My Postpartum Journey During a Global Pandemic

PregnancyPelvic HealthPhysiotherapyWellnessPostpartum
Written By Kim Deschamps

Written by Kim Deschamps | December 14, 2020

“Resilience and being resilient means bouncing back from the hard times and staying positive and happy despite what happens.”

I am writing to all of the moms out there, to the moms who have had a baby during the covid-19 global pandemic and to those moms who are expecting a little one any day. Moms I feel you so very hard and I desperately want you to know that you are most certainly not alone. The year 2020 has been very hard. It has challenged our emotional and mental well-being. It has taken us to our limits and turned our planning/schedules/routines right upside down and out the door. I personally believe in the power of the universe and energy that is transmitted between us, others, and our environment. I believe in learning opportunities and lessons that we are supposed to learn and grow from. I believe in listening to the whispers, whether that be from our body, our mind, or our environment, and when we don’t hear the whispers they simply get louder and louder and eventually everything yells. I believe that globally we are experiencing that right now. There has been some very important social system topics that have the volume turned right up and rightfully so! It is now our job to pay attention, listen, grow and learn. I believe that we are being provided an opportunity to slam on the breaks and embrace the simplicity in life, practice gratitude, shift our focus to what truly is important to us in life, open our minds, change our mindset and ride out the waves of uncertainty. I am looking at 2020 as a year to shift and refocus my mindset and to explore the power of positive beliefs, attitude, and emotion.

I started writing a blog around thanksgiving to express my gratitude, give thanks to my support system and to embrace the positives of my birth story of my son Harris on March 18, 2020. The purpose of my blog was an opportunity for emotional and mental healing and the courage to share my story in hopes to provide support to the other moms in their postpartum journey during a global pandemic. It became difficult for me to share my entire story. I was struggling with my words, sharing my truth, and honoring all of the emotions that were surfacing when I put pen to paper. I listened to these emotions and I sat with them. I noticed how they were surfacing in my body and I didn’t want to rush through and not acknowledge what I was feeling. ‘Emotions are tunnels that you must go all the way through them. Exhaustion happens when you get stuck in an emotion.’ Emotions have a beginning, middle, and an end. Often, we are taught about our body by someone else vs. being aware of what our body is telling us. We are often told to silence our body by covering up our symptoms. I personally have been challenging this and have collected my postpartum health team to honour and support me with moving through the emotions that are coming out in my physical body. I was experiencing skin irritations and flareups- my psoriasis showed up in vengeance and I looked like I was going through puberty again with the flare up of acne. I was experiencing headaches, restlessness, sleep disturbances, irritability, digestive upset, increased heart rate, jaw pain, body aches + pain, and emotional roller coasters. I was experiencing chronic stress and undealt with emotional trauma. It was my turn to stop, listen and move through my stress cycles that stalled out.

I am leaning into the uncomfortable and sharing my story. Thank you for the safe place to do so.

We welcomed our baby boy Harris on March 18th, 2020. The same day that the Saskatchewan Government and Sask Health Authority mandated all non-essential businesses to close. This included shutting down my clinic until further guidance from our professional governing bodies and Sask Health Authority. I was devastated and scared. The week leading up to March 18th was very stressful. There was so much uncertainty and consistent changes, recommendations, fears, worry, and despair. I was in and out of early labor this week and trying to help support my team at Holistic Physiotherapy & Wellness as we waited on guidance to make our next move. Watching the fear in my team’s eyes was unbearable. There were words said to me out of fear that I have had to work through for many months afterwards that affected me deeply. I was thrown into a situation that nobody knew how to navigate. Many of us clinic owners in the city tried to reduce hours, control cash flow, overhead expenses, really anything that would help us get through this without having to close our doors and prevent layoffs of our employees. Decisions were being made out of fear and worry for those around us with very little guidance from our government and professional governing bodies. With all respect, they too were unsure what to do. We all have never experienced a global pandemic. I was thankful for the amazing camaraderie amongst local business owners, physiotherapy clinics and colleagues as we navigated the very thought of having to shut down our businesses, provide ROEs to our employees, and to have the incredible weight of financial stress on our shoulders.

I was in active labor when we got notice from the government that we had 2 days to close our doors. I was on the phone with my team in between contractions and making quick decisions. I am so very thankful for my team. Wow did they ever show up for me. They rallied to support me to safely deliver my baby boy and move into my early postpartum days. This still brings tears to my eyes. I am and will be forever grateful to them.

Labor & delivery, and postpartum is already so very challenging, let alone during a global pandemic and a mandated clinic closure. I spent my early postpartum days navigating financial aid from the government, sending information for ROEs so that my employees could access CERB, and trying to stay connected to my administrator at the clinic to handle accounts receivable, communicate with patients, cancelling of appointments, setting up tele-health, and the list goes on. All while struggling with breastfeeding challenges, mental health challenges, a bladder infection, nipple vasospasm, not to mention the normal healing that goes into a vaginal delivery. You can see that my nervous system was in a fight-flight mode!

I am thankful for my midwife, Jessica Bailey for the incredible support even with the reduction in patient contact due to covid-19.

I am thankful that my parents and my husband’s parents were able to meet Harris before everyone went into lock down.

I am thankful that my husband was home with me for the first 3 weeks after Harris was born.

I am thankful that our baby boy was delivered healthy.

I am thankful for being able to have experienced a beautiful water birth in the hospital with my husband and the support from my midwife and one nurse. It was quiet and calm.

I am thankful for the quick labor- 5.5 hours, an easy pushing phase- 5mins, and no vaginal tearing (thank you prenatal pelvic physio!).

I am thankful for feeling safe during my labor and delivery and that both baby and I were healthy and that my husband was beside me holding my hand through it all.

I am thankful for my postpartum care team: Jessica Bailey (midwife), Hilary Keller (RN, Lactation Consultant), Alexandra Froes (Registered Psychologist), Dr. Stacey Hornick (Chiropractor), Dr, Madolyn Linka (Chiropractor), Dr. Stephanie Liebrecht (Naturopathic Doctor), Lindsey Tasker Cole (Pelvic Floor Physiotherapist), and of course my family and my dear friends.

Self-care requires a bubble of support by those who care for your well-being as much as you do. It is a lifelong process where you can experience incremental improvements in your health and wellness. We need to take care of ourselves to recover from stressful situations. We have to rally and support one another. Everybody has to work together. Recovery can sometimes be a very long process. There may be many unfinished stress cycles that are holding in our bodies. It takes time to release them all. Be compassionate and patient with yourself. If you started at an 8 out of 10 and you are now a 4 on the stress cycle, you can say that’s pretty darn good. Incremental progress is still massive progress.

Learning how to work through and finish a stress cycle is a very important lesson to learn. The good news is that stress is not the problem. The problem is the strategies that deal with stressors and they have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions that our bodies have to those stressors. What does this mean? It means that removing the stressors does not change the stress response. Burnout happens when you don’t deal with the stress. People often get sick. Your body does not feel safe. Your body will experience a physiological response (ie. increased heart rate, digestion changes, pain, etc.). So, when we are surrounded by stressors (ie. financial stress, loss) it is important to understand that by simply removing the stressor, does not fix the problem. This can be empowering because when we cannot control the stressors in life in our immediate future, we can still move through the stress cycle to calm our nervous system and bring us back to balance.

What does it mean to move through the stress cycle? What control do I have in reducing stress?

‘To be well is to not to live in a perpetual state of safety and calm, but to move fluidly through a state of adversity, risk, adventure or excitement and back to safety and calm again. Stress is not bad for you. Being stuck in stress is bad for you’.

Complete the stress cycle.

This can be done through some relatively easy lifestyle practices! There is no fancy algorithm or specific treatment. We can honestly calm our nervous system and work through stress by increasing the positive biochemistry in our bodies by experiencing one or many of the following basic human experiences:

1) Physical Activity. Movement. Anything that encourages your body to move and let your muscles finish the stress response and release tension.
* dancing, walking, running, riding a bike, yoga, Pilates, truly anything that gets your blood pumping and muscles contracting.

2) Breathing. Taking time to breathe can down regulate your central nervous system, reduce cortisol and help bring you back to your parasympathetic nervous system (the rest, recovery & digest part of your nervous system) and snap you out of your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response).
* taking 5 minutes to slow down your breathing can dramatically calm your mind and move you through a physiological stress response.

3) Positive social interaction. Gosh this can be super challenging right now when we are being told to distance ourselves from our loved ones. A phone call or video call is a good alternative right now to stay connected with loved ones. When you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media, take this as an opportunity to scroll through your contacts and call a friend- have a virtual coffee date.
* connection and the feeling of home and safety is the take home message here.

4) Laughter. A good belly laugh is the best medicine to release oxytocin (the love hormone) and bring us back to a state of calm, safety and well-being.
* even reminiscing on a memory of something that made us laugh really hard can be just as powerful!

5) Affection. My favorite one. A warm hug in a safe and healthy environment. Hugging a loved one until relaxed.
* Research suggests a 20 second hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and improve your mood. All of which are reflected in the post hug response of the oxytocin surge.

6) Crying. It is so very important to allow yourself the opportunity to cry and to let the tears and emotion come out. Pay attention to the physical reactions of crying vs. the thoughts that are feeding the cry. Allow your body to move through the sorrow and feel the emotion all the way to the end. When we hold back our tears, we are getting stuck in the emotional tunnel and essentially not moving through the stress cycle.

7) Creative Expression. A mode of releasing emotions and dispelling it from our body. Let it go!
* This can be done through painting, writing (journaling), sculpting, really anything that provides you the opportunity to create something meaningful to you. Like this blog- I am moving through a stress cycle by expressing, sharing and putting my emotions into words.

‘Take your broken heart and turn it into art’ – Carrie Fisher.

How do we know that we have completed the stress cycle?

You will honestly feel it in your body. You will learn how to listen for it. Seek out support from a mental health practitioner. They have so many tools to help us move through stress cycles. I am so very grateful for my psychologist. Alexandra has provided me with exercises to work through trauma, stuck emotions, emotional regulation, stress and having difficult conversations. I am a firm believer in having a psychologist, counsellor, and/or social worker on your wellness team. Consistently checking in on my mental & emotional health and wellness has been a huge focus of mine during my postpartum journey and especially navigating this wild ride of 2020.

For me, resilience means coming out on the other side smarter, stronger, and more courageous. It means celebrating all of the wins and learning from the losses. It’s the comfort and knowledge in noticing, feeling, processing, and regulating my emotions. But most importantly it is recognizing that I overcame adversity when I wasn’t sure that I could and then smiling at myself, because I sure as heck did make it through and I nailed it!

With grace,

Kim Deschamps

Kim Deschamps

Physiotherapist, Pelvic Health Therapist & Yoga Therapist

Clinic Owner - Holistic Physio Wellness

Kim Deschamps

Kim Deschamps, MPT, BKin, PYT, BDN

Kim is a physiotherapist, pelvic health therapist, professional yoga therapist, and the owner of Holistic Physiotherapy and Wellness. Kim’s professional practice follows a holistic or whole-being approach to health and wellness. Her goal is to help people find the primary driver to their pain, reduced mobility, and reduced function. She strongly advocates that every person holds the power to be an active driver in their health and well-being. Kim strives to promote self-care with her clients and the community. She actively practices this in her personal life and works hard to have work-home-life balance.

Kim's first education adventure was at the SIAST Wascana Campus in Regina, SK, where she completed a Certificate in Occupational Therapy Assistant/Physical Therapy Assistant in 2006. Kim later completed a Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology with Great Distinction and majored in Adapted Physical Activity in 2011. Kim also completed a Certificate in Gerontology (Study of Aging) from Mount Royal University in 2011. Soon after Kim applied into the College of Medicine, School of Physical Therapy at the University of Saskatchewan where she completed a Master’s degree in Physical Therapy in 2013.

After graduation, Kim knew that she wanted to pursue continuing education in movement-based, alternative and integrative medicine. This is when she began her medical therapeutic yoga training at the Professional Yoga Therapy Institute in Emerald Isle, NC. Kim has continued in this path taking further training in yoga therapy specializing in pain care management, prenatal and postpartum therapeutic yoga, and pelvic floor and core re-training. Kim has also completed additional continuing education in Pelvic Health Physiotherapy which provides her with specialized training and skills to assist clients with bladder and bowel concerns, pelvic pain, prenatal and postnatal rehabilitation, and pelvic organ prolapse. Kim has recently received her certification in Biomedical Dry Needling and is now adding this tool as an adjunct to her physiotherapy treatments with her patients.

Kim strongly advocates for her colleagues to find their passion, to follow their desire, and to take care of themselves first before extending care to others. When reflecting back on her journey through Professional Yoga Therapy training and connecting with practitioners from all around North America, Kim shares that the most valuable lesson she learned was how to prevent practitioner burnout. By listening to her body, mind, and spirit she follows her values and extends kindness and gratitude daily... this is Kim’s daily yoga practice.

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