Just four days after giving birth to her son in September 2020, Ethel Yap found herself in the emergency department.
“I had chest tightness. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I had heart palpitations. Every time I attempted to drift off to sleep my body would jerk itself back awake. The feeling was almost like, as you’re falling asleep, your body forgets how to breathe, and it desperately wakes itself up to say, ‘breathe, breathe, breathe’, if not, you’re going to die.
“Every time my body jerked itself awake, I was gasping for breath, like I was suffocating, choking, breathing in water,” said the 36-year-old singer-songwriter and theatre actress.
It was so bad that doctors feared she might have heart failure and admitted her.
“My physical symptoms were actually consistent with this heart condition called peripartum cardiomyopathy that newly postpartum mums can suddenly develop… get a heart attack and die,” Yap told CNA Women.
At that time, the pandemic was ongoing and because some of her symptoms were similar to COVID-19, the new mother was placed in an isolation ward, and cut off from her newborn, husband and family.
There, while fighting for breath and sleep, she continued to pump breast milk, which her husband shuttled back daily for their infant.
Throughout, a constant stream of doctors and nurses in full personal protective equipment ran MRI scans, heart ultrasounds, X-rays and other scans on her.
A week later, doctors ruled out heart and lung problems, and referred her to a psychiatrist. She was diagnosed with postpartum depression.
HER POSTPARTUM SPIRAL
Yap was aware of postpartum depression. “But I did not think it would happen to me. Or even if it did, I didn’t realise how bad it would be,” she said.
She recalled how after a painful 20-hour labour, she was overjoyed to deliver her son.
“The moment he came out, I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop sobbing for a very long time. They put him on me for the first time for skin-to-skin. I was very, very happy,” she said.
