I was trapped in a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up. I hadn’t slept properly since before Rosalie was born, a traumatic birth that ended up being an emergency cesarean due to preeclampsia. For a week, I felt trapped in an escape room, and I was convinced that I needed to perform rituals around the house and garden to try to get out. I was exclusively breastfeeding and would find myself feeling wired after the night feeds, so I’d stay up and rearrange the house. Amidst my new mum stress, I hadn’t quite realised that I had entered a state of full-blown insomnia.
The hallucinations started pretty soon after getting out of the hospital post-birth. At one point my baby morphed into W1A actor Jason Watkins, the next I thought she had been replaced with a pillow, and then when she was sound asleep in her next-to-me cot, I saw her body crushed on my bedsheets.
My husband didn’t notice anything at first as I muttered things like”‘Don’t you think our light really looks like Rozzy?” at 3 am, but I soon deteriorated. “You’ve grown up so fast”, I mumbled to my husband, convinced he was an adult version of our daughter. I’d taken the well-meaning “She really looks just like her Dad” comments literally. Then I became convinced our house was on fire.
My ‘new mum’ hormones that were meant to protect our newborn instead had me in overdrive, and I was constantly on edge, thinking everything was an emergency. I couldn’t stop smelling gas. Then I realised I had no idea what date it was, not even the year. I would get in the bath with my watch on, convinced time was hurtling forwards and then backwards. I genuinely thought I could time-travel. The reality is that new motherhood and maternity leave are crazy periods where time seems to move differently, but my illness had taken this to new extremes.
It was a Saturday night when the ambulance was called. Ironically, I’d been watching Casualty and had believed that everything happening on the show was actually about my life. I changed the channel, and it happened again; nightmare versions of mine and Rosalie’s lives were playing out on a celebrity special of The Weakest Link.
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