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!

Many of you have thoughtfully inquired about how nursing has been going since I posted about mastitis awhile back. Well, yesterday I filled another prescription for mastitis, my second case and hopefully my last. I’m feeling physically better, no fever, no aches still sore and tender though. But, my mental state has certainly taken a turn for the worse. All kinds of doubts and questions about my nursing future loom heavy in my mind. I know to others it sounds silly to go through so much torture just to feed your child when there are multitudes of precisely engineered, well-balanced formulas to choose from out there. And, maybe that criticism is well-placed now and you can be sure I’m listening but I also don’t think it’s crazy to want to give my body the fullest chance to nourish our child. It’s so damn ironic and unfair that I’m actually producing too much milk and that this oversupply could mean the end of my days nursing my daughter. So, I’m taking the advice of a few of the admirable women I know who have dealt with the plugged ducts and the mastitis and the oversupply and with great end results and I’m concentrating on giving it one last shot. But, I’m under no pretenses. This is exactly what I said, my last ditch effort. If pumping and pumping and hot packs don’t finally cure these plugged ducts I don’t know what will and for my own health I’ll have to call it quits. I’ll keep you posted on the ongoing saga. Please wish me and Gianna (because afterall this is a team sport!) the best of luck because that and prayers are our best hope now.

Over the weekend I came down with some nasty symptoms, much like the flu except way way worse. My temperature soared over 102 degrees, my joints felt like they were going to walk off without me, my head was in a death grip, and my boobs ached and were hot to the touch, even hotter than my feverish body. That’s when I called my OB’s office at 5pm on Sunday only to find out they couldn’t issue me a prescription since all the damn pharmacies in this small mountain town were already closed for the day. Needless to say, I was in utter shock that the only relief to be had would require a trip to the emergency room. So, I hunkered down with my fever and waited for morning. What a tedious night!

No one told me that breastfeeding your baby came with so many potential pitfalls and as it turns out one of those happens to mainly affect the bovine among us. But I am not a cow! How did I find this out, you may ask? Why, google, of course! Alongside all the helpful literature on dairy farming were a plethora of sickening images of cow udders the size of the beasts themselves. Scary news indeed. So scary were those pictures that I think this may go down as the only time in my long internet search history that I actually wish I could take back my query. Unfortunately no amount of purging my browser history can erase those images from my mind’s eye.

Anyway, the doctor wanted to see me on Monday afternoon to determine my illness but I had already self-diagnosed from the aforementioned google pages. It was mastitis, an infection of the breast caused by bacteria entering the nipple and setting down roots in a mammary duct. Sounds appealing right? Well, the doctor had us drive all the way down there just to tell me my suspicions were correct, there was thankfully no abscess forming, and to finally write me the script for some 20th century penicillin knockoff. (Makes me wonder what happens to those organic cows where the farmers agree not to give them any antibiotics. Cruel animal punishment I say!)

So, I’m finally on the mend but still not feeling totally human…still a little bovine in spirit it seems. Maybe I’ll go moo my way to bed now. Moooooo…