Playing Dollies Never Hurt Like This**

It hasn't been the best week for me. I really thought I had navigated safely through the third baby postpartum stage with a minimum of tears and drama... and then I woke up on Thursday morning and nothing was right. I was slightly feverish, completely tearful... and those "blocked ducts" I had been complaining about were even worse. It also happened to be the day that George was supposed to go back to work. I rang my community midwife to see if she could pay me a visit. After blubbering on the phone to her for several minutes about my milk ducts which I thought had been painfully blocked for over a week, she suggested that I go over to Llandough Hospital to the breast clinic. I agreed to this, then hung up the phone and cried for an hour. (Meanwhile George had gone to register Lili's birth at the Cardiff registrar's office. There was a also a decorator downstairs painting the walls while all of our downstairs furniture sat, piled in disarray in the dining room.)

I finally called Angela (the midwife) back again to tell her that I couldn't face going out to some unfamiliar hospital. She had already assumed as much and had arranged for a breastfeeding advisor to come and pay me a visit at home in the afternoon. While George was off collecting the children from school, Amanda, my breastfeeding-guru/ savior arrived. I answered the door in tears and in my underwear. She was completely unfazed and followed me upstairs to my bedroom where I had spent most of the day wallowing. I explained about the blocked ducts and all of the horrible abuses I had heaped upon my poor left breast to try and unblock them. "Right, shall I just have a look then?" she asked. (Little did I know Amanda would be the first of about 75 people to just 'have a look' at my boobs.)

Oh my word, when she saw what I had been calling 'blocked ducts,' I thought Amanda was going to cry. She was sure they were not blocked ducts. It had even gone far beyond mastitis, a miserable condition I have had in the past. Amanda was 99% sure that I had a breast abscess and that I needed to immediately go back to the hospital to have it all sorted. Of course, nothing can be that simple. I had to first get an emergency appointment with my GP, so that she could confirm the diagnosis and ring the hospital on my behalf. All of this was done. Dr. Pryce looked at my boobs, asked me why I hadn't come in days before, then told me that the worst case scenario was that I'd have to have breast surgery. Great.

Now all five of us headed back over to Royal Glamorgan Hospital. We had been told to enter by the A&E entrance. (That's Accident and Emergency for those of you who are unfamiliar with the NHS.) So I took my very unwell self, my newborn and the rest of my family into the A&E, which shared an entrance with the Swine Flu clinic. Nice. The maternity unit (on the complete opposite side of the hospital complex) was expecting me, and I was told to wait in the waiting area (full of sick-looking people who were most likely carrying horrible communicable illnesses). No thanks. I asked if I could just go back to the car and drive over to maternity, but apparently the porter had already been called to transport me via wheelchair. I steered clear of sick bay waiting area, and an age later a porter arrived without a chair. He had to go and find one. Super. Meanwhile all of the sickies were eyeing up my baby and breathing in her direction.

Finally I ended up back on old familiar Ward 11. I really thought I was done with that post-c-section place. It was time to hurry up and wait. Meanwhile an extremely unhelpful midwife visited periodically to tell me that she didn't know why I had been sent to the hospital and ask why my GP didn't just sort me out. She'd also pop in occasionally to tell is it was going to be a while before the doctor would see us. Actually, all of the midwives were constantly popping in on us as we seemed to have been stowed away in a treatment room/ storage closet. So every few minutes, some member of staff would barge in, then apologise, and go rummaging through one of the cupboards for a wound dressing or something or other.

George and the kids eventually took a field trip to McDonald's while Lili and I continued to wait for the elusive doctor. Finally she made her appearance. She looked to be about 16 years old and seemed very concerned upon examining me. "Right, let me just go and confer with my senior colleague." she said. Several minutes later, her senior colleague, who looked like one of the Jonas Brothers, came in and had a look and a feel. Dr. Jonas really wished I had been in earlier because there was nothing he could do for me until the morning. My situation required an ultrasound for further diagnosis. I was happy he allowed me to go home and return in the morning. He assured me that my breast wouldn't explode overnight, although it felt like it might.

I spent the night at home (thankfully) caring for Lili and alternating between sweats and chills. After the kids were in school, we headed back to the hospital where we basically repeated the previous evening's scenario. Luckily, we did bypass the A&E this time and headed directly to Ward 11.

After showing my breasts to nearly everyone on the ward and becoming so familiar with the storage cupboards in the (same) treatment room that we could gather supplies for the midwives ourselves, I was finally taken down to ultrasound. At this point I was a nervous wreck because I knew that if the ultrasound showed infected fluid in my breast, it would have to be drawn out with a large needle. Wouldn't you know it, there WAS fluid. It was definitely a very infected abscess. The very nice doctor told me that anesthesia would not be helpful, and that we just had to suck it up (so to speak) and do it. I had a full-on panic attack for a minute and somehow got myself together. There is no need to write about what happened next. It was horrifying for me. When it was over, I sat and trembled for several minutes. But it was one of those things that had to be done. I have been taking heavy-duty antibiotics ever since and will be back at the hospital tomorrow. I really hope that more fluid doesn't have to be drained, but I won't be surprised if it does. This will give me another opportunity to go into the 'Jesus Jell-O,' because my brain cannot stay in that room while that is happening. I have been running off to find Jesus a lot lately, and climbing into His Jell-O mold is a good thing to do when this world feels completely overwhelming.

So please keep me in your prayers. All will be fine in the end, but the journey has been somewhat harrowing. Hopefully the next time I write, I will be much bouncier and much less drained.

By the way, please scroll down to the very bottom of the page to view a very cool video that always seems to make Lili stop crying. (Thanks again to Molly Cook for that.)

** My title quote was shamelessly pirated from an email conversation I recently had with my friend Molly, mother of five, who knows firsthand how true it is.