Give that baby the breast!

I want to start off by saying that yes, there are reasons why a mother cannot breastfeed. There are some people who have medical reasons for not being able to breastfeed, these people should not be made to feel bad for not breastfeeding, it's not their fault. If they wanted to breastfeed and they can't then they are probably already devastated. Another reason that is ok in my eyes for not breastfeeding is postpartum depression. Breastfeeding can be hard at first, and without the right support it can become so overwhelming. It's hard to understand if you have never had postpartum depression, but some women need to stop breastfeeding in order to start their recovery. These women also feel bad as it is, they don't need people making them feel worse. I think that formula should be a "last resort". There are other options out there. There are milk banks where you can get breastmilk from a donor. They pasteurize all breastmilk, so some of the antibodies and nutrients will be lacking, but it's still better for baby.

I do think that everyone should try to breastfeed. It's natural, it's beautiful, it's one of the best things that you can do for your baby, so why wouldn't you want to try? 

I think that some women don't try or continue breastfeeding because of a lack of support. I had cracked and bleeding nipples for about a week. Every time Elijah would latch on it would hurt so bad, it even brought tears to my eyes a few times. I had to brace myself and do breathing exercises. I knew it wasn't his latch, he had a perfect latch from the minute he started nursing, but my nipples were being used in a way they had never been used before, and they were being used about 12+ times per day for anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes at a time. Then, as soon as my nipples healed, it didn't hurt anymore, but then I got mastitis. I still breastfed through it all, I was determined and I never once thought that I wanted to stop, because I didn't. No matter how much it hurt or what happened, I was going to breastfeed my baby. Now breastfeeding is one of my favorite things to do. It's such a wonderful bonding experience. Elijah stares at me lovingly while he's nursing, and sometimes he even stops for a second to laugh. It melts my heart. I'm going to nurse as long as Elijah wants it, even if he wants it until he's 3. Not all women will experience breastfeeding the way that I did, and I can understand why some women just want to give up, but instead of give up women should get help. 

Breastfeeding Support

La Leche League  - Not only does their website have a forum and tons of resources, but they have meetings all over the place. You will find a ton of support at these meetings, and you will be able to ask any questions, get help with any problems you might be having, or just sit and talk with other mamas!

Dr. Jack Newman has a wonderful website. I used his website when I was researching surgery and breastfeeding, and also when I was determining whether I could continue breastfeeding if I was to do the interferon treatment for cancer (and you can breastfeed on interferon! I decided not to do the interferon treatment anyway)

Kellymom - I spent a good chunk of the first few weeks of Elijah's life on Kellymom. They have everything that you want or need to know about breastfeeding. Bookmark it!

Find an IBLCE certified lactation consultant. I had an entire list of lc's before I gave birth. It's a good thing to have on hand in case you need it.

Read, read, read! One of the best books I read was The Breastfeeding Book by Dr. Sears. Dr. Jack Newman also has a wide variety of books on breastfeeding that you can find here.

Be prepared. This is one thing I could have done better. I was prepared in the sense that I had gotten a Boppy at my baby shower, read books, and had a list of lactation consultants ready, but I did not have some necessary items! Lanolin (or any natural nipple cream). Seriously, you want this. I still use my tube of lanolin for everything from chapped lips and skin to lanolizing my wool diaper covers. I mentioned it before in my must haves for new moms post, but the Earth Mama Angel Baby Breastfeeding Support Kit will be your most prized possession in the first few weeks of your baby's life. You should also be prepared by understanding that breastfeeding is not always easy and that you might need help. If you are having trouble it doesn't mean you are a failure, not only is it new to you, but it's new to your baby, so you're both learning how to do something new at the same time! You can do it, and the hard weeks will end.

No artificial nipples for the first 6-8 weeks. Nipple confusion doesn't always happen, but it does happen, and having to overcome that obstacle is kind of like taking two steps back for every one step forward. If your baby loves to suck and you can't let him suck on your nipple anymore, try your finger. Elijah loved my finger! It was the best soothing device (besides myself)!

We had our last postpartum visit on Tuesday. I have to admit, I feel kind of sad about it! Going to the birth center was my life for the past 11 months and now I won't be going there anymore. Elijah weighs 12 pounds now! Mother's milk is doing that boy good.
The birth center costs $4500 to go to. We paid $2800 out of pocket. Turns out my insurance paid about $3300 of it so I emailed the insurance woman at the birth center and inquired about a refund. She emailed me back saying we would be getting a refund, they are just waiting for insurance to pay some other claims. I don't know what other claims they need to pay since the whole thing is supposed to cost $4500, plus the shot of nubain that I got. I guess we'll see. We need to use that money to pay other stupid medical bills.
I can't wait until I don't have to see doctors all the time. I had the dermatologist on Thursday at 7:30am, way too early. Who makes 7:30am appointments!? Apparently I do. Ugh. PET scan was on Friday. That went as well as it could go. I had my oncologist prescribe me some medication to take before the scan for anxiety. He prescribed me a xanax, one of the strong ones. I fell asleep during the scan and then came home and went to bed pretty much immediately and slept until this morning (well, Saturday morning since it's technically Sunday now). I think I am still feeling some after effects because I took a 4 hour long nap today. It's been nice catching up on sleep since it's pretty rare these days, but I missed breastfeeding Elijah. I was finally able to feed him today, and I cheated and did it a few hours early (after much research I concluded that I was no longer radioactive and 3 hours wasn't going to make all that much of a difference). I love breastfeeding. The bond is just so great between you and your baby, and the being able to give that to Elijah is just awesome. I have my follow visit with the oncologist on Thursday. We will be talking about treatment options and the results of my PET scan (which I really hope are good. I don't think I can handle any more bad news).
After that I have an appointment to get an IUD and then a general checkup with my new GCP on September 1st. You can just call me exhausted. Seriously. I have a 7 week old and I feel like I have been running a marathon.
I am finally getting adjusted to driving again. The freedom is great, and being able to do stuff like go grocery shopping while Jason is at work makes things a lot easier. It's pretty hard with an infant, but I can get it done.
Our washing machine just "broke" again, I say broke in quotations because you can get it to work if you watch it, but that totally sucks. I guess the water valve is broken. It fills up with water then doesn't stop and overflows. I looked up the parts to fix it and they are quite a bit more expensive than the other part we got, so it might just be better to buy a machine off craigslist. Money, money, money, money. It doesn't grow on trees, but it should. A washing machine is one of the most important things to have with an infant! Especially when you are using cloth diapers.
We have to pick up Elijah's birth certificate soon. For some reason I thought they were going to send it to us, but nope. Have to pick it up, and it costs $23. At least his social security card was sent to us and free! I still have to change my name on my ss card, and my license. I've only been married for almost a year now. At least my debit card and insurance card have my married name on them.
Ok, on to bed for me. Elijah will probably be waking up soon to eat anyway!

In honor of National Breastfeeding Week here are some photos of me nursing in public.

Oh, but I didn't stop there! Little Elijah got hungry while we were in American Apparel so I started feeding him while I was looking around. Of course no one there cared, they all work half naked anyway! Well, he was still hungry when we weres done looking so I walked down South Congress, nursing him. I'll tell ya, nursing while walking is hard work!

I just took a few minutes to change Elijah's diaper. After I was like "I'm topless, your topless, let's get som skin to skin contact in." Well guess what my reward was? Little baby barf curds all over my chest and in my hair. Yum!

Our washing machine decided that it was going to stop spinning yesterday. Cloth diapers + broken washer = not cool. Then later today Elijah's diaper leaked onto the bed, leaving us with 0 clean sheets, and all of my breast pads are dirty, which means every receiving blanket we had now needs to be washed because I have been shoving them down my shirt to be milk catchers. Plus all the other laundry that needs to be done. Ugh. I hope this washer problem gets resolved soon.

Oh, good morning.

I feel well rested yet extremely tired. How can that even be possible? Last night I finally managed the side nursing and was able to sleep through (for the most part) Elijah's night nursings. I put him on one boob and then fell back asleep and woke up when it was time to switch him to the other side a couple hours later. I bet he was like "awesome! I am just gonna suck until she pulls me off!"
Finally at around 6:30am he got a little fussy. He was acting hungry but spitting up and then getting even more fussy when I would try to nurse him again, so I finally swaddled him and rubbed his chest until he got quiet. He's finally asleep, but now I am awake. I feel like I should try to go back to sleep, but I am feeling a little hungry. I should probably take this opportunity to eat because I might not get one again today, for anything other than quick snacks anyway.
Babies are a lot of work. You know they are a lot of work before you have one, but you don't quite realize how much until you do have one. It doesn't matter if I am tired, hungry, or have to pee anymore. Baby comes first.
People tell you to nap when baby naps. Well, that's almost impossible sometimes. I am able to do it at times, but seriously, when your baby goes to sleep you finally have some time to yourself so if you aren't dead tired then you will probably take that time for you. I know that when Elijah is asleep I use the time to make myself something to eat. Once I even managed to jump in the shower quickly. Little stuff like that suddenly becomes a luxury when you have a newborn, so sleeping when babies sleep isn't entirely possible.

Now on the cancer note. I had my appointment with my oncologist on Wed. He basically told me that my treatment options were suck and suck even more. I have to have a PET scan, so we're waiting on insurance approval which takes a week or two. Once approval comes in I will have the scan (I won't be able to breastfeed for 8 hours because of radiation, but 8 hours isn't that bad and we can unfreeze some breastmilk and use the bottle, which we tried the other day to make sure he would take. He does and there's no nipple confusion, which is good). My treatment options depend on what the scan shows. If the scan comes back showing the cancer is somewhere else in my body then I could go to Dallas for a melanoma vaccine study as treatment. This sucks because I am not sure I want to do a vaccine clinical study, although it's already established it's still a study. Also, it's Dallas. It's not that close. It's not really an option if I need to go there all the time or for long stretches of time because I need o be near Elijah and I am pretty sure I would need someone there to take care of him will I was doing treatment stuff, and Jason has to work. Another also is that I can only do this study if the scan comes back with visible cancer which I clearly do not want.
There's another study I can do if there is no visible cancer, but it's in Virginia. That's really not an option.
So that leaves us with option #3, if there's no visible cancer then I will do the interferon drug treatment. This treament lasts a year. The first 4 weeks I would have to go in 4 days in a row per week to get a high dosage injection. After those 16 visits I would be able to inject myself at home every 3 days. The thing that sucks about this treatment is that the side effects are feeling like you have the flu, fever, and nausea. Great, so I will feel like shit for a year.
So no mater which way the cookie crumbles, this shit sucks.

P.S. How do I have a baby that is almost 4 weeks old? Time is moving too fast!

My Blackberry broke a few weeks ago, which means I am on the hunt for a new cell phone. I have been temporarily using my broken Sidekick 3 (broken but still works, unlike my Blackberry) but I am over it and want a new phone. I am probably in the minority when I say this, but I want a non smart phone. I want a phone that does not have internet or data plans, but has a keyboard for easy texting. I could get a smart phone and just not get a data plan, but I wouldn't be able to buy a new one from t-mobile because they require data plans with the purchase of a new phone now apparently.
I don't want a data plan because I have the internet at home, I don't need to use it on my phone, and it would save me $30 a month, which really adds up. At this point I also refuse to pay a cell phone company $80+ a month. All I need is 300 minutes with unlimited weekends and unlimited texting.
Anyway, it's proving impossible to find a phone that fits my requirements, so should I try maybe using a normal non smart phone and get used to T9 word again, or should I get a smart phone without a data plan? Any phone suggestions are greatly appreciated!

We got a Playstation 3 last night. Jason wanted one for his birthday. It came with this game called Little Big Planet which is really neat, and has some awesome graphics. It also came with the Blueray version of Wall-E. Now we're going to get another television at some point for the bedroom so he can play video games and I can still watch something without having to make him stop.

National Breastfeeding Week is August 1st - 7th. I plan on breastfeeding in public wherever I go!

I feel it all.

Wow, what a week. Let's start with Friday. Friday I had my surgery. We dropped Elijah off at my friend Nicole's house. A while back after hearing my story she offered to be my wet nurse for Elijah. She has a beautifully written blog entry about the entire experience on her blog at http://nicoolio.tumblr.com. After we dropped Elijah off we went to St. David's and checked in with admissions. We were then brought to a dreary day surgery room and I changed into the gown and got as comfortable as I possibly could. I had my vitals checked and an IV started and finally they took me down to nuclear medicine at around 10:30am. I spent a long time in the nuclear medicine room, we hit a few road blocks in there. Originally they were going to inject my chest with the radioactive dye and then I was going to go through this scary looking machine and have photos taken so they could find out which lymph nodes the dye went to. Well, I am breastfeeding, therefore leaking breastmilk, and the radioactive dye gets into breastmilk, so I was leaking radioactive breastmilk. This wasn't harmful to me, but it would really mess up the photos and confuse my surgeon when he was trying to figure out which lymph nodes he was going for. So instead of taking the pictures everyone decided my surgeon would just go in with this tiny camera during surgery to find which nodes they went to. Because I was leaking radioactive breastmilk we had to figure out a way to contain it so it wouldn't contaminate the operating room, so we taped breast pads to my breasts and a nurse wrote do not remove on them. I got the dye injected in 4 areas right around the site of the melanoma, it burned a whole bunch, then I was sent back to my room.

Once I got back to the room the nurse came in and hooked my IV back up and asked if I wanted to be pre-sedated. UH, YES PLEASE. Finally the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me about the procedure and gave me a sedative. It must have made me pretty damn out of it because when we got to the operating room I asked if it was the OR and then the next thing I knew I was waking up in the recovery room. I had a big bandage covering my chest and a drainage tube attached to me (which was the most annoying thing ever, seriously. It made everything from nursing to peeing to showering difficult). I spent a bit in recovery and then I was finally released and able to go home.

Recovery hasn't been terrible. My chest is really sore, I was prescribed hydrocodone, I am sure it's doing something and it would hurt a lot more if I wasn't taking it, but I feel like it's not doing enough. Nursing with the drainage tube in was a bit of a challenge, and a little painful when Elijah's little hands would grab it.

Here is a before and after photo:




So there's that. Then there's this...

Today I went to get the drainage tube removed. After my surgeon removed it he got the pathology report from my lymph node biopsy. The lymph node in my armpit came back clear of cancer, but the lymph node that was near my collar bone came back with a small amount of cancer in it. 0.7mm. So it's very small, but it was there. If we had waited 6 months it would have been 1 or 2cm and I probably would have had to have another surgery. So, I don't need to have anymore surgery, but I do need to have PET scans, which is a radioactive body scan to look and see if there is cancer anywhere else in my body. He was also saying that I might have to do some kind of drug treatment. He mentioned Interferon. We won't know exactly what treatments I will have to do until we see the oncologist.

Elijah is my rock. He makes me stronger than I might normally be because I need to be there for him! I think I am doing a pretty good job of dealing with everything. I have lost it a few times during this whole ordeal, but nothing major. I have been trying to stay positive about it all, but I still get discouraged sometimes. I still cry and worry and am scared, but I know that in the end I will pull through, it's just going to be a huge pain in the ass, and it's going to make me a little sad sometimes.

I can't wait until my chest wound heals so I can start wearing my moby wrap and wearing my little Elijah. My chest is his favorite spot to lay. I wish him laying there would make me all better.

One day everything will be back to normal.