We had a lovely start to the day

The cab dropped the dumpling and I right in front of Bergdorf Goodman, and for a moment I felt totally competent. I grabbed the carseat, snapped it into the stroller, grabbed my elegant oversized purse which was cleverly packed for a morning out with baby and headed across the street ... to the doctors.

It seems that my new primary care doctor (who I love, love, love. Awesome to have a former L and D nurse as your primary care doctor when you are newly postpartum) was a bit nervous about the shingles diagnosis and so I was off to a derma.tologist. And that's when things headed downhill. I should have guessed from the address, but this der.matologist specializes mainly in cosmetic surgery. There was a loop running of him doing some procedure on the View and the dumpling and I were definitely the odd ones out in the waiting room. I will admit that I was surprised by quite how many men were in the waiting room, but not in the least surprised to see 2 nice little boys (probably ages 6 and 7) waiting alone. And then a tall, unnaturally skinny woman with 2 ice packs emerged from the back and called for them to head out. Great way to spend your spring break morning, waiting for mommy to have her plastic surgery, right?

Then the dumpling and I found ourselves in an examine room with a team of doctors poking and prodding my breasts, while an equally large crowd of nurses cooed over the dumpling. It seems that I may have something in addition to shingles, or some really rare postpartum virus, or something else, or something else, yadayadayada ... all I could focus on was that only half of the possible diagnosis were contagious, and only a quarter of the contagious ones would require us to also treat the dumpling, which is good, I guess? It was determined that 2 biopsies were needed, and I shrugged thinking this would be like a biopsy of a mole: a little scraping, a band-aid and you are off.

Not so much.

There was extensive consultant about injecting local anaesthia into the breast of a lactating woman, and the next thing I know we are scheduling an appointment to get my stitches out ... so yeah. I have 5 black stitches in my breast, and 4 in my arm. And they itch. A lot.

Let me definitely recommend not getting stitches put into your breast at 6 weeks post-partum. Not only is it painful to breastfeed, but carrying the dumpling in the sling to collect the fusspot from daycare was excruciating because the sling pulls ever so slightly on my chest and I'm pretty sure that it pulled all of the stitches out. And all this for a teeny, tiny biopsy.

Needless to say, I postponed my next medical adventure by a week to let the scar heal. Up next week: PT for the ever-popular-in-2nd-pregnancies diastasis recti.