One side effect of feeding The Chubbs yogurt is that he’s not nearly as hungry as he once was. I am not even being remotely exaggeratory (that’s totally not a word, and if it is, I misspelled it) when I say that up until last week Alex nursed AT LEAST once every hour of the day. No jokes here.

Sunday (or maybe Saturday, it’s been a loooooonnnggg six months), I noticed that I was getting a red raised bumpy thing (yes, I’m technical) on my left breasticle. Figuring that it was absolutely nothing, I just let it be. Then, yesterday I noticed some serous fluid had collected underneath the skin and the realization smacked me in the face! I was probably experiencing a blocked duct, and OH WAIT I was sick too, and if there is one phrase I can remember about mastits, it’s this “if you’re breastfeeding and you feel like you have the flu, you have mastitis” (see Mom, my medical education WAS for something!).

Begrudgingly, I placed a call to my doctor’s office and left a message for the nurse. Now, I have a previous longstanding grudge against the nurses that work in the office, because, well, most of them are complete pinheads. When I was first pregnant with Alex, barfing my brains out, and on a leave of absence from work from aforementioned uncontrollable barfing, I called them at the request of my HR department to see if the MD would sign for a medical leave. The nurse told me that they “didn’t do that sort of thing” and that I should “eat an apple” to help with my nausea.

Riiiiiiiiggggggggghhhhhhhhhtttt. I’ll get right on that apple eatin’, lady.

(as a complete aside, one of the things that I hate to do most is to ask for help, especially from a medical professional. When I do, it’s under total duress and I am all weird and squirmy inside while doing so. So to be told to “eat an apple” was a huge slap in the face to me. Almost as bad as when I had delivered Ben, sustained a 4th degree and was given Tylenol 3 to take home. Obviously, at 3 am, if I am paging the on-call doctor for something to actually take the pain away, “taking a bath” isn’t going to cut it. So fuck you.)

ahem.

I fully expected a return call like,

Me: “I have a problem with my breast.”

RN: “I like potatoes.”

Me: “That’s nice. But I have a problem with my left breast and I am currently breastfeeding.”

RN: “Poooottttaaaatttttoooeeess are good. I love them.”

Me: “Okay, yeah, so about my breast. It might be mastitis, but I guess it could be a pimple.”

RN: “Baked potatoes are good for you.”

Me: “Okay, I gotta go.”

Instead, I got a call back from a competent nurse, who was alarmed by my symptoms, far more so than I was. She insisted that I come in the following morning (today), called in a script for some hardcore antibiotics and put me on an NSAID’s regime.

All to have the PA tell me that I have a spider bite. And a sinus infection.