I Can Choose to Laugh or Cry. I Am Now Laughing After Lots of Tears.

it's been a hella rough day. i started feeling really achy all over- all my joints hurt, my ankles to my wrists and all in between. then i got chills. and then got all sweaty with a low grade temp. and then when i was nursing i noticed he really couldn't get much off of one side. and then that same side started getting hot and swollen and very painful.

so...i've diagnosed myself with mastitis (breast infection/inflammation). i'm nursing and pumping regularly to try to clear it out and applying heat and taking motrin and tylenol 3, etc. and i'll see my OB in the morning to maybe get some antibiotics.

the worst part wasn't the unpleasant symptoms but the fact that i couldn't seem to feed him properly anymore. the amounts coming out are kind of wimp-ish and he just suddenly isn't interested in that side's nipple.

and he had a rough day all on his own. we couldn't make him happy. he would go 10, maybe 15 minutes without crying and then was shrieking murder that is very bloody. all day long. dry, clean, fed, nothing pinching him and still, howler monkey in my ear.

so...the fear that i'm somehow failing my tiny by not feeding him properly (mind you, i'm pumping this whole time and supplementing as need be by bottle feeding) coupled with the shrieking baby monster and my raging hormones and lack of sleep left me weeping like a broken faucet. buckets of tears streaming down my face and then merging with the spit up on my shirt to form this awesome tragic river in my cleavage.

and then at one point in my meltdown, i got up to fetch some toilet paper to try to quell the fountain of snot and kicked over a full mug of tea onto the carpet. i was so enraged by the injustice of everything that i kicked the bathroom door as i walked in and...it came off its hinges and almost fell on me and henry.

now, it was scary and dumb and dangerous. but, it was also kind of funny considering that i don't typically have snit fits like that and don't think i've ever kicked anything in anger before...and that i didn't even kick it hard enough to hurt my foot, but the flimsy door and ghetto construction of our basement made it quite dramatic indeed.

the whole event sort of woke me up out of my hysteria. and then henry took 3 consecutive huge craps and was pleasant and happy the rest of the day.

so we're clearly still figuring out his patterns and needs. but we'll get there.

and i seem to be hitting all the common but annoying post-partum/delivery issues. i mean, what are the three terrors of the fire swamp? one, jaundice-no problem. there's a yellow hue preceding that, we can avoid that. two, mastitis, which i was clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too. what about the R.O.U.S's?

...i don't think they exist. :)