, she felt too ashamed to tell anyone how she felt. PND affects around one in ten women, according to the NHS, but Ivana believes that if she'd received better support after her traumatic birth, she wouldn't have fallen so ill. Babies Henry and Mason arrived with a bang in 2016. Six weeks early and unable to breathe unaided, the tiny pair were hooked up to machines in the hospital's intensive care unit. The rush of warmth and love that Ivana had been told to expect failed to emerge. The promised early days of cuddles and sunshine were replaced with strip lighting, beeping machines and the cold clinical environment of hospital. 'As soon as they were born, they were rushed away. When I did see them, I felt nothing. I was numb. Frozen.' 'I immediately felt like a horrible mum,' adds the author and blogger from Fife. 'Like a failure. Those two weeks were the worst of my life.' As the babies recovered and put on weight, Ivana went into decline. 'When we got home, it didn't get much better. I felt like I was falling apart for months. I cried a lot. It was the pressure; I just felt like I was failing. That I couldn't be a mum. 'I really believed that I was the only one feeling this way. That every other mum was happy. So I put a lot of effort into hiding my emotions. I put a mask on. I pretended I was okay. It was exhausting.' When Ivana's husband suggested she speak to a counsellor, she was put on){kind=link}
By Sarah Ingram
Ivana Poku’s eight-month old son snuggled in her lap and beamed at her.
She was at home, alone with her twin boys, waiting for a friend to visit. However, as her son smiled up at her, she felt a dark cloud descend.
‘I felt the strong urge to hurt him,’ Ivana admits. ‘It was horrible. And it scared me. So I strapped them both in their car seats and I locked myself in the bedroom.’
Ivana, 38, curled up and wept. She had hit rock bottom following months of stress, trauma and crippling feelings of failure following a difficult birth. Suffering from postnatal depression (PND), she felt too ashamed to tell anyone how she felt.