It was during one of my favourite times of day - the house is all quiet, not a toddler nor kindergartener nor husband stirring - just me and my precious newborn baby up for a late night feed in the rocking chair.  All seemed quiet and serene until suddenly my heart felt like it did a 360 degree flip inside my chest!   If I hadn't been so freaked out by the sensation, I would have thought my heart was doing loop-de-loops over the fact that I had fallen madly in love for my newborn baby boy!   I was shocked and stunned and didn't know what to think and so let it go thinking it was just some weird random event that would never happen again.  Boy was I wrong.  And so began my journey of intense post-partum anxiety.

I began to have the heart-flipping sensations daily and they would be more noticeable at certain times than others.  Sometimes it was a small "blip" and other times they were so severe they woke me from my sleep!   On a couple of occasions I was up late at night with them (they seemed more noticeable at night when life was not so busy and chaotic) and crying on the phone to my mom who lived a 4 hour plane ride away!  She is an LPN (Licenced Practical Nurse) and I called her one night  while she was on the night shift.  She put the RN on the phone to calm me down and find out what was happening.  It seemed that everyone I spoke to just chalked it up to heart palpitations or rapid heart beat but I knew that didn't jive with what I was experiencing and so the anxiety seemed worse because I didn't feel like I was getting any answers.  No one seemed to know what I was trying to explain.

I took myself to the emergency room on two occasions where I was hooked me up to their machines, had blood drawn and it was determined that I hadn't had a heart attack and I was fine.   I didn't feel like I had any answers.  I must have looked like a wreck, on one of the visits the doctor walked into the examining room and within minutes was giving me Ativan for the anxiety the heart problem was creating.

Tragically, it was during this time that a mom from my children's school who had three children almost the same age as mine was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. The entire community wept for this wonderful, young mom - me included.  I couldn't imagine what she was going through.   I had never heard of it before as it tends to be a more rare form of breast cancer that has symptoms similar to mastitis.  During one of my conversations with this mom, she told me her sad story that the doctors had been treating her "mastitis" for months but it kept recurring and finally they realized it was because it wasn't mastitis at all but rather, inflammatory breast cancer.   As I held my newborn baby she told me if I ever "get" mastitis, be sure to question the diagnosis.  And so, a few weeks later, for the first time in all the many many months of breastfeeding three children I developed mastitis.  If you've ever had anxiety, you can imagine by now my anxiety is raging.   In my case the antibiotics seemed to work and the mastitis symptoms disappeared, but the heart-flipping continued.  Finally I was referred to a specialist and while waiting to get in to see the heart specialist, I was hooked up to a 24 hour Holter Monitor to track what was happening with my heart.

And again the Mastitis!  Oh yes, my worries came through for me again...this time I was sure it was inflammatory breast cancer and that the same thing was happening to me - a misdiagnosis!  I was given the antibiotic in the emergency room but booked an appointment with my family doctor.  By now the heart is flipping daily, I have no results from the heart tests and now I am being told I have mastitis again....I am sure I must be dying.  The post partum anxiety rages on.  When I walk in to see my family doctor she takes one look at me and I can see the surprise on her face.  No more am I the well-put-togeher mother-of-three.  I have transformed into a zombie. The picture drawn by my 5 year old daughter that week confirms it - dark brown semi-circles under my eyes which she is quick to relay are the bags under my eyes!  My doctor comes right out and asks me "What can I do for you?"   Me, being the well-informed patient that I, and frankly all other anxiety-ridden people are, tell her I want a needle-punch biopsy to rule out inflammatory breast cancer. The procedure is invasive and involves taking tissue from the breast to be examined because this type of breast cancer forms in layers not lumps so mammography, breast exams, etc aren't effective ways of diagnosing.

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Although I loved my baby to bits I knew the loop-de-loops weren't because of my undying love for him!  But it did turn out to be due to the sudden hormonal changes from giving birth to him!

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Once I was so full of anxiety and had been going on no sleep and running around after two children while caring for a newborn that I looked like death-warmed-over.

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