Take two aspirin...

...and freak out until the morning. From the pregnancy to the delivery to the baby, everything has been a textbook case with Ella. That is until I pulled the ultimate bonehead move =)

Adam went to a Sharks game so I was on my own for bedtime. We just started Ella's bedtime routine and she was sleeping well so I didn't want to jinx anything by skipping the bath. It was pretty easy to take care of both baths at the same time, Ruby got dressed by herself while I got Ella dressed and then I read to Ruby while Ella ate. I was downstairs at a reasonable hour and felt pretty good about myself. Adam checked in and I was going to spend some time alone with the TV before going to bed. I'd had a little headache all day. Once it was quiet, I noticed it more so I went upstairs and took two aspirin. The second I got back downstairs, I realized that was probably not a good choice while breastfeeding. I quickly checked with Dr. Google and confirmed it was definitely not a good choice. Crap.

All the websites I could find said not to take aspirin but none said what to do if I already took it. I put a call out to the advice nurse to see what they recommended. A nurse called me back and started by telling me I shouldn't take aspirin. Yep, got it. She said she'd never had the question before so she needed to look it up. She couldn't find much information so she sent me to a website and recommended I call poison control. Crap again.

I went to the website. It said wait 1-2 hours before feeding Ella. I called poison control. She started by telling me I shouldn't take aspirin. Yep, still got it. She said she'd never had the question before so she had to look it up. After a few minutes, she said wait 63 hours before feeding Ella. 1-2 hours and 63 hours is quite a difference. I checked in with Dr. Google again. Apparently there is something Reye's Syndrome connected with aspirin and children. There is not any specific research on aspirin and breastfeeding but Reye's Syndrome is bad enough that they recommend not taking aspirin. At that point I was getting pretty bummed. Going 63 hours without feeding Ella meant pumping, pumping and more pumping and I was going back to work the next day. It would've actually meant calling out sick because I literally could not pump around the clock while at school for two days. Crap again and again.

Around the same time, Adam walked in the door which meant I immediately burst into tears explaining the situation to him. We decided that the risk was pretty low but the thought of hurting Ella was just too scary. The plan was to give her bottles for the night to get through the 1-2 hour mark and go from there.

In the morning, I told my mom what happened. She suggested calling a lactation consultant. Actually, she's so great, she called the lactation consultant for me. Guess what? She'd never had the question before so she needed to look it up. She said she thought it was fine to feed Ella again but thought I should speak to a pediatrician since she's not an doctor. She actually said the pediatrician would probably say to call her so I should tell the pediatrician she didn't have an answer. Crazy, right?

I put a call to the advice nurse again. They connected me to the on call pediatrician who said she'd never had the question before. She had to do some research and called poison control back to figure out why they recommended waiting so long. Eventually she found there was one case where a breastfed baby got sick but the baby made a full recovery. She also said that poison control really didn't know so they just calculated when the aspirin would be completely out of my system. She felt it would be fine to feed Ella but would not officially give her stamp of approval. That was enough for us. After 12 hours, two calls to the advice nurse, two calls to poison control, one call to a lactation consultant and one call to a pediatrician...no one officially knew what to do but everyone felt it was "probably okay" so I finally fed one very happy little baby. Phew.

Note to self, next time you're alone and have a headache, drink a bottle of wine and pass out =)