Warning! Warning! This post contains TMI.

If you don’t want to learn EVEN more about thrush and what it can drive a Mama to do, stop reading now. Click your back button or the next post on your RSS reader NOW.

(On the other hand, you will also learn that being willing to go whereever you have to go definitely produces results.)

On Thursday of last week, I noticed that some of my thrush symptoms were back, but I forgot to call my doctor.

Friday afternoon, I remembered, and called, asking that they call in another prescription for me. I was given the “prescription message line” which indicated that they would call it in within 24 hours.

I was glad I did, because when he got home from daycare on Friday, the yeasty beasties had clearly attacked Noah and were making him miserable.

Saturday evening, I went to the great big chain drugstore where I’ve been going since we moved here, which is currently being sued for race discrimination. Maybe what happens next is karmic payback for my going there even though I knew about the lawsuit.

“It’s not here,” said the pharmacist. “They didn’t call it in.”

Now you may remember from my previous posts about thrush that while acute, it hurts. But what has really been killing me about it this time is the change in how it has taken hold in Noah. CLEARLY his pain is at least as bad as mine, at least whenever the affected area is touched. And the way you get the drugs into the baby’s system is via Mama’s milk — I need to be treated for him to get better.

I almost lost it, but if the doctor’s office didn’t call it in, they didn’t. In the moment, I couldn’t think of anything to do.

We called the on-call pediatrician, who gave us a home recipe for the yeasty-beastie diaper rash, and it seems to slowly be helping:

• 50% over the counter diaper rash cream with zinc oxide. Incidentally, original Desitin is 40% zinc oxide, while all the other kinds are 10-16%. The things I learned this weekend.
• 25% lotramin/generic equivalent. Here again, education. I discovered that the tube in the “feminine hygiene” section was 50% larger for the same price as the tube of exactly the same stuff in the athlete’s foot section.
• 25% neosporin. No exciting education there.

And this morning, 5 minutes after they opened, I called my doctor’s office again, wanting to know where my prescription was.

Eventually, I got the nurse line. It had a message saying that the prescription line was only available Monday-Thursday and until noon on Friday. Why the prescription line doesn’t have that message, I wish I knew. But this time a human being told me they’d call it in.

Hours later, they called to say I didn’t give them the pharmacy number. (I left it TWICE on Friday.) I called back and gave it to them again.

On my way home from work, I went to the pharmacy again. There was a long line, and I waited in it. At just past 6, I reached the front.

“They didn’t call it in.”

Now I started to wonder just who might not be telling me the whole truth.

“Are you sure? I spoke to them again less than 2 hours ago, and they specifically said they were going to call it in. They were originally supposed to call it in on Friday.”

Cue the searching.

Lo! It is here. But it has mysteriously been filed in the computer under my pre-family name, which has not been my legal name in 3 years, and under which I have never had medical treatment in this state.

It is (obviously) not ready.

“I’ll get it ready for you. It’ll be ready in 10 minutes.”

It is already 6:10 pm. I don’t want Noah’s schedule off any further.

“Thank you, but I can’t wait just now. I’ll come back in 2 hours.”

I returned at 8:15 pm. The line was longer.

When I got to the front, the same man said, “It isn’t ready.”

“Your colleague, in the striped shirt, told me at 6 that it would be ready in 10 minutes.”

“It isn’t ready.” He shook the cardfile full of pending prescriptions.

I lost it.

Dear Internet, you know that I have almost no embarassment about bodily functions. And I was DAMNED if I was going to let Noah suffer any more, or sit around for another 45 minutes in this Walgreens, listening to the line of sniffling people waiting for their prescriptions.

So I looked him straight in the eye, and carefully raised my voice so that all 8 people in the pharmacy waiting area and all 4 people working behind the pharmacy counter could hear me, and said Very Tensely:

My nipples have been bleeding since Thursday. I can’t wait any longer.

Several people gasped. One person behind me muttered, “Whoa. You thought you had it bad.”

Five minutes later, diflucan in hand, I was getting into my car.