A Possible Solution
few days later my brother-in-law, a physician’s assistant, gave me a call. “You should go on anti-depressants, Mary,” he told me bluntly. “I told you to go on them years ago, for your depression symptoms.”
I did remember him suggesting this before, but at the time I hadn’t acted on his advice. Anti-depressants were for people who were really depressed—like can’t get out of bed or brush their teeth depressed. They weren’t for people like me. Besides, I was used to feeling down much of the time. Even before this PMDD had started, depression had been my default state of being. Wasn’t it just part of who I was, a quirk of my personality?
“Um…okay,” I said finally. “I’ll think about it.”
And this time, I would. If it might help me to be the wife and mother I needed to be, I was willing to try anything.
But what if the anti-depressants change who I am as a person? And what will people think about me if they find out?
It didn’t matter. Something needed to be done. Since my will power and self-control had been unable to curb my mood swings, I had to find some other way to keep it together. Even if people did end up looking down on me for taking a medication.
The Doctor Visit
At the end of June, the day of my doctor’s appointment finally arrived. After asking me some questions about my symptoms, my new physician, Dr. Bailey*, diagnosed me with PMDD. She offered me two possible treatment options: anti-depressants or birth control.
Birth control? I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “My husband and I would like to have more children someday,” I told Dr. Bailey. “I do not want to take birth control.”
I felt disappointed that birth control was considered a top treatment for PMDD. Surely there was a better way to manage PMDD than simply suppressing a woman’s fertility. Birth control might alleviate a woman’s symptoms, but it wouldn’t actually heal or fix the problem.
“So…” Dr. Bailey furrowed her eyebrows and picked at her surgical mask. “You want to try the anti-depressants instead?”
My cheeks burned in humiliation. “Yes, I’d like to try an anti-depressant medication, please.” Did she think I was weak or a pill-popper for asking for them?
She shifted on her stool. “You’re aware it may have side effects, and needs to be taken consistently to prevent withdrawal symptoms?”
I nodded. I’d done my research before my appointment. “Is there a kind that’s safe to take while nursing?” I asked.
“I can prescribe you with a very low dose of Zoloft,” she recommended. “It’s safe to take while pregnant or breastfeeding. In fact, it’s also prescribed for post-partum depression.”
“That sounds like it might be a good fit for me,” I answered.
Dr. Bailey examined the questionnaire I’d filled out before she’d entered the room. The two-sided sheet listed symptoms of depression and anxiety, and I had rated my frequency in experiencing those symptoms.
“Hmm,” she said, after studying both sides of the paper. “It looks like you actually have more symptoms of anxiety than depression.”
“Oh.” I had always assumed it was depression, because I had recurring suicidal thoughts. When my interior world was in pain, I fantasized about escaping…by any means.
Can you have those kind of thoughts with anxiety, too?
The doctor laid my paper down. “It doesn’t make a difference in your treatment, though. Zoloft can be prescribed for anxiety, too.”
Taking the First Pill
That night, I read through the entire list of Zoloft’s side effects, including drowsiness, headache, dry mouth, jitters, and occasionally, worsening symptoms. I also read about how and why it works. Zoloft allows more serotonin into the blood stream, which in turn can improve mood, mental clarity, and decreased symptoms of depression and anxiety.
I read all about it, but that night I was too scared to take my first pill. What if I had some kind of strange reaction? Would it change my personality? What if I became a mindless, happy robot after taking it?
The next night, after the kids were asleep, I pulled one tablet out of the container. The green 25-milligram pill sat small and tiny in the palm of my hand.
Tiny and terrifying, I thought.
I folded my fingers over it, paced back and forth in the kitchen. It took me a long time to do anything more than hold it.
Come on, Mary. You can do this!
The refrigerator hummed as I filled a tall cup with water. I pressed my forehead against its cool silver surface, then shifted my face towards our prayer board. The suffering face of Christ gazed back at me, an imprint of Jesus’ face on the Shroud of Turin. I surveyed my prayers for human trafficking victims, those who’ve committed suicide, parishes at risk of closing—my desperate causes. In another picture, my good friend smiled at me with her mom and five siblings.
I need to do this, I decided. Not just for myself and my son, but for my friends and readers, too. If this helps me, then I can tell them about it. Maybe it can help them, too.
I placed the green pill in my mouth and gulped it down with water. Then I headed outside for a late evening walk.
The First Night
My hands slipped over my rosary beads as I charged through the pleasant summer air. The sun had already set, and the last rays of light were sinking into deep twilight. I walked close to our house, where I knew most of my neighbors, and prayed.
The medicine left an odd metallic taste in my mouth, and a certain dryness. I began feeling a little dizzy and disoriented.
I was surprised to have felt anything so soon. Dr. Bailey had said it would take up to a month to achieve a stable management of my symptoms—if I was taking the correct dosage level for my body.
It did take the rest of June and early July for me to stabilize. The first two weeks, my mind felt disoriented and my feelings seemed off. I didn’t trust my reactions to things, or my mental judgment when editing blog posts. But the third week was better.
By the fourth week, I felt like a different person.
The New Old Mary
As more time passed, I realized I didn’t feel like a different person. I felt like myself, except without all the negative, anxious, guilty thoughts.
“I remember feeling like this a long time ago,” I told my sister April, “when I was a kid. It’s like my mind is clear again.” No more crazy racing thoughts. No more horrible feelings of guilt every time I had to make a decision for the children. Most amazingly, no more suicidal thoughts.
One last thing was absent: a physical sensation of pain throughout my body, especially my arms and hands. It was something I hadn’t described to my doctor, because it seemed like it must be in my head. There were no visible signs of it.
But when I started taking the medication, this sensation went away. I simply did not have that torture-like feeling in my nerves anymore.
That means my pain was real, I thought, completely stunned. That means that all this time, after all these years of spiritual and emotional healing, part of my wound was a real, physical thing. It was something I could fix by taking a medication.
A Whole New World
It seemed impossible; unbelievable. As if a whole new world had opened up to me. I could feel happy sometimes, and find joy in my vocation as a wife and mother. My life maybe didn’t always have to involve gritting my teeth and “pushing through” things. I could smile and say positive things to my children, and really feel and mean those words and gestures. My joy could be authentic.
For twenty years, I had lived with anxiety, depression, and invisible sensations of pain. My convent experience healed my back and my heart, but it had not fixed those things. No, it was my desire to help my son that had led to this last and final healing.
The solution had ended up being so simple, it was almost funny. While spiritual warfare was real, I now deduced that many of the times I thought I was experiencing spiritual warfare, I was actually experiencing low serotonin levels in my bloodstream.
“You can’t cure COVID with holy water,” our old parish priest told us once during a pandemic homily. “You use physical means to cure physical diseases, and spiritual means to cure spiritual wounds.”
And so my latest piece of healing was a physical one.
Blessed be God!
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Thank you so much for reading! 😊 If you have any thoughts or questions on this piece, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
Also, please visit the site next week for more of the story and the effects this decision had on my family! 🙂
PS- My husband and I had a wonderful trip to Nashville this week–thank you for your prayers! I plan to write more about the visit in a future post.
