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In 1989, when I was 32, I met a dragon. I would like to be able to report that that’s a metaphor, an exaggeration, or a tall tale, but it’s not. It was an event so terrifying that even now, as I recount this event, my hands shake a little.

On June 17 of that year, after an easy, happy pregnancy, I gave birth to Noah, an 8-pound, 5-ounce boy. My husband and I and our extended families were thrilled. Two days later, at home in our Burnsville apartment, I was sitting in an armchair holding the baby when a strange, powerful sensation suddenly pressed down on me, as if something heavy and dark had settled on my shoulders. I was smacked by a sense of foreboding and horror so overwhelming that I handed the baby—who suddenly seemed a frightening stranger to me—to my husband and sat still, barely breathing, waiting for the feeling to pass.

It didn’t.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, I told my husband and mother, who planned to stay with us for a few days, that I was feeling strange and sick. What I didn’t tell them was that the heaviness on my head and shoulders seemed to be morphing into a creature. And the creature, as best as I could make out, was a dragon.

Now, I didn’t—and still don’t—believe in dragons, or anything supernatural. But even as I told myself that this could not be happening, the dragon took shape. I couldn’t see it, exactly. Rather, I sensed it as a dark, squatting presence with leathery wings and a hunched head. I felt its hot breath, slow and dank. And I could smell it. The dragon smelled like sweating horses and old leaves.

Hour by hour over the next two days, the dragon grew heavier. Merely getting dressed, brushing my teeth, or moving from the armchair became a major effort. I felt as if I was moving under water and that drowning was imminent.

By then my husband and mother, who decided to extend her stay (and helped put off visitors who wanted to meet Noah), understood that I had some form of the “baby blues.” But because my behavior was so radically different from my normal demeanor—cheerful and talkative—they were bewildered as to what was going on with me. I had never had even a touch of depression in my life, and I had never heard anyone describe depression as a dragon intent on slowly suffocating her. How in the world could anyone survive such a thing? I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.

Certain both that the dragon was real and that no one would believe me, I didn’t talk about it. In fact, I spoke very little, and when I did, I described the rational, visible things—the bone-deep exhaustion, the panic attacks, the inability to sleep. One night, as my husband and mother slept, I crept down the hall into the baby’s room and was horrified at how strange and small he looked. He cannot possibly live, I thought. He’s too small. He’ll die. And I was certain that I, too, would die, under the weight of the dragon.

The next day my mother, cradling the baby, and my husband took me to the hospital emergency room where we waited for almost two hours before a busy but cheerful doctor informed us that the baby was doing great and that I had some postpartum blues but that it was nothing to worry about. Clearly I had good family support; I should take an over-the-counter sleep medication and try to rest. I’d be fine, he said.

I went home, took the medicine, and lay down. Twelve sleepless hours later I stood up and cried, “It’s even worse!” Panic attacks, anguished, garbled thoughts, and the sensation that the dragon was pressing down on me were intensifying. My mother set up another doctor’s appointment, but it was days away.

Two more hellish nights ensued. I tried everything I could think of to get even a moment’s sleep, but there was none to be had. I was exhausted, almost unable to hold my head up, but I could not sleep. When I’d close my eyes, ominous, obsessive fears occupied my mind. I agonized over how to tell my husband and mother that I could not take care of the baby and that he would have to be given up for adoption—if he even lived. By then I had lost the strength even to fear the dragon, now as relentless and immobilizing as a great pile of earth. I was simply waiting for it to crush me.

Photos from the time show me holding my robust, beautiful newborn son and my old cat. I remember what I was thinking at the time: Get them off my lap. I don’t want them to be crushed. But I said nothing. I was convinced that I was crazy and that the sooner I died or could be sent to a mental hospital the sooner my family could rest and get on with their lives.

Nine days after the baby’s birth, I sat in the armchair waiting to die beneath the dark weight when I felt something like a blast of wind. Suddenly the dragon shifted and seemed to loosen its grip a little. A jolt of something—adrenaline? a hormone ebbing? hope?—rocked me.

“Something is happening!” I remember saying to my mother. “I think it’s going away!” I had the presence of mind to notice that her eyes filled with tears of relief.

Over the next two days, I sat in that armchair, day and night, and waited as the dragon slowly withered. By two weeks after childbirth, the dragon was dead.

Words cannot describe what it was like to be free of that hell. I felt as Lazarus must have, emerging from the winding sheets. Even now, 17 years later, as my handsome, 6-foot son, Noah, the prince of my world, banters with his pals in the next room, I shudder with relief when I think of the moment I began to feel fully alive again.

After I recovered, I did some research. In 1989, one didn’t Google things; one went to the library. I didn’t find much—a couple of mentions in books reassuring new moms that the baby blues are normal, a few Ann Landers columns. My doctor didn’t have much to say when I told him about it, so I found another one.

Since then, much more information has become available about postpartum depression. It’s even the subject of the bestseller Down Came the Rain by actress Brooke Shields, God bless her. Knowing what I know now, I realize that I had a life-threatening condition and should have been hospitalized and medicated. I never had another child, partly because my marriage eventually ended, but also because of fear.

The dragon, of course, was a delusion, the result of crashing hormones, perhaps. Maybe my mind, poisoned by chemicals run amok, created the fiend out of the material it had at hand. I had recently studied a lot of medieval literature while earning my master’s degree, including an old copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost that featured a woodcut of the devil rearing himself up off hell’s lake of fire. His wings were a lot like the dragon’s.

I’ve since read plenty of horror stories about women who did not recover from postpartum depression and I have come to realize how lucky I am to have made such a swift, inexplicable recovery.

Sometimes when I’m out and about, I’ll encounter a homeless person talking away to someone or something I can’t see. I feel drawn to this person. I want to sneak up and whisper, What do you see? Is it a dragon? Of course I don’t. What sane person would do that? But if anything good has come out of this, it’s that I feel a deep kinship with the chronically mentally ill. I’ve visited their country, and it is hell indeed.

A few years ago, after a couple of highly publicized murders of children by mothers suffering from the most severe form of this illness, postpartum psychosis, an editor at the newspaper where I work asked me to write an article about my experience. Within a day of its publication, I received scores of heartrending e-mails from women who’d had experiences ranging from suicidal despair to months of numbness after giving birth.

None mentioned a dragon. But I encountered one, and I lived to tell the tale.

Pamela Miller (B.A. ’78) has degrees in anthropology and journalism from the University of Minnesota and earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Minnesota–Duluth in 1986. She lives in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and is the Faith & Values beat reporter for the Star Tribune.

First Person features personal essays written by alumni, faculty, students, or anyone with a University connection. To request writers’ guidelines, write to Minnesota Magazine, McNamara Alumni Center, 200 Oak St. SE, Suite 200, Minneapolis, MN 55455; e-mail fling003@umn.edu; or visit www.alumni.umn.edu/minnesota.