Happy Breast Feeding Week…Calmbirth Educator Aimee Sing shares her breast-feeding journey with us. Part 2

Happy world breastfeeding week!! Part 2

This is the second post in my breastfeeding journey series Hamish’s breastfeeding journey!

Ahhh little Hamishy! He was the first baby I could get to latch directly to my breast, and with that came the most incredibly intense pain I think I’ve ever experienced Hamish was born at 40 weeks on the dot, a beautiful home waterbirth where I felt I reclaimed my power and autonomy.

Pulling him from the water was the most surreal experience of my life, and then breastfeeding him for the first time (first photo) was absolutely surreal as well. But it did hurt, right from the beginning – it felt like sandpaper every time he sucked and like someone stabbing a needle through my nipple in between (hi vasospasm).

By day 3 my nipples were raw and I was crying with every feed. My milk had transitioned, it was flowing pretty freely at this point, and my breasts were SO engorged that that was painful too…but the nipple pain was next level I remember my midwife coming over and asking when I’d last fed him, and me crying saying it was over 3 hours but ‘please don’t make me do it’.  I couldn’t see any way up from this and was so desperate for something to change. My midwife checked his mouth and said she couldn’t say for sure, but she thought he had a tongue tie, and suggested I go and see about getting it revised. In the meantime I started using a shield occasionally (it didn’t make much difference realistically) and using the silicone milk catcher to help ease the engorgement I was dealing with.

Unfortunately this created a massive oversupply which then resulted in repeated blocked ducts, mastitis and soooo much pain and the suggestions to deal with this were usually to use massage, warm packs and feed more regularly, all of which I diligently did and made things worse This is why I am so passionate about bringing evidence based information to women on their breastfeeding journeys, especially when it involves mastitis (I have a whole blog post on this topic if you’re interested).

By 6 weeks postpartum I’d had multiple bouts of mastitis and had developed a Galactocele in my right breast – it was huge and again, as everything in this journey had been, painful  It was only that my Nonno lived next door to a breast surgeon that I got in to see one over the Christmas break! We loaded Hamish (6wo), our 3.5yo Willow (both of them hated the car from an early age, it wasn’t until they could tell me from about 2yo that it was because they got motion sickness!) and a million snacks and a pram into the train and caught it down to Strathfield!

Hugh, the breast surgeon, took one look at my breast, did a quick ultrasound and diagnosed it as a Galactocele and said, ‘we can alleviate this with serial aspiration, do you want to go ahead?’ While it was incredibly painful (he aspirated 120ml from that one lump!) it felt so much better once it was done! We went back 7 times after that with each aspirate being a bit smaller (my Galactocele journey is also shared on my blog as a case study research article).

As a background note, the Galactocele likely came from all the tissue trauma I’d created by massaging my breast when I had blocked ducts and mastitis!! That gave me a kick up the bum to get clear on how to treat it properly, and once I worked that out (18 months later) I finally got to be mastitis free!