Kysten Alvarez was seven and a half months pregnant with her first child when she fell down the stairs, breaking four bones in her foot.
Hours later, her baby boy was delivered via an emergency C-section. She spent five days in the hospital, during which her son was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). But upon returning home, Alvarez was stuck in a cast and couldn’t even bathe her newborn baby, much less herself. The feelings of postpartum depression — despair, guilt, shame and worthlessness — began creeping in.
"I wasn’t enough," she thought. "I wasn't a good mom, because I couldn't support my baby. I couldn’t do anything, and it just kept getting worse."
She looked to her mom, sister and husband and told them they would be better off if they could "find somebody that would take care of everybody."
"I told them, 'I'm ready to go. I need to leave… you're taking care of a newborn and you're taking care of me,'" Alvarez says, reflecting on the 2023 incident. She packed a backpack with the intention of going to a homeless shelter.
