What a sorry excuse for a blogger I am. It's been hard to maintain this blog. I feel as though I give all my time and energy to work whenever I'm not with the baby, and I try to give the baby my complete attention when I'm with her. I always have work to do at home when she's napping or sleeping as well. Working a full-time job at around 55-60 hours per week and being a full-time mommy when I'm not working just doesn't leave much time for doing anything else. I'm sure there are a lot of moms who can relate to this. I think I'm lucky I manage to keep enough clean laundry to clothe myself. I'd like our house to be cleaner too, but I'm not even going to go there. I'd like to work in time for myself as well, especially for exercise, since regularly working out was such a big part of my life pre-baby, but this is still on the to-do list.
I'm convinced it will become easier when I'm no longer breastfeeding and pumping all the time. I figured out that I spend approximately 3-3.5 hours every day feeding and pumping. Sometimes I think about what I could be doing with all that extra time and it makes me feel kind of resentful, but that's quickly overridden by the many reasons I keep doing this. Nobody told me how challenging it was going to be. I don't know what I thought before. Like "Oh, I'll just pump a few times a day for like 5 minutes?" I was kind of clueless, to be honest. Having gone to medical school and even done a lactation rotation for 4 weeks as an elective, you'd think I would have at least laid eyes on a breast pump before I got pregnant, but I hadn't. The focus was on breastfeeding itself, not pumping, since I was seeing patients in the hospital before they went home with their babies. So yeah, I just didn't know what it would entail. For someone who was that clueless, though, I managed to figure things out pretty well. We are still going strong. Corinne breastfeeds whenever I'm home and then takes expressed milk in a bottle when I'm not. I continue to overproduce on a daily basis, and we filled a large standing freezer (that we purchased solely for this purpose) and our regular freezer, with frozen milk. It's probably about 3 months worth, if I had to estimate. Meaning it would be enough for 3 months if I totally stopped producing for some reason. I had to start defrosting and dumping some out every day because we just ran out of space, so I started replacing the oldest milk with the new stuff I'm freezing. It sort of makes me sad to dump it out, but mostly it makes me glad that we have so much extra that I really don't have to worry about not having enough to last at least until her 1st birthday.
I can see now why women who breastfeed are so proud of it. It is a really big accomplishment because it's challenging in so many ways and requires a lot of dedication, likely more when pumping after a return to work is involved. I do feel proud to be able to give my daughter what is supposedly best for her body, and I also really enjoy the connection it allows us to have. I can probably wax poetic on the joys and benefits of breastfeeding all day. Weird how you never imagine yourself doing certain things in life, but things like this can come to be so fundamental and important to you down the line.
Anyway, things on the work front are chugging along. What a disappointment my job is, really. Maybe I've said this before, but being a parent has changed my perspective on a lot of things. One of them is healthcare. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that I spent many months being a patient because I was pregnant, and then post-partum, and whatnot. Having experienced more on the other side, maybe I'm just more aware of what a sad state healthcare is in. I also work in the outpatient (clinic) setting now, having transitioned from inpatient, and it makes me more acutely aware of the limitations of my particular specialty, both in terms of treatment options and in terms of insurance and providers/access to care. I almost wish it weren't too late to run screaming in the other direction. I often feel helpless as I'm not able to do things for my patients that I might otherwise if I could have longer clinic visits or prescribe whatever treatment I thought was best without having to worry about their ability to come back for follow up appointments or the cost of medications. Always limited by resources and money. This is not how I envisioned helping people. Of course, it's just reality. But it's a sad reality.
So, that's the news I guess. By the way, my little experiment of writing about "topics" instead of my personal life is so over. It's just not my style, and I find it sort of boring. At least this feels real and not like I'm writing a term paper or something.
On that note, I'm off to bed. I'm hoping the next baby wake-up is after 5 AM...
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