Operation Pink Herring

Giving up the gun

Joel gently suggested that perhaps I should lay off posting about breastfeeding after my last couple of thrush posts, and I know. I know. So that's what I've been doing. By not posting at all. But now I'm back! To talk about... breastfeeding.

I had half-written several posts in my head that were going to detail our long battle against thrush. These posts all ended happily with the One Thing That Finally Worked, sort of like a Modern Girl's Guide to Beating Candida. I got myself through the really terrible days by imagining myself in the future, happily nursing my baby without a palace of pillows arranged carefully around me and a headache from gritting my teeth the whole time.

That won't be happening, because I quit breastfeeding yesterday.

SAY WUT?

Remember when I was complaining about how long breastfeeding took, and I said I hated it? That statement has been haunting me. That was when I was pain-free and everything was going fabulously. I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face. When my OB told me that I had to quit breastfeeding as soon as possible yesterday, I burst into tears. Why? Why is it such an emotional thing? As I held Hannah in my arms today and gave her a bottle, I asked myself how this was so different than nursing. (Besides, of course, the ten minutes of fighting I had to go through to get her to take the bottle. THAT'S FUN.) There's nothing but a thin t-shirt between us. She's still getting fed, and I'm not in pain. Oh, but it's so different.

SERIOUS BABY KNOWS UR NOT TAKIN BOOBS AWAY

I don't feel like this was my fault and I know for sure that I did everything (EVERYTHING) to beat it, but... I'm just heartbroken. And if my OB hadn't told me point blank that I needed to stop immediately and then called a surgery consult because she thought I needed stitches (in my nipples. Just in case that wasn't clear. Do you want me to say nipples a few more times, just to make sure my poor brother gets the mental picture?) (NIPPLES.) I'd still be trucking along, telling myself that the next thing was going to be It. The thing that finally cured me.

(I didn't get stitches. Thank you Jesus.)

In fact, I haven't quite stopped yet. I nursed Hannah yesterday because she refused the first formula I tried to give her and I had to feed her before I went to the store to get more. And then I nursed her this morning to take the edge off my rock hard boobs. And I will do so again tonight, just because I don't want to get a plugged duct or mastitis or something. And because I am possibly addicted to breastfeeding and I just cannot let go. (But I'm going to. Tomorrow!) Every time now I think "this is probably the last time." And then I cry, because, oh, I just wish things could have been different.

We tried EVERYTHING. Oral nystatin for Hannah, oral diflucan for me, diflucan for both Hannah and me, over 30 days of gentian violet, grapefruit seed extract, vinegar rinse, probiotics, yogurt, low sugar diet, sunshine, excessive laundering of everything in the house, boiling everything in the house, bleaching everything in the house. I had pretty much gotten used to washing every blanket and bib and burp cloth and outfit and towel after a single use and boiling pacifiers every day. And I could even deal with the pain, which came and went. But then, over the course of one weekend, the yeast somehow managed to eat away most of the skin on my nipples. It is easily the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. But even that I could take, because it convinced my OB to refill my prescription and I got a matching one for Hannah and I was sure that we were finally on the right track! And so I kept going! For five more weeks.

And five weeks later, not much had changed. Instead, air moving over my boobs had become excruciating (and a key to keeping thrush at bay? Air drying after every feeding). In the meantime, the pain and stress and my constant trying to push feedings back just a few more minutes because I really just wasn't ready to go through that again caused my supply to fall way off, to the point where at Hannah's most recent checkup she'd fallen from the 5th percentile for weight right off the chart. Still, I thought we'd be OK. I started taking a shitload of fenugreek to boost my supply back up and I started feeding her every two hours on the dot. I figured we'd supplement with formula if we needed to, and I made another appointment with my OB, hoping she would increase my dose of diflucan or put me on something else or do... something.

She did do something. She took one look at my boobs and told me that I needed to stop.

When people asked me if I planned to breastfeed (and let me tell you, a LOT of people ask a pregnant lady if she's going to breastfeed, from doctors who are doing their job to strangers on the street who don't know how to mind their own damn business), I always said I was planning to try. I knew that a lot of people tried and couldn't (my own mother being one of them), and I thought that was totally understandable and OK. I always intended to try my best and accept it if things didn't work out. But apparently I am not very good at that last part. "It's OK, maybe we can try again in a few months," Joel comforted me yesterday. Noooot exactly, I explained. I think it's that finality, the knowledge that once I wean her for real that is it, no going back and trying one last thing, that is really getting to me.

I know we'll be OK. This is not the end of the world. I have a happy, healthy baby and everything is going to be fine. But you'll pardon me if I just have one more little cry about it, and then I have to go try to convince Joel that we should have another baby right now so I can have a breastfeeding do-over.

(Kidding! Mostly.)

No, YOU'RE still posting Christmas photos

My latest concern about Hannah's health (not including thrush, we'll get to that later) is that she's not getting enough sleep. She sleeps well at night (and that's all I'll say about that, because I don't want to jinx it), so I figured it was cool with me if she just wanted to stay awake all day. I mean, I kind if envied people who could put their babies down in the crib for a stretch of a few hours and, like, do other stuff. But Hannah is generally a satisfied customer these days and I like hanging out with her all day. But then I got my weekly BabyCenter email and it said that babies her age need to be getting around fifteen hours of sleep a day. Uhhhh. Yeah. Even with her excellent night-sleeping habits, Hannah is at most getting ten hours of sleep a day. And, again, I don't mind hanging out with her, but apparently this lack of sleep is stunting her brain growth and stuff (paraphrasing). So I decided that was it! We'd start making her take naps!

So the next day I swaddled her up a few hours after she woke up in the morning, rocked her a bit in the rocking chair, and BOOM. Out like a light. Amazing I thought. This napping thing is great! That was super easy!

That lasted two days. Then she decided she preferred to stay awake and grin at me for forty five minutes instead of falling asleep. Or she'd fall asleep, I'd put her down in the swing (not the crib. Dear god, not the crib. We have learned our lesson on the crib, and that lesson is that cribs are very nice decorative pieces) and fifteen minutes later I'd look over and see her wide awake, smiling at me from across the room. NO! You're supposed to be sleeping! Stop smiling at me and let your brain grow!

Now she's decided that she'll nap... as long as it's on a human body. She'll take a four-hour nap on Joel's chest in the evening. She'll snooze happily in the sling while I bulldoze around the house, trying not to whack her into anything (it's just like being pregnant again! Except even more back-breaking!). But put her down? Hell no.

So my new approach is to try to put her to bed earlier. This approach also worked well for the first few days, but last night I got her to sleep at the early hour of 10:15pm and as a reward, she woke up for the day at 6:30am. Instead of the normal 7:30 or 8:30. Again, I'm really not complaining. I would have murdered someone a few months ago to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It's glorious! But the problem is that I'm out of things to do. I've already fed Hannah, eaten my own breakfast, showered, and gotten us both dressed for the day. And dried my hair. And made myself a sandwich for lunch. I half-jokingly asked Joel if I could tag along with him to work today. We wouldn't be a bother, I swear! We'd just sit quietly by his desk, listening to other adult humans talk! And then we could have our ham sandwiches together and I wouldn't be drowning in loneliness and boredom at 9am. Possibly it is time for me to find some friends. 

*************

Bored and lonely as I may get sometimes, I love this three-month age. You guys told me things would get better, and it's not that I didn't believe you. I just didn't realize how much better they would get, and how fast. Hannah is, generally speaking, just so much fun to be around. She smiles a huge grin at everything from diaper changes to seeing the cat walk by. The nightly five-hour crying jags seem to have played themselves out (THANK YOU JESUS). And most importantly, I feel about a thousand times more confident. When she cries I can figure out what the problem is and fix it, whether she's tired or hungry or just in need of a change of scenery. I look forward to outings rather than having a panic attack about the thought of leaving the house alone with the baby. And have I mentioned the sleeping? At night? And how it's the best, most glorious thing in the world? I'm no longer wishing desperately for her to hurry up and get older because I just cannot take the crying any more, for the love of god. And looking back, Hannah was an easy baby. She first slept through the night at five weeks old. And yes, she cried and cried and cried on several occasions (including one day where she cried for twenty-seven hours straight, and I am not exaggerating one bit with that figure. She only stopped to eat and to take three two-hour naps; other than that it was all crying, all the time. From 9pm one night until she finally exhausted herself at midnight the next night.), but it ended by about six weeks. Oh, how easy it to look back and say that it was only about six weeks of misery. "Only" six weeks! HAHAHAHA babies are insane. But three month old babies are so much less insane and lo, it is fantastic.

**********

But what about the thrush, you're wondering. WHAT ABOUT THE THRUSH. Surely it's a distant memory, just like the endless cryfests? Oh, how I wish. Thrush has pretty much completely ruined my breastfeeding experience. I used to think people who talked about their breastfeeding "experience" were totally lame, but now I'd kill to have any experience other than never ending laundry and pain and boobs that look so nasty that it'd made you puke if I showed you the pictures. And yes, I have pictures, because I fully plan to shove them in the face of the pediatrician who told us that we didn't have thrush and I needed to just deal with the quote-unquote discomfort because "sometimes breastfeeding hurts". Except I am going to a new pediatrician now because I was not willing to believe that giant gashes filled with something that looked like mold on your boobs was normal. So I'm not sure what the pictures are for. Maybe to show to Hannah when she turns fourteen and it's time to have the talk about Why You Don't Want to Have a Baby When You're in High School. I'd say that some day, I'll look back on this experience and appreciate how it made me stronger, but that assumes that some day I will not have thrush and after thirteen weeks I am pretty sure I'm going to die having thrush. Put it on my tombstone.

********************

And now allow me to bore you with some boring family photos. I am feeling kind of sad that I didn't send out Christmas cards this year so now you will suffer for my laziness.

Merry "Christmas"! Which we celebrated, per tradition, at my brother's house the week before real Christmas. Hannah's second trip to the Motherland (aka New Jersey)!

Cheesy family portrait from actual Christmas, which we spent at home, doing nothing and driving absolutely nowhere. Miraculously, Hannah's mouth is not wide open.

Hannah, her loot, and her kickass smile. This is why I love three months.

On Christmas Eve we went to see the lights on 34th Street, this insane block in north Baltimore that goes totally crazy with the Christmas lights. We brought the stroller. That was a mistake.

Now pretend these photos I took with my cell phone tie this post together. Later!