A peer breastfeeding counsellor asked on one of my old entries what would have helped me cope with the severe early (3 weeks or so) breastfeeding pain I had when V was born. I thought it was worth repeating my comment here:
Things that I think actually helped:
(1) opposing pain, kind of like some people use in labour. Andrew used to grip my shoulder really hard as V latched on. (The IBCLC suggested on the phone that some women sing or chant to themselves as an alternative.)
(2) expressing milk before each feed until my nipples were nice and soft and stretchy. At the time I didn’t do this enough because I was terrified of making my oversupply worse, but now I think, screw it, it wouldn’t have lasted long, and expressing 30mL or so is not going to increase supply that much. It did help some.
(3) the hot packs and hot showers I think did help a bit, if only in relaxing me. It was just that (I thought) they were presented as compulsory, so I thought I had to get up in the middle of the night and heat up a hot pack and apply it before feeding every single time.
(4) other distractions, especially having visitors. It’s hard to scream when trying to entertain visitors.
I think in an ideal world, this would have happened as well:
(1) feeding more often so that everything was softer and he was less hungry. But it hurt so much I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I can see how it works though.
(2) I would have seen an IBCLC just to definitively rule out latch problems and so on. He didn’t have a nursing problem, but I kept getting slightly different and confusing advice from midwives and it undermined my confidence a lot. So just for confidence it would have been good to see an expert LC.
(3) Drugs. I took codeine for blood pressure headaches when pregnant (while waiting for the BP meds to stabilise it), and I probably should have busted it out for this too. I suspect there’s a vicious cycle with being tense and scared that drugs might break.
(4) Visits from breastfeeding peers. However, because very few of my friends had babies at the time, there really wasn’t anyone to talk to a lot about it except my mother (she had more or less the same experience).
Things that I didn’t find useful:
(1) cold packs
(2) anything that made night feeding more complicated (hot packs, showers)
(3) fiddling around all the time with his angle of approach as recommended by various midwives
Thanks for sharing 🙂
It’s interesting that your mum experienced the same; there are a lot of breastfeeding issues that follow families (weird how we’ ve survived them sometimes 😉 (well, many didn’t)) so I always think it’s a good idea to ask mum and even better grandmum (and similar on the paternal side, since toungue ties and small mouths follow that line, too) how breastfeeding was for them. Unfortunately breastfeeding ha a huge dip in all the rich world from the 60ies and onward, with scheduled and time-limited nursing etc. Grandmothers usually had a more “virgin” experience.
The generations are changing: 1960s parents are grandparents now. (My father was born in 1958.) So breastfeeding experience in the older generations is still falling I guess.
As best I know:
My maternal line never stopped breastfeeding and my mother was a member of the Nursing Mothers Association and so on, she was very committed to bf-ing although not for as long as I have done. I don’t know if her mother had the oversupply/pain issues that we both had.
Andrew’s mother breastfed, in at least one case into toddler years but Andrew had a giant nursing strike at 9 months and never breastfed after.
My father and his siblings (1950s children) were all formula fed.