A Lonely Complication - Part I
I don't care what anyone says. Breastfeeding is not intuitive. For some women it comes easy. For me and most other women it's a tough challenge. Even tougher with complications.
So frequently when I read or hear women talking about the troubles they had breastfeeding I hear them complaining bitterly of undersupply: "I dried up at 3 months", "My supply tanked when I went back to work", "My baby failed to thrive". I was horribly under-informed when I had my first baby. I thought that childbirth and breastfeeding would come easily. I had breasts right (big ones at that!)? I had no idea that it would be anything but easy. Oh boy, did I get slammed. About 4 weeks after I brought my newborn son home, at my wits end with both nipples cracked and bleeding, by breasts dribbling (not leaking or dripping) milk constantly, a friend passed the number of a lactation consultant to me. One of the first things she told me, and I have no idea how true or not it is, was this:
By about a week after we got home I was pumping 10-12oz per breast, every 2 hrs around the clock. In metric that's about 750mls x12 = 9 BLOODY LITRES PER DAY!. It was all that would help ease the pain. Discomfort by that stage had left my vocabulary. I existed in a world of pain. Making milk like that made my hefty stage 3 vaginal tear feel like a mosquito bite...but I'm getting side tracked.
My baby's tiny stomach could only hold 2 oz. at a feed and all he was getting, my LC later informed me, was watery, low-cal fore-milk. Which explained his persistant grizzly crying, pulling his legs up and crazy quantities of greenish diarrhea. Into the bargain I got mastitis. I woke up about 10 days postpartum - I say woke up, but really it was really more of a semiconscious daze to the mind-numbing tune of pump wheeze - with a fever of 103F.
Motherfucking HOT.
Defying reality, my breast was an angrier shade of red and hurt like someone had run over it with a bulldozer. I chattered with chills and hefted my grossly painful breasts downtown on Chicago's El (August heat) with my tiny baby in his carrier to my OB who prescribed antibiotics and yet more nursing and/or pumping. Holy shit. Do you see where this is going?
My mastitis smartly resolved (abx works magic), my supply remained stupidly excessive but now I had red irritated nipples and ridiculously painful needle sharp pains shooting back into my breast as my milk sprayed out with each letdown and then between feeds. Yeast (thrush) was to blame. First of all who knew that you could get thrush in your nipples?? I was GOBSMACKED. How could this gig get any worse???
Both Mastitis and Thrush visited me again before I stopped. Bringing up the rear, I developed a lump in my left breast approximately where I'd had a benign lactating fibroadenoma diagnosed about 5 months into my pregnancy. I returned to the radiologist to have an ultrasound. She was perplexed and I was worried.
"I've never seen this in a lactating woman before." she said "You have Mondors Disease." Mondors Disease is a rare phlebitis of a vein. It usually manifests in a large vessel underneath the curve of the breast, after trauma or breast surgery. My oversupply had so traumatized my breast and surrounding tissue that a vein had become inflamed and thrombosed. It's a benign condition so I was sent home to put ice on it. Yeah right, as if I hadn't already been living with icepacks shoved into my bra...
Just for shits and giggles, let's have a quick recap of the fun so far:
I searched like crazy for other folks who might be dealing with this problem, I really wanted someone who was in the same (or even a similar) boat to say "Feelin' ya sister". I desperately wanted to know when someone else had felt they'd had enough. I needed someone to tell me it was ok to stop this madness. On the Breastfeeding issues support sites I visited was a resounding chorus of "Oh, I WISH I had your problem!!". No one understood just how debilitating it was to be literally chained to a pump for relief from the unrelenting pressure and pain of milk building up and literally spilling out whenever, wherever. "How great that you have such a good supply!"I kept hearing. Well, no. Actually it sucked beyond your wildest imagination. I had such a huge supply that I couldn't actually nurse my baby. By the time I figured out how to get help and retained the services of a wonderful lactation consultant he was so thoroughly nipple confused that he didn't want to stay latched when we did manage it (always under her supervision and tutelage). I tried everything in her considerable arsenal to reduce my supply and manage the recurrent infections and shredded (and I mean ground beef, people) nipples. Many, many bags of milk in my freezer were tinted pink. Cabbage leaves(24/7), ice (also 24/7), prepumping and then taking large doses of painkillers to deal with not pumping any more than absolutely necessary, nipple shields to help latch concerns (nipple confusion and cracks), eliminating all sugar and refined carbs and vinegar rinses of bras along with antifungal meds to tag-team with the anti-biotics... It was beyond dreadful.
I researched off-label medications that my OB refused to prescribe for me like Cabergoline and Bromocriptine which are typically taken by people suffering from prolactin secreting pituitary tumors (for the record my prolactin levels were WNL). I honestly contemplated ordering this medication on the internet to permanently suppress my bodies ability to lactate. Like, forever. By the time I got help I had lost a whopping 30lbs. (4 weeks postpartum) and was fairly seriously depressed. I actively disliked my baby and felt hopeless as a mother. I wanted to stop but I felt so guilty. The voices of all those undersupply women on the internet ringing in my head. I also feared the day when I had to stop pumping. I wondered out loud if there was a narcotic I could take to kill the pain and maybe let me sleep through a process which I sometimes felt sure would culminate in my breasts actually exploding.
I ultimately resorted to binding my breasts with elastic bandages which I only took off for long enough to pump enough milk off so that I could breathe without sobbing. I chased this with unsafe doses of vicodin and slept as much as I could... That process took 4 weeks. I continued to produce sufficient milk to leak through nursing pads and clothing (back at work) for a further 8. Meanwhile my baby took 6 months to eat his way through the huge quantity of milk I had pumped and frozen. We all went without frozen food as there was no room for anything else.
I vowed never to breastfeed again.
So frequently when I read or hear women talking about the troubles they had breastfeeding I hear them complaining bitterly of undersupply: "I dried up at 3 months", "My supply tanked when I went back to work", "My baby failed to thrive". I was horribly under-informed when I had my first baby. I thought that childbirth and breastfeeding would come easily. I had breasts right (big ones at that!)? I had no idea that it would be anything but easy. Oh boy, did I get slammed. About 4 weeks after I brought my newborn son home, at my wits end with both nipples cracked and bleeding, by breasts dribbling (not leaking or dripping) milk constantly, a friend passed the number of a lactation consultant to me. One of the first things she told me, and I have no idea how true or not it is, was this:
The number one breastfeeding complication in the U.S. is undersupply, the number one complication in Australia is oversupply.Yup. Australian. That would be me. Holy crap, did I have oversupply. Massive, dire, unrelenting oversupply. My breasts had reached an all time high about 4 days after he was born. Normally a D cup I had become an H cup. Basketball sized, heavy, hard, hot boulders of milk-filled pain. My nipples which were usually smallish and tended toward flatness anyway were stretched completely flat and yet now approximated the size of my (quite large) palm. An effective and pain-free latch was impossible and my letdown was spray-across-the-room powerful and excruciating into the bargain. My infant son choked as he tried to latch (visualize an adult trying to suck something out of a watermelon) with nothing to hold on to he just kinda gnawed with his tiny gums on the already bruised, bloody tissue. And so I pumped. I pumped for pain relief and because the nurses at the big, fancy training hospital had instructed me to do so "if your engorgement is bad, honey". The road to hell I tell you is paved with advice like THAT.
By about a week after we got home I was pumping 10-12oz per breast, every 2 hrs around the clock. In metric that's about 750mls x12 = 9 BLOODY LITRES PER DAY!. It was all that would help ease the pain. Discomfort by that stage had left my vocabulary. I existed in a world of pain. Making milk like that made my hefty stage 3 vaginal tear feel like a mosquito bite...but I'm getting side tracked.
My baby's tiny stomach could only hold 2 oz. at a feed and all he was getting, my LC later informed me, was watery, low-cal fore-milk. Which explained his persistant grizzly crying, pulling his legs up and crazy quantities of greenish diarrhea. Into the bargain I got mastitis. I woke up about 10 days postpartum - I say woke up, but really it was really more of a semiconscious daze to the mind-numbing tune of pump wheeze - with a fever of 103F.
Motherfucking HOT.
Defying reality, my breast was an angrier shade of red and hurt like someone had run over it with a bulldozer. I chattered with chills and hefted my grossly painful breasts downtown on Chicago's El (August heat) with my tiny baby in his carrier to my OB who prescribed antibiotics and yet more nursing and/or pumping. Holy shit. Do you see where this is going?
My mastitis smartly resolved (abx works magic), my supply remained stupidly excessive but now I had red irritated nipples and ridiculously painful needle sharp pains shooting back into my breast as my milk sprayed out with each letdown and then between feeds. Yeast (thrush) was to blame. First of all who knew that you could get thrush in your nipples?? I was GOBSMACKED. How could this gig get any worse???
Both Mastitis and Thrush visited me again before I stopped. Bringing up the rear, I developed a lump in my left breast approximately where I'd had a benign lactating fibroadenoma diagnosed about 5 months into my pregnancy. I returned to the radiologist to have an ultrasound. She was perplexed and I was worried.
"I've never seen this in a lactating woman before." she said "You have Mondors Disease." Mondors Disease is a rare phlebitis of a vein. It usually manifests in a large vessel underneath the curve of the breast, after trauma or breast surgery. My oversupply had so traumatized my breast and surrounding tissue that a vein had become inflamed and thrombosed. It's a benign condition so I was sent home to put ice on it. Yeah right, as if I hadn't already been living with icepacks shoved into my bra...
Just for shits and giggles, let's have a quick recap of the fun so far:
- Engorgement beyond your wildest imagination
- Oversupply
- Shredded nipples
- Mastitis
- Thrush (yeast)
- Mastitis again
- Thrush (not sure it ever resolved the first time)
- Fore/hindmilk imbalance.
- Mondors Disease
I searched like crazy for other folks who might be dealing with this problem, I really wanted someone who was in the same (or even a similar) boat to say "Feelin' ya sister". I desperately wanted to know when someone else had felt they'd had enough. I needed someone to tell me it was ok to stop this madness. On the Breastfeeding issues support sites I visited was a resounding chorus of "Oh, I WISH I had your problem!!". No one understood just how debilitating it was to be literally chained to a pump for relief from the unrelenting pressure and pain of milk building up and literally spilling out whenever, wherever. "How great that you have such a good supply!"I kept hearing. Well, no. Actually it sucked beyond your wildest imagination. I had such a huge supply that I couldn't actually nurse my baby. By the time I figured out how to get help and retained the services of a wonderful lactation consultant he was so thoroughly nipple confused that he didn't want to stay latched when we did manage it (always under her supervision and tutelage). I tried everything in her considerable arsenal to reduce my supply and manage the recurrent infections and shredded (and I mean ground beef, people) nipples. Many, many bags of milk in my freezer were tinted pink. Cabbage leaves(24/7), ice (also 24/7), prepumping and then taking large doses of painkillers to deal with not pumping any more than absolutely necessary, nipple shields to help latch concerns (nipple confusion and cracks), eliminating all sugar and refined carbs and vinegar rinses of bras along with antifungal meds to tag-team with the anti-biotics... It was beyond dreadful.
I researched off-label medications that my OB refused to prescribe for me like Cabergoline and Bromocriptine which are typically taken by people suffering from prolactin secreting pituitary tumors (for the record my prolactin levels were WNL). I honestly contemplated ordering this medication on the internet to permanently suppress my bodies ability to lactate. Like, forever. By the time I got help I had lost a whopping 30lbs. (4 weeks postpartum) and was fairly seriously depressed. I actively disliked my baby and felt hopeless as a mother. I wanted to stop but I felt so guilty. The voices of all those undersupply women on the internet ringing in my head. I also feared the day when I had to stop pumping. I wondered out loud if there was a narcotic I could take to kill the pain and maybe let me sleep through a process which I sometimes felt sure would culminate in my breasts actually exploding.
I ultimately resorted to binding my breasts with elastic bandages which I only took off for long enough to pump enough milk off so that I could breathe without sobbing. I chased this with unsafe doses of vicodin and slept as much as I could... That process took 4 weeks. I continued to produce sufficient milk to leak through nursing pads and clothing (back at work) for a further 8. Meanwhile my baby took 6 months to eat his way through the huge quantity of milk I had pumped and frozen. We all went without frozen food as there was no room for anything else.
I vowed never to breastfeed again.
posted by Louisa at 5:33 PM
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