oh my gosh, where was i?

I’ve been meaning to write an update post for weeks.. I just never took the time to go back and look at previous posts to find out where I left off.. Mom brain, it’s real.

If you follow me on IG, then you probably already know most of this. I’m WAY better about posting things on IG than I am on here. It takes way less time to snap a pic, and write a quick caption. I can do that while I’m nursing, which takes up a whole lot of my time these days. (follow me here)

When I left off last we had take Paisley to two appointments with the chiropractor. We took her to the chiropractor because she had a really tight jaw. She was unable to open her mouth much more than the size of a dime, which made breastfeeding a real challenge. We finished up her treatment at the 3rd visit. Dr. Smith felt she had made some great progress and that we could come back as needed, but he didn’t see any need to continue treating her.

Since her final adjustment our breastfeeding relationship has gotten substantially better. We did have a gross case of thrush, which required us to both be treated… but once that cleared up, we have been pain free. It is seriously crazy to me that we are breastfeeding without pain. Sometimes when I’m nursing I think, “wow, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.” It really is so bizarre. We went through so much to be pain free, and while it was a really difficult & trying 11 weeks, I am so so glad that we stuck it out. (I posted about my struggle with breastfeeding here and here)

is it weird to be non-related baby pictures? yes? to bad.

I think I wrote in the last post that my leg is 100% back to normal. so, yay for that! I never did get the results of the nerve conduction study, and at this point, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t have any residual numbness, and my range of motion is perfect.

What else, what else??

Oh. I never posted about this on the blog, but I have posted about it on IG.. and if you get squeemish about medical stuff, or you think it’s weird that I’m posting about it.. then, you’ll probably want to exit now, because we are about to get REALLLLLLL personal up in here.. and I mean REAL personal..

exit now.

So. About a million years ago (or approximately 12 weeks) I thought I had hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are SUPER common after child birth, and then, add in the fact that I pushed for 2.5 hours.. I was pretty much destined to get hemorrhoids, right? I thought so.

If you’ve never had hemorrhoids, lucky you – From what I’ve read, they can be very painful – which is why I thought I had one (or 100). I tried every trick in the book to get rid of the ‘rrhoid.. After about 8 weeks of excruciating pain (and blood) every time I had a bowel movement (LOL, can we just say after I took a poop? bowel movement is just…. so work like. I say bowel movement a lot at work).. I went to see a colo-rectal surgeon.

There are fewer things in life more embarrassing than going to see a colo-rectal surgeon. When the nurse took my vitals, my heart rate was through the roof. I had so much anxiety going into this appointment. I know what the treatments are for the ‘rrhoids and it’s not pleasant.

After an exam (where I almost died of embarrassment) the good Dr. proclaimed that I in fact do NOT have hemorrhoids. I have an anal fissure, which I also call a butt cut. Laugh all you want, but that shiz is NO JOKE. It’s a cut, in your butt… just imagine having to poop with an open cut in your butt.

Per the good Dr. the butt cut can heal with the application of some butt cream. It will take 8-12 weeks to heal, but I should have some relief in 1 week. Sweet hallelujer! relief!

Only… I didn’t. Same pain, day after day. I followed up last week… since I have had zero improvement (at that point) the Dr. wants to schedule surgery, more specifically a sphincterotomy. (don’t google that, you’ll be scared. I’m scared).

Here’s what I should have been doing, but wasn’t – taking stool softeners. I increased the amount of fiber I was taking, but wasn’t taking a stool softener with any regularity. So, now, I am taking the stool softener like it’s my job. I do no, I repeat, I DO NOT, want to have surgery. I am absolutely terrified of surgery.

The point of the stool softeners is to soften up the stool enough so that the anus doesn’t have to stretch out, thus causing the butt cut to rip open with every bowel movement.

I told you that you should have exited this post a long time ago. it’s all your fault if you’re like WTH, Jena, WTH.

Surgery is scheduled, but I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to cancel it. I have to give the Dr. 3 days notice to avoid being charged – I have approximately 9 days to get the butt cut healed up.

happy to be running

 

I’ll try to keep it short

I’m so far behind in blog land, that I’m not even sure where to begin.

I currently have 235 unread blog posts in bloglovin…. who has time for that? I read as I have time, I’m obviously never going to catch up on all that reading. So, if I usually comment & you haven’t seen anything from me.. well, that’s why. I have short spurts of time to read; usually when I’m nursing Paisley (reading from my phone) or when I’m eating breakfast; I’m lucky if I get through an entire meal w/o her fussing. Please excuse my absence. Babies are way more work than I could have ever anticipated..

So, what’s new around here?

Well, I’m still breastfeeding, and it’s still {somewhat painful}. I haven’t done an update on that {or anything} in quite a while. You’d be here all day if I tried to tell you everything that has been happening in our lives, in one post.

So I’ll try to keep it brief:
Breastfeeding

Lip tie was revised in January; still lots of nipple pain.
Lactation consultant suggested cranio-sacral therapy.
We went one time… Not for us. It’s alternative medicine, and it’s just one of these things that you either believe in, or you don’t. I don’t believe in it enough to pay $55/hr.
We {as in Paisley} are now seeing a chiropractor that treats infants/kids. I have done a lot of reading, and I have found several sources that say chiropractic’s can help many breastfeeding issues. So we are driving 2hrs to a chiropractor that treated one of our BFF’s babies. Of course there are chiropractors in our area, but we can’t even find a good eye Dr. – I’m not about to just google chiropractors and hope for the best. I needed someone that we trusted… because having a baby adjusted is scary crap.
I cried during her first adjustment
and closed my eyes the 2nd time.
The chiro pointed out that she really favors her left side.
This was something I hadn’t really noticed… until he pointed it out; and man, once he pointed it out, it is SO OBVIOUS.
She looks left most often, kicks her left leg more, uses her left arm more, and I have a difficult time latching her on my left breast, because this forces her to have to look right. The Chiro said there is definitely something going on that he believes he can fix.
I will say that I have seen some improvement in her since her 2nd adjustment. She looks around a lot more, and just seems more active over all. She does still sleep a lot, but when she is awake, she is a lot more active.
We also have had quite a few less painful breastfeeding session. Sometimes I wonder if the nerves in my nipples have just completely died, because we have some sessions that are totally painless, and that is abnormal for us. It’s bizarre, and I’m hopeful that this step of taking her to the chiropractor will be successful, because it’s the last thing I’m willing to do.

MY LEG

It’s getting better. I have complete range of motion in my right foot, so that’s progress. There is still a dead feeling on the side of my calf, and I’m not sure that will ever go away.

I had a nerve conduction study done at the beginning of February, but when I went to my appointment to get the results, I left before seeing the Dr. The staff were completely rude, and just awful, and I refuse to tolerate that – so I left. I haven’t decided if I’m going to try and see the Dr. in one of his other offices, or just request my records and have the neurosurgeon I work for look at them.

I have attempted running a few times, my leg did fine.. my lungs on the other hand.. way out of shape. Whew. It’s going to take a while.

Right now my goal is to run a Mother’s Day 5k, obviously that is in May, so I have a little while to build up my endurance again. I’m happy to be running again, but it is frustrating to not know if I’ll be able to run long distances again.

For now I’m just doing what I can, when I can, and that will have to be enough.

Boob talk: an update on our breastfeeding situation

In case you missed it, and want to read about it, I recently wrote about our struggles with breastfeeding.

I foolishly thought that breastfeeding would be easy.

I am an idiot.

I finally found a lactation consultant that would come to my house and help me figure out why we were having such a difficult {painful} time with breastfeeding.

I was really really nervous about the meeting. I was nervous to have a stranger in my home, nervous for a stranger to be poking at my baby, nervous that she would tell me there is nothing wrong and that BF is just going to hurt; or that I’m doing it all wrong and that I’m an idiot.

I was just really nervous about meeting with the LC.

NONE of those things happened. Amy was the nicest person ever – I was totally comfortable and she completely put all my fears to rest. She immediately started asking questions about my delivery, when my milk came in, and did Paisley start BF right away. After she got done asking questions it was time for her to examine Paisley’s mouth.

She put on gloves and pried Paisley’s mouth open – in case you’ve never tried to open a newborns mouth..it’s not an easy task. She examined her lips, tongue, and the roof of her mouth. Almost immediately she found, what she thought, was the root of our problems. {and if you follow me on instagram, you’ve seen a million posts on this by now} but Paisley is lip-tied. (or was, because, SPOILER ALERT: we had it revised).

Run your tongue along your top gum, between your upper lip and teeth. Feel that piece of tissues that connects your lip to your gums? That is called the frenulum. In a normal person it’s a small piece of tissue that doesn’t go very far down your gums.

Paisley has a class IV lip tie, which means it goes all the way down to edge of her gums, and underneath into her hard palate. The chance that she would end up with a gap between her front teeth was very large. Lip ties can also lead to tooth decay, speech problems, gap between front teeth, and several other issues. There was also the chance that the lip-tie could rip during rough play when Paisley gets older…

not the best picture, but she was not amused to have us pulling at her lip.

Amy told us we had two options: A. We could leave it as it is, which would most likely lead to other problems the older Paisley got, or B. we could have it revised, which would probably fix the breast feeding problems and would also help us to avoid some of the problems that would/could occur later in her life.

Lip-ties are genetic; after we met w/ Amy, I was telling my sister how the appointment went and she mentioned that my niece also has a lip-tie. Her dentist pointed it out to my sister this past summer when he recommended she get braces to fix the gap between her teeth.

She gave us the name of a pediatric dentist in Tampa and recommended that we do our own research to decide whether or not we wanted to get the lip-tie revised.

I felt so much relief when Amy told us that the lip-tie would cause all the problems that we had been having. That sounds terrible, but we had struggled so much with breastfeeding, and I wanted to quit so many times – I had talked to a lot of people, and read a lot of articles, blog posts, whatever and they all made me feel like I was just doing something terribly wrong. I felt relief that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.. I was upset that there was something “wrong” with my baby.

One thing that I don’t quite understand, is why Pediatricians don’t check for this. If breastfeeding is what’s best for baby, why wouldn’t the baby be checked for any possible things that could cause breastfeeding complications?

When I asked Amy why our pediatrician, or anyone in the hospital didn’t check for this defect – She responded that most Physicians are not trained in breast feeding. They get a short breastfeeding class, much like we could have attended had I chosen to – They aren’t trained in any great depth about it. She also stated that ENTs (Ear, Nose & Throat) Physicians are really the only Physicians that are trained at any length about breast feeding and the anatomical defects that could affect it – but you probably wouldn’t think to go to an ENT when you are having difficulties breastfeeding. I know I wouldn’t.

Another thing that I found interesting was the overall lack of knowledge on lip-ties. I googled my heart out in regards to breast feeding, and I never came across any information regarding lip-ties. Oh, sure, if I google lip-ties, there is some information there, but it’s no where to be found if you’re not looking specifically for it.

I did some of my own research, but it did not take much to convince me that we should have the lip-tie revised.

Breastfeeding is really important to me, so if this would help our relationship, and also save her some agony down the road, then why wouldn’t we have it revised?

Based on my own research there were a few ways that the lip-tie can be revised. It can be cut, which requires general anesthesia and stitches, or it can be revised with a laser; which is a super short procedures, requires no anesthesia, no bleeding, and almost no chance of infection.

The pediatric dentist that was recommended does the laser procedure, but if we had decided to go the other route, we could have seen an ENT. Obviously I don’t want to put my kid through more trauma than necessary so we chose the laser revision.

We met with Dr. Sierra, who was so so nice, and made me feel completely comfortable about the whole thing. He examined Paisley and agreed that she would definitely benefit from having her lip-tie revised. He also said that she had a slight tongue tie, but that it was really pliable and he didn’t see any need to revise it.

The procedure it self is very short; Dr. Sierra was able to examine her & do the procedure in the same day; he had already seen pictures of her lip-tie, and the exam was pretty much just a confirmation that, “yes, she does need it revised.”

Chris stayed in the room while they did the procedure; I had planned on staying, but I wimped out and ended up waiting in the waiting room. I would say it was probably less than 5 minutes from the time I left the waiting room until the time they came and got me. Right after the procedure they put us in a private little room so we could nurse right away. I was really surprised at how well she handled the procedure; She really wasn’t even crying when they handed her to me.

Dr. Sierra warned us that Paisley’s lip would be sore for a few days and that she might not want to eat. I am happy to say that she had handled it like a champion. She never acts like her lip is bothering her, she does get a little bit fussy after we stretch it out, but I think that is to be expected.

Yes, we have to stretch her lip. I feel so bad. The stretch is basically what you see in the picture to the left. We pull her lip up and then rub the bottom side of her lip & her gum. The purpose of that is to keep the scar tissues from building up; which would essentially defeat the purpose of the revision.

Paisley must have her Daddy’s pain tolerance level; she never acted like her lip was even bothering her. The Dr. warned us that she might have a decrease in feedings because she would be sore.. Nope. She handled the whole thing like a champion. Thank goodness, I was really worried we were headed for some rough days.

— I can’t remember what day I started writing this post, but I’m sure it’s been at least a week. I’m going to stop here, because I have even more updates to write about, but this is ridiculously long as it is.

Next update will be about my foot…ugh.