juthwara | (no subject)

Our angelic daughter decided to sleep long enough yesterday to let us not only go to a movie, but stay through the entire thing. She's a champion napper at the moment, so we may yet be able to do this again before she gets too old for this. We saw Fantastic Four, which was a fun movie. It lacked the emotional depth of a lot of the recent comic book movies, but that's just fine with me. Not every comic book has the angst and drama of Batman or The Hulk, so I'm not sure why every comic book movie should. FF was amusing and very much in keeping with the feel of the early comic.

Meanwhile, it's just starting to penetrate my squishy brain that the new Harry Potter book is coming out in a week. I hadn't forgotten - I had it firmly in my mind that it was coming out in the middle of July. It had just slipped my mind that it is in fact July.

I certainly don't regret having a baby and it's nothing but a relief to me that I'm no longer working, but at times like these, I do wish I was still cataloging so I could get my hands on HBP a week early.

So almost every woman has this experience at one point or another: you feel a certain itching or burning south of the border and start to notice substances that can be compared to cottage cheese (between that and the resemblance of baby spit-up to cottage cheese, it's a wonder to me that anyone can still stomach eating the stuff). So you either go to the doctor or diagnose it yourself from long-suffering experience: a yeast infection, cured by over the counter creams or suppositories that inevitably make you begin to feel like a cannoli by the end of the treatment cycle. Very, very common. Heck, if you're like me, you pick up a yeast infection cure every time you go to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for antibiotics, yeast infections are so common and easy to contract.

So when I felt the itching and burning and pain this week, the diagnosis of yeast infection wasn't surprising, especially given that I was given a hefty dose of antibiotics post-surgery. What was surprising is where the yeast infection decided to take up shop.

In my nipples.

Yes, in my freaking nipples. Frankly, the thought that milk is coming out of my nipples seems freaky enough, but that there's yeast living in there as well is just about too much to bear. I thought I knew all of the orifices in which you could develop yeast overgrowth - our cats have problems with yeast in their ears for instance, and the mouth is another common area, as well as the aforementioned southerly areas. But nipples? Apparently it's very common in nursing mothers, although it's not something La Leche League talks about when they're promoting the joys of breastfeeding. It makes breastfeeding such the joyous experience, I can tell you, what with the burning and shooting pains and desire to yelp in pain every time K latches on.

And to add to the joy, it turns out that mothers and babies can pass the infection between each other, so we got to take K to the pediatrician as well, where we had a comedy of errors in communication which initially made us look like ridiculously overanxious parents bringing their child to the doctor to get checked for a random illness for which she had no symptoms. She is currently in the clear but has a prescription in case anything develops.

So the current cure is the same as it would be for, ahem, other areas - over the counter cream, obsessively applied every ten minutes or so. I'm giving it until Monday to work, then I'm calling up the doctor to demand Diflucan or the like, as I have my doubts about how effective an external cream is being on an internal infection. After two days, the symptoms aren't quite as bad, but this is one infection that I really really want to kill. Meanwhile, lots of acidophilus, lavishly applied Monistat, and copious swearing are the order of the day.

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Eek! (Aside from the pumping-for-preemie thing, the nursing stuff was textbook great, and avoided some textbook worries. I suppose it was to make up for the decidedly non-textbook-great pregnancy and whatnot...)

Luck on that, yeah. Isn't it called "thrush" when it's passed back and forth?

Thanks! Yes, yeast is known as thrush when it's found above the belt. Candida is apparently the organism of many aliases. :)

Actually, the breastfeeding itself is going very well. She's finally latching on well enough and staying there that I don't need to use both hands all the time to keep her on. We've even been able to introduce a nighttime bottle with no problems. If I could only get rid of that whole stabbing breast pain problem, life would be just peachy.

It's probably the thrush?

(I got pins and needles with let-down aka "about to spurt out to a distance of 2-3 feet." Not entirely comfortable, but not bad. After some weeks, it calmed.)

I'm glad you've got the latch setting up well!

It's almost certainly thrush - it's a lot more than pins and needles and it's not just at letdown, I got a hefty dose of antibiotics after the c-section which for me is an engraved invitation to yeast overgrowth, and most tellingly, it's improving with the application of Monistat. Thankfully, it is starting to improve, so hopefully I'll have it conquered by the end of the week.

Much luck! I hope it's not going to get passed back and forth any.

Um, EUGH! My gosh... Intelectualy, it makes sence. Technicaly you can get a yeast infection in any oriface on your body; my 7th grade science teacher's son had one (ahem). Yea.

Cottage cheese. It's a wonder anyone stomaches the stuff. Period. Ye cats it's awful.

Once you get rid of the thrush, try using lanolin cream to help keep everything healthy. I'm glad that you went and got antibiotics for K, though, since it can be passed back and forth for quite a long time. In the meantime, I hope you like yogurt!