Mastitis - I Haz It

I woke up on Monday morning at 4:30 am and my right breast was engorged and really super duper painful. After much groaning and rolling over, I decided that I needed to get up and pump. I was surprised that I needed to do this since Ian has been sleeping through the night for the last month and a half and I haven't had a problem. I think things got screwy because last week was my first week back at work and so I was pumping a lot more than breastfeeding. Anyway, I pumped and my boob felt mildly better but still hurt. I tried to go back to bed but I was just sort of feeling miserable and cold. I got through the day at work, but my boob still hurt when I came home last night. I showed it to my husband and he noticed that it was pretty red on the underside. Ruh roh. Those are some good signs of mastitis (or so says Dr. Google). I debated for a long time whether or not my symptoms were bad enough to go to the doctor. I had a lot of breast tenderness and the redness alarmed me. But I had no fever or aches or other flu-like symptoms. But, hey, I LOVE medical care (and I'll admit that I'm a hypochondriac that was slightly worried that my symptoms meant some strange form of breast cancer) and so I decided to see my midwife today. She said it was really good that I came in. She wasn't absolutely sure it was mastitis but she said that giving me a course of antibiotics was probably 80% the right thing to do and 20% overkill. Within hours of taking the first antibiotic pill, I felt better. The pain and redness were almost gone. And the body aches that I had (which I had attributed to weekend painting) were also almost gone. To me, this is proof that I did, in fact, have mastitis. I know that antibiotics can work that quickly because when I have UTIs, I always feel better within hours of taking the antibiotic. So now I'm REALLY happy that I went for medical care because apparently this could have gotten a lot worse really fast.

My only bitch...this is a TEN-day course of antibiotics! And they have to be taken FOUR times a day! And they have to be taken on an empty stomach - so 1 hour before eating or 2-3 hours after eating. Oh well.