This is another one of those "for the ladies only" posts. Gentlemen, continue only if discussions about boobs intrigue you for some reason...Anyway, another month, another post. All my ambition of posting weekly crumbled when confronted with the reality of managing two kids (even if one of them is only 7 weeks old!). Am still trying to figure out how this two-kid thing works, and, as I'm doing so, I'm realizing the truth to an observation a friend of mine once made: dealing with two kids is not doubly hard; it's EXPONENTIALLY harder. And INFINITELY harder when the entire family (including me) is as sick as dogs. Sigh.
So back to the subject matter at hand: breastfeeding. A true blessing, of course, though it can so oftentimes feel like a curse. If you're like me -- a hyper-producer -- you know what I mean: the constant engorgement, the blocked ducts, mastitis, the pumping schedule, the crazy letdowns (that gag your newborn), the soaked shirts and sheets, etc. With Kid #2, L, the whole process seems a lot less traumatic, for some reason. Perhaps because I've been sick, my body has been producing drastically less milk, which translates to easy feeds for L and no pumping (happy dance!). But in this post, I did want to write about something I discovered when I was breastfeeding C and dealing with constant, uber-painful blockages.
Ugh, those were awful: huddled over a table at 1, 2, 3 a.m., with one of my breasts dunked into a bowl of steaming hot water while I tried to massage the blockages out. And then, one night, in desperation, I turned to Google (to figure out if I needed to go see a doctor about what I thought was perhaps a bad case of mastitis). And there, in the magical world of the interwebs, y'all, I discovered a factual nugget that changed my life forever (or at least that was the hyperbolic sentiment I felt when I first happened upon it). MILK BLISTER: that tiny, miniscule flap of skin that grows over a milk pore, trapping the milk behind it, thus creating the uber-painful blockage. Why hadn't anyone told me about this???? I had to find out about it while scrolling through a comment thread of some obscure website. Of course, back then, I didn't know about kellymom.com.
Anyhow, the solution, it turns out, was a sterilized needle. You'd have to look for the blisters really carefully. Mine were just tiny white specks that looked like they could or could not be part of the nipple. But once I located one, I would just gently scrape the skin away, and...sweet, sweet, sweet relief, as the milk would just come gushing out.
kellymom.com has a lot of information about this here:
Hopefully, this information will help some of you new breastfeeding mommas feel a little less like you have pain sacks bolted onto your chest. At this point in the game the last time around, I would have happily opted for "discomfort sacks"! Happy pumping...er...breastfeeding, ladies!
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