I would say one of the worst and most painful experience for postpartum was my experience with breast engorgement. When baby was born, she weighed 5lbs and 12 ounces. As many know, within the first 24 hours, babies lose about 7 to 10% of their weight due to all the extra fluids that they are born with. Breastfeeding her was a challenge, it was hard to get her to latch. And once she did latch, she would fall asleep. It took almost an hour in some sessions to get her to feed. My partner and I had no idea how much a newborn should be feeding at the same time, and we would get tired from attempting to get her to latch on so we’d stop. In an hour of a breast feeding session, I would say 90% of it was just trying to get her to latch and trying different positions. And she might have been able to suck out a few sips of my colustrum. For the next two days in the hospital, we would just try to get breast feeding down, but it was so hard to do it, especially since our baby was so sleepy. Most of the time it only worked because a nurse came in and tried to ram our baby’s head into my breast. When we got home, we were still failing at breastfeeding. My breastmilk started to come in that first day home, and my breasts were getting so big. Every time I woke up from a nap, they would become larger and huger. And my baby was barely feeding from me, so I wasn’t able to remove the milk.
Due to my lack of preparation for breast feeding, I was not aware that it was vital to remove your breast milk as soon as possible to prevent engorgement and ultimately mastitis. So I was still just trying my best to breast feed but it was challenging because baby kept wanting to sleep. When we woke up at midnight the second day, I started to feel hardness in my breasts. Just mild movement in my chest area was painful. I decided to ice my breasts. I ended up leaving them on my breasts when I went to sleep. We woke up again at 3am for the next feed, and my breasts were getting even harder. That was when I started getting worried. We woke up again at 5am for another feed, and the hardness still hadn’t gone away. Then around 8am, I woke up by myself, and my breasts were rock hard and painful. They were gianormous, and even full in my underarms. It looked like I had huge lumps in my armpit. My breasts were hot to touch and you could see the veins. I instantly started googling what was happening to me and how to quickly relieve it. One of the first solutions I found that I had instant access to was taking a warm shower, to help let down the milk. Without checking a second source, I got up and blasted the shower. I attempted to lift my arms up to throw my towel over the shower door, and realized that due to the engorgement in my armpit, it was limiting me from reaching all the way up with my arms. As the water rained down on my body, I started softly massaging my breast, and soon enough, my breast did soften up a bit. But they were still quite engorged. Meanwhile, we were still having a hard time feeding our baby, so as my breasts were getting engorged, more milk was coming in, but getting it out was not fast enough.
I started using the Haaka to help manually express some of the milk out and ended up bottle feeding instead. She seemed to drink more from the bottle than from off my breast so that was helping a little bit. So for the next two days, I would take warm showers to help soften up my breasts, and just Haaka pump. But by Tuesday (4th day home since leaving hospital), my breasts were getting super engorged again, and this time, it was even more red and swollen. I started feeling hopeless, and miserable. I was solely focused on giving relief to myself and not even focused on my baby, which was a problem because she was so small in weight and we needed to make sure she was eating enough. I would constantly complain to my husband how much pain I was in, and we even got into a fight because he said something that pushed my buttons even though it didn’t come out the way he meant to. We were both sleep deprived, but I was sleep deprived and had massive breast pain, and on top of that I was recovering my lady parts. I felt so miserable.
I told one of my close girlfriends my breast engorgement problem, and she said that everyone gets engorgement, which sort of made me feel a little better. She gave me suggestions on some products that she used to help with engorgement. I ended up purchasing a lactation massager, lecithin pills, and two pairs of therapearl breast therapy packs that you can heat up for a hot pad and freeze for ice pack use. Another recommendation from a relative were the silverette nipple cups. I was so desperate at that point and was willing to buy anything that helped with breast engorgement and breastfeeding pain. The lactation massager did help a bit, but we were still encountering the same problem, my milk was not getting removed fast enough. Our baby was still always so sleepy, and it was such a painful process having to constantly wake her up to start sucking again. She would knock out dead cold on my boob and I would tap her, scratch her back, blow on her face, and she would still not wake up. We ended up having to supplement with formula because she was becoming jaundiced and not picking up her weight.
For the next two weeks, my breasts were still engorged and I decided to see lactation specialist because I was out of solutions. When I showed her my breasts, she instantly saw how swollen they were. The first thing she did was put ice on my breast. After ten minutes, she then helped massage the area around my areola to soften up the milk and let some of it out. I do remember feeling that it relieved a lot of pressure there. Then we practiced properly breast feeding. Lactation consultants really knew what they were doing, they made breastfeeding so easy. She pretty much had to force my baby’s head onto my breast, while at the same time, making sure the mouth was open and at a certain angle. It was definitely hard for me to do this on my own. She pretty much told me, that my baby had a poor latch, and in order to get my engorgement down, I needed to feed the baby as much as possible. She also suggested that I take ibuprofen to help with the swelling, and to listen to soothing waterfall music with a baby cooing in the background.
When we got home, I was ready to try all my new breastfeeding techniques, however, my baby was still falling asleep. I ended up starting to use my pump, and bottle feeding her everything I could pump out. I also started icing my breasts more and continued to take ibuprofen. Slowly the engorgement did go away, and I think it was mainly because pumping was helping me get the milk out. However, my milk supply was really low. And I think it was due to me not removing my milk fast enough in the early days. I remember being able to only pump 50ml (less than 2 ounces) during the morning, the largest pump of the day. And the remainder of the day 10-30ml a session. If you want to learn how I increased my milk supply, check out my next article!
