For months after Meghan Trainor welcomed her first child, Riley, via cesarean section, she says she could still vividly feel the pain of the ordeal — and even sometimes felt like she was still in the hospital.
“I was like, ‘It’s so weird.’ To my therapist and my doctors, I was like, ‘It’s like I’m back in the room,’” she told Hoda Kotb on the TODAY show on April 24. “At nighttime, when the pain would kick in, I was like … ‘I’m still on the table.”
Trainor, 29, ended up being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as a result of her scary birth experience.
“They were like, ‘So we have to work through this. That’s a sign of PTSD,’” she said, recalling how professionals reacted when she shared how she was feeling. “I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’”
About 9% of women experience postpartum PTSD, according to Postpartum Support International (PSI), an organization that spreads awareness about emotional challenges people may experience during pregnancy and after birth.
Symptoms of postpartum PTSD can include “intrusive re-experiencing of a past traumatic event,” which could include “the childbirth itself,” the organization says on its website.
Other PTSD symptoms can include flashbacks or nightmares, irritability, hypervigilance, anxiety or panic attacks.
Postpartum PTSD is “temporary and treatable with professional help,” PSI also notes.
Trainor also recalled to Hoda what was so upsetting about her first childbirth experience.
“When they were like, ‘C-section,’ because baby Riley was breach, I was like, Oh, do I have to be awake? It was the scariest,” Trainor said. “I felt like I was jumping out of a plane. The whole time, I was just with my husband shaking. I was just like, surrender. … Truly, you lose control, and it’s all right. We’ll get through this. And we did. We survived.”
The “Mother” singer said that while many new parents may have “suffered with (PTSD)” silently in the…
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