Bad weekend

These are the antibiotics I finally managed to get. But i am starting at the end, so rewind a few day. Friday night I started to get abdominal pain, it was not like the post birth pain, it was not severe at this point but it was more pain than i had been having over the past few days, i had up to that point been feeling really well. Saturday came and it became increasingly difficult to move and my abdomen really hurt. It felt like bad menstrual cramp only 100x worse, but i did not have a fever or any other symptoms that would indicate an infection so i just kept hoping it would go away. Gavin kept saying you need to phone someone and i kept saying no i am okay, lets just wait and see. Murphy's law - or Sally stubborn law, 10pm the pain is unbearable and i decide we do need to call someone, so we phone the Hospital postnatal ward which is the out of hours contact number we have, the midwife there says that i must come in.

Dilemma: what to do with Rachel, they say we can't bring her with us, so I phone my sister. She was in a movie but her and Mike left half way because of me and rushed home, Gavin drover to London to collect them and they stayed at the house with Rachel who gratefully slept through the whole thing.

We get to the hospital at about midnight, get accessed by the nurse and have to wait for a Dr, we waited a LONG time. Finally a young ( fortunately female) Dr comes to see us. She feels my tummy but does not say to tell her if it hurts, so i think she is just feeling if my uterus is contracted etc and i bite my tongue through the pain. Then she says well there is obviously little abdominal discomfort! I say ' no actually that was really sore'. She say she will do a swab - fun. And then says she thinks it is just muscular pain and prescribes codeine.

WHAT???? How do you get muscular pain from doing nothing at home 8 days after having had a baby! AND codeine???????? lovely cover up the symptoms with a very constipating medication. Thank goodness i know that as a nurse but she does not mention once that it is constipating or that i should take a laxative with it. Well that was if i had taken it at all, which i did not. I knew it was not muscular and was not going to take something that masked the symptoms AND constipated me until i knew what the heck was potting.

She said the results from the swab would be back by Tuesday but she doubt that it is anything as i have no fever. The drive home was excruciating. I was crying out in pain - i felt worse than i had in labour. After a bad night, in which feeding and looking after Caleb was difficult, I phoned Dad and chatted to him about what to do. He said that with such sever abdominal tenderness even without a fever it was clearly an infection and that I should go back and ask to be treated for an infection. I knew he was right but so dreaded going back to the hospital and not being taken seriously again.

Gavin was about to drag me kicking and screaming to the hospital when i thought maybe i should contact the community midwives team and see if i could get some advice from them. I spoke to such a lovely midwife who agreed with Dad and said that even with no fever it sounded like an infection and to come to their weekend drop in clinic and she would organise some antibiotics from the on call GPs.

What a relief not to have to go back to the hospital and the added bonus was that the clinic was in St Albans and not Watford where the hospital was. The midwife took one look at me hobbling down the passage and went off and get the prescription for the antibiotics from the GP's. By this stage i was starting to feel a little nauseous and not that great.

We got the antibiotic on the way home, Jenni and Mike had been wonderful and not only had they looked after Rachel that night but they had stayed over and looked after her while we went to the clinic - again I am so lucky to have Jenni so close by.

Well the fever they wanted hit, 39C shivering and shacking and all. I spend the rest of Sunday and most of Monday in bed. If i took regular Paracetamol and I did not shiver all the time and by Monday night i could feel the antibiotics had started to do their thing.

Today i feel like a different person.