts about my pēpē not breathing when he slept (perinatal OCD symptoms), she told me- and I quote, “we all go through it- you just need to get outside and go back to work.” At the time I was working as a NICU nurse taking care of critical infants and couldn’t fathom going back to that in my current state. Thankfully I had a few midwife friends who linked me with a PMHNP and I started to receive therapy. Although my care team was not Kānaka Maoli and couldn’t provide the best, culturally congruent care for me, they did their best and with time I started to get better. I ended up having to quit my NICU job due to the continued anxiety 😥 Ultimately leading me to a new chapter in my life where I vowed to use my experience, nursing background and expertise to change the outcomes of others who were going through the same thing I experienced.
This led to me co-found a Maternal Mental Health Coalition jn Ventura County, getting a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree focused on improving every bad outcome that I experienced and then doing a post- doctoral program in Psychiatric Mental Health with a focus on Perinatal/ Reproductive Mental Health. ✊🏽
This picture is of my almost 10 year old child reading the poster that I presented at a conference about that work. I was cleaning out a closet and getting ready to toss the printed poster and he literally stopped me and said, “No! You worked so hard on that and there’s nothing like reading the original so I wanna keep it and I’m gonna read it!” He laid it out and pinned the ends down with his weights and went to it😭😭😭
This story of my experience is why I do what I do. 💙💙💙
