Had a Baby Within the Past Year? What You Need to Know About Postpartum Thyroiditis

I think virtually all new mothers experience sleep deprivation as a result of their new bundle of joy. For someone who is supposed to sleep most of the day, they sure know how to keep us up half of the night. For working moms, the mantra to sleep while baby sleeps is just impossible. But your fatigue and sluggishness may not be your baby's fault after all. You could be suffering from a condition called Postpartum Thyroiditis.

After the birth of my first child, I was still a working mother and trying to keep my goal to breast feed her for at least the first year of her life. This is no small feat for a woman working full-time who needed to pump a few times a day. In a busy office environment, this can be near impossible. When she was about 8 months old, I began to experience crippling fatigue and it seemed that no matter how much sleep I got at night, I was still running on empty the next day. I and my husband attributed extreme fatigue to the demands of nursing a child, so I started to take multivitamins in hopes of boosting my energy levels. I lost my ability to concentrate found my train of thought wander of track. In fact, one time while paying bills, I wrote a check to the phone company for my checkbook balance and not for the amount of the bill! That one perplexed my husband. How could someone do something so goofy?

My milk production dropped through the floor. I tried fenugreek, which is a natural herb said to increase milk production. I even went so far as to schedule an appointment with a lactation consultant. It wasn't long after that I started to experience heart palpitations off and on, and this is what scared me enough to visit a doctor and try to find out what was wrong with me. I'd ignored most of my symptoms, blaming them on having a baby that woke several times a night. It wasn't until I started experiencing the heart palpitations that it sunk in that I needed to see a doctor right away, that what I was experiencing was not normal.