InnerTeub

Stick with me on this:

Years ago, my grandmother was at our house and stubbed her shin on the edge of our coffee table. It was a pretty solid hit, and she cut her skin a little, but whatever, we all moved on with our day. Weeks later we heard from her that she actually ended up with a staph infection from the open wound. When asked why she didn’t go to the doctor long before the infection became STAPH, she shrugged and was like “It’s a cut. How was I supposed to know it was so bad?”

As a somewhat related occurrence, my mother recently wrapped up what was (I think) 5-7 years of intense dental work to correct some major structure jaw / teeth problems, problems that had led to her spending most of her life chewing different foods on different sides of her mouth, depending on their …chewiness (or something). When asked how she managed to go her whole life with such glaringly painful dental stuff, she shrugged and was like “How was I suppose to know it was so bad?”

So anyway, I suppose I shouldn’t be THAT surprised that I found myself yesterday at a Women’s Imaging Clinic (boobs. The place traffics in boobs, and boob related malfunctions) having 4 syringes worth of infected fluid pulled out of my breast. When asked how I possibly let the infection get THAT BAD, I shrugged and said “How was I supposed to know it was so bad?”

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One thing they tell breastfeeding mothers is that if you spike a major fever, you hightail it to your doctor. I am apparently a special snowflake in that I had an infected milk duct, but my body walled off the infection so that it didn’t hit my overall system. Yay! Except, boo, because that meant the infection grew to kind of dangerous levels. And this highlights one of the major weirdnesses to me of having a baby: the baby to boob interface is kind of a medical no man’s land: If my baby had symptoms of infection from me, the pediatrician would have helped. If I had had symptoms of general illness, my GP (I don’t have one but you know what I mean) (yes, Mom, I know I need one) or possibly my OB could have helped. But what do you do when something is vaguely not right? At what point does it cross the line from “just one of the mild discomforts of nursing” to “extraordinarily dangerous medical issue”? I mean, apparently the answer to that is “a few days before you actually called your doctor, dumbass”, but you catch my drift.

This whole thing also has me kind of spiraling down a “I am what is wrong with society” wormhole, because, if I’m being honest, two large reasons why I didn’t call my doctor – if I could have even decided which doctor would be the appropriate phone call – were:

1. I didn’t want to seem bothersome over what was probably a simple issue. (Good girl, don’t make a fuss)

2. I didn’t call an LC because I felt ashamed that I had started scaling back nursing to accommodate my work schedule, and I assumed discomfort was a side component of that scale back, and that as a result I was kind of … getting what I deserved. You know, for being lazy and kind of selfish.

That second one is a hard one for me to cop to, because intellectually I know it’s bogus. I intellectually understand that it’s a really good thing my kid takes bottles, because her dad is the full time parent and needs to feed her; he is the full time parent because it works best for our family for me to work full time, and I’m lucky to have a job that I want to work full time AT. But the reality is I know I’d still be exclusively nursing if I hadn’t gone back to work, and while I never considered not going back to work, I was sadder about this than I anticipated, especially because I have good supply and my kid was doing great nursing…well, it feels pretty selfish. Which I also THINK is really bogus but that doesn’t change how I FEEL, and anyway, good work, LIZ, because not being able to sort through those feelings sooner means you came really really close to being dangerously ill.

And those two reasons highlight two of my least favorite character traits, traits I feel like are fairly exclusively female: not wanting to be a bother and taking on too much guilt about acting like a human, so basically, HI this feels like a good platform from which to start raising a daughter.

So anyway, being back a work is going pretty well, thanks for asking.

(It actually is, major medical issue notwithstanding. Thank you for asking.)