Rough Week!

Wow – it’s been a crazy week! Let me just start off by saying that No, I do not have a life threatening condition! Okay, so a few days before Christmas Eve I started having some small symptoms, but I still felt fine. On Christmas day I didn’t feel the best, but that night I went downhill fast. I felt like I could hardly stand up. I crawled up to bed and stayed there the rest of the night. The next morning I didn’t feel any better so Christians step-mother saved the day by coming to get Kyle for me. I pretty much stayed in the same condition that whole day. I decided to go to the doctor the next morning when I wasn’t a hair better. Christian stayed home from work to take care of me and the kids. They did lots of tests and blood tests and found out that I had a UTI so they put me on antibiotics right away. Well, the doctor put me on an antibiotic that you are not supposed to take when you are breastfeeding even though I made sure about 100 times that it would be okay. When I got the prescription it said on a big red sticker: Warning Do Not take if Breastfeeding. I called the pharmacist and she said that it would hurt Brooklyn, but she just may not eat it. Well, sure enough – she stopped eating my rotten, yucky breast milk. This brings us to Friday and my mom had Kyle since I was still not any better. So I could hardly stand up still and now I had a hungry, ornery baby. I called the Dr. and she finally called me back like 7 hours later, but she wasn’t calling about the antibiotic. She said that she got my tests results back and one of the levels was very elevated. She said that the high level would indicate a condition that was potentially life-threatening and that I needed to go to an Emergency room right away to have further tests done. That hit like a ton of bricks! Christian rushed home from work and off to the ER we went. After several tests they confirmed that I was okay and actually released us that night! One of the tests that they did was CT scan with contrast (which means they injected some kind of something in me that breastfeeding babies can’t have). They said that I would have to pump and discard my milk for 2 days. We ran out of frozen milk thanks to the first antibiotic I was on for the UTI so at 3 am the next morning was the first time she had to have formula. We were pretty worried that she wouldn’t drink it and didn’t know how she would react since she had never had formula, but she gobbled it up great! But about 5 minutes later she started throwing up like crazy and then developed a major rash all over her body. Now I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. She obviously didn’t tolerate the formula, and my milk was again rotten so I had no idea what to do for my little hungry sweetheart! I paged the on-call Dr. at 3:30 am and he said it sounded like she has a milk allergy! There was one kind of formula that doesn’t have milk product he told us to try, but he said it tasted nothing like breast milk so hopefully she’ll eat it. That wasn’t very encouraging with her recent past, but we went ahead with it. She did choke it down, but it was very obvious she didn’t enjoy it. She’s such a trooper! Now I’m back to breastfeeding and slowly getting my strength back! It was a very difficult week, but luckily I have such wonderful family around to help me out!