I’m really very happy that Gianna and I have made it to 7 months nursing and almost exclusively at that. She’s a poor eater when it comes to solids so her diet these days is mostly breastmilk with a few teaspoons of fruit or veggies at mealtimes. I still offer them to her twice a day but for the past week or so she hasn’t been interested at all. She may just be one of those babies who doesn’t find being fed a particularly worthy daily activity and once she’s able to feed herself bite-sized morsels she may like to eat again. Who knows. With this baby I’ve learned not to question or ask, “why?” I just keep the milk flowin’ and let the rest take care of itself in due time.

And, speaking of milk flowing, I’m happy to say I have finally uncovered the mystery of my short milk supply. I have had issues with a sudden drop in supply every 4-5 weeks or so since Gianna was 4 months old. And, my gut instinct on what’s causing this is hormones. I haven’t yet had a period since she was born (THANK YOU THANK YOU!) but my natural hormones are still there, lurking in the background and coming closer and closer to resurfacing as the post-natal months progress. I hear it takes an average of 6-9 months for full-time nursing moms to restart their cycles.

So, mystery solved. Every time my estrogen levels peak, my supply dips, and when the hormones level out again my milk comes back with a vengeance thanks to Gianna nursing overtime when it’s low. Fenugreek does a lot to help us get over the 3 or 4 worst days but I’m just happier knowing it will end and my milk will rebound as soon as the hormones settle down. It’s not as stressful as before when it would come suddenly and with no reason and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Now at least I know it’s nothing I’m doing and I can take the guilt off my shoulders about it. But, I’d still like her to eat more solids so I can stop being her only source of nutrition. No mother wants to hear her child cry out of hunger and not be able to soothe her. At least I can quasi-predict when it will happen again and fortify myself against the reality of the following few days. It’s bittersweet but better than being in the dark and surprised about it each time.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how in the world we have managed to put 6 some odd billion people in existence on this planet. And for that matter, how do people ever manage to have more than one child without going insane from all the different kinds of deprivation that entails? This has been the conundrum running through my head for the past week or two. And Gianna is a great baby. Let’s make that clear right off. She isn’t colicky, hardly ever has gas, cries only when tired or hungry or if mommy has forgotten to change her diaper (and it’s always me forgetting). Okay so nursing hasn’t been easy for us but it’s not exactly her fault. I’ve got the overproducing, overshooting boobs. So she cries when she nurses and it takes us awhile to settle down, sometimes a single feeding takes hours in fact. But, on the whole, this is not a demanding, needy child. I wish she cuddled more actually. I wish she liked being attached the way the attachment parenting books tout as the answer for raising a conscientious, caring, compassionate child (Dr. Sears’ alliteration not mine).

So, today when it took me an hour to get her to nurse through three let downs and then she fell asleep on the bed next to me, I wasn’t about to jeopardize my good fortune and instead I curled up next to her and decided I could use a nap too. Two hours later we both woke up, refreshed, ready to tackle an afternoon of attempts at rolling over, sitting up and babbling our vowel sounds, at which point I realized none of this would have been remotely possible if I had a two or three-year-old running around the house with her. And at that thought, I made a mental note to tell Benoit we have just created an only child and that’s all there is to it. No more. I cannot handle another. Anyone who does and stays at home AND nurses is better than Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Grandma Moses put together. Those women are G-O-D, all in capitals.

It’s too bad Gianna. The only way I would even think about giving you a brother or a sister is if we adopt a toddler. This baby business is too demanding!

I finally turned the corner last night somewhere around 3am. God apparently did not want 9-1-1 speed dialed on my telephone and she certainly didn’t care to teach Benoit how to use the emergency epinephrine pen the nurse prescribed for me on Monday, worried I might go into anaphlaxis. If you’ve ever known someone severely allergic to bees you probably have seen one of these things. They are huge and hideous and inspire fright in the most persistent of allergens.

Anyway, since my last post on Sunday things steadily and quickly got worse. The hives spread and I also started swelling badly, something called angioedema. I haven’t bothered to look that one up since I’m pretty sure I got the jist of it from the last 4 days. I don’t usually go into the doctor’s office until things look really bad so it says something about how terrified I was that we went into the quick care clinic on Monday afternoon. They were surprised at the swelling, told me to stop taking my antibiotics and gave me an epinephrine shot (not a massive one like what’s in those bee kits) and a heavy shot of benadryl. All this did nothing to stop the progress of the hives or the swelling. Well, it gave me about two hours of relief and turned my Bubba Gump lip into just Pamela Anderson proportions. They also put me on Keflex to substitute for the Dicloxacillin we think started the reaction. Well, two doses of Keflex later and the hives had taken over my back, scalp and moved onto my face, neck and throat. Needless to say, we were back at the quick care clinic on Tuesday. They pow-wowed with my O.B. and decided the best course would be to stop taking the antibiotics altogether and hope the mastitis is either already gone or will be gone with just homeopathic remedies and to give me a steroid (prednisone) to kick off my immune response and tell my body to SHUT THE HELL UP already! Seriously, if a body ever needed a red light this was the time.

So, last night I began the steroids and voila! The smallest hives and swelling have all but disappeared and the more acute areas are finally coming under control. I worry how the steroids will affect Gianna since we’re still breastfeeding so I’m using it as an excuse to have Benoit try bottles with frozen milk for the feedings closest to the time I take the steroids. I’ve looked up the half-life of the drug and it seems it clears your system in just 4-5 hours after you take it so this should work. Now, if only Gianna would actually take a bottle!! Anyway, they have me on the child’s dosage so hopefully if I have to feed her close to the time I take the steroids each morning, it won’t have too much of an effect. That’s all I can do. She needs a functioning mother after all of this and I can’t keep relying on the kindness of her pseudo-grandma up here who has been a dream by the way.

So, thanks for all the prayers and good wishes. I came the closest I’ve ever come to dialing 9-1-1 and putting my life in the hands of rural medical staff. I hope this is the last and grandest of my medical problems up here!

Last night around bedtime I began to see and feel a bunch of itchy welts around my joints: elbows, knees, wrists, shoulders. I thought they must be mosquito bites but in weird localized places. The weather has been changing around here and quite warm so I have noticed a few hatchling mosquitos out and about. Plus, we had all the windows in the house open yesterday since it was so nice. Maybe that’s how they got in. I’ve always had a pretty decent allergic reaction to them so this was nothing new, itchy but not new. So, we went to bed but changed all the bed linens just in case it was a spider or something instead.

Then, this morning I woke up and the bumps were increasing and turning splotchy in color and the biggest bell-ringer of all, my lower lip swelled to elephantiasis proportions. I was scared. I thought maybe it was a spider and I was having some severe reaction to it. Benoit googled everything he could think of and we checked our emergency room coverage on our health insurance. No dice. Definitely NOT going to the E.R. with our coverage! So, I called my aunt who lives a mile away and is studying to be a nurse. As soon as I hit the part about my lip swelling she told me I have hives. Grrreat! Though I’m now unafraid to crawl between the sheets, doing so is excruciatingly itchy and painful. I have since managed to get a welt the size of a golf ball on the bottom of my foot. Yes, that’s right, I said the bottom. Try walking with a golf ball sticking out of your foot and then add some itch on top of it. Yuk.

Now, whenever I go into a doctor’s office and they ask me if I’m allergic to any medications I can definitively say, YES! No more dicloxacillin for me. Unfortunately, this penicillin derivative that was prescribed to treat my last bout of mastitis may be my last penicillin-related drug. It took us awhile to figure it out and the hives are still spreading because of that final dose I took at 5am this morning, but I am definitely allergic to it. Hopefully I’ve taken enough of it to wipe out the infection…it was most likely the 17 days of taking 1200mg of it (two cases of mastitis in one month) that just toppled my immune system into rejecting the drug. Damn, I was always so proud of replying, “Nope. NO allergies for me.” when the doctors asked. It looks like Murphy’s law, what can go wrong will go wrong, found in me a new believer.

Well, I’m off to go google whether or not benadryl interferes with breastfeeding…