I was in Detroit for a conference, and I was presenting at the conference on one of the days. And I’ve been away from my daughter, who’s six months old now, a couple different times overnight, never had any issues. But this time I also went without her. I started having issues the first day with a blocked milk duct. So for those of you — I mean it is pretty self-explanatory, but for those who are not sure what I’m talking about, if you’re breastfeeding you can get an area that gets blocked up and it just — like, the tissue is a lot harder and it obviously still has milk in it can be pretty painful and sometimes there are things you can do to loosen up the blockage, like icing it, applying heat and stuff. But nothing was working. So I have had them in the past. It’s not been anywhere near as bad as it was this time. It was, like, shooting, stabbing pain. I just could not get it to unblock. And the other thing I should say is when you have a blocked duct, one of the things they recommend is really not pumping if you can, if you can help it, and I didn’t have an option not to do that because obviously my baby was not with me.
So anyway, I kind of rode it out the first day, was hoping that it would overnight kind of loosen up. It didn’t. So in the morning — on the morning of the second day, I had to call my husband and say like, “I really need you to bring her here.” Um, he’s on paternity leave, so at least that piece wasn’t kind of a mess. But so he drove my daughter to me on the same day that I had to present. So I had to present at 1:00, and he was set to arrive I think originally by 11:30, but then she was just kind of fussy. He had to stop to feed her. So he came around 12:00 or 12:15, and I had to run out and feed her, and then I also had to ride back with them to show them where I was staying.
And so I’m like manically trying to breastfeed my daughter. We obviously can’t be driving while that’s happening. Then we do start driving, and I tried to show him where he could maybe get inside. Meanwhile, he, you know, last minute dropped everything, came out. He hasn’t eaten, he has a full bladder. He’s got a baby that is only sort of content, which is not her normal default. She’s normally really relaxed, but she was pretty cranky. So it’s just overall really stressful. By the time I got dropped back off — Oh, and then we like went to go — He’s like, “Do you want to walk back to the center, you know, where you’re presenting, or do you want me to drive you?” And at first, I was like, “Oh, you should just — you should just sit here and try to sort this out,” and he was like, “No, no, I don’t mind.” So then he goes to drive me back, and we somehow end up on a highway. Like it was — the way that it was directing us. But it basically it just looked like it’d be a lot closer, and the way that we took to get from the place I was presenting to the hotel was a lot closer. So we didn’t know that it was gonna be quite that roundabout to get back. So that took longer, and I basically got dropped off at — I don’t even know, it was like 12:50-something-3. So I had to run inside, and thankfully I had two people presenting with me. So one of them had arrived earlier just to pull up the slides. Just had a USB drive or whatever.
But you know, it’s never how you want to start something, like you want to be very calm, and you want to get a lay of the land and greet people and whatever. Thankfully the conference was big enough that there weren’t a lot of people coming in early. Like, each session kind of ended while another one was starting. There was a pretty short time period in between. And it was a really large place. There was like three or four floors, so we didn’t start right on time, which was nice, but I definitely felt very, like, harried and stressed and just, you know, not how I wanted to start things out. Although I was really grateful to my partner for bringing me my daughter because it did help. So yeah, that was the most recent time I’ve been pretty late.