One night at around 4am, when it was just Chris and me at home with the baby, we woke up to feed the baby and pump. After her diaper change, the baby started crying loudly because she was obviously hungry. As I was setting up my pump, I noticed that there were drops of milk that were on the kitchen counter below me…. And the drips continued to splatter. And I realized that I was actually leaking milk from my breasts. I am sure I had leaked milk before and it had probably just dried up on my clothes. But this time, it was obvious. The reason for the leakage was not only because my body recognized that it was my usual time to pump, but probably more because I heard the sound of a crying baby — my baby.

I read that this is pretty normal. Lactating women, when they hear the sound of a crying baby (it does not have to be their own child) will start leaking milk from their breasts. In this way, a lactating woman can feed any baby, not just their own. This is a sort of “takes a village,” evolutionary type thing.

Well, I leaked so much that I ended up just hand expressing both breasts. I never even turned on the pump. And I got over 2 ounces in about 20 minutes. I probably killed my hands and fingers doing this, but it flowed so easily that it was pretty quick.

Ever since the baby’s one-month appointment, I suppose you could say that I had become a bit maniacal about researching exclusive pumping and how I could maximize my milk output. One of the things that I had read about in terms of how to maximize milk output while pumping was to do a little bit of hand expression before turning on the pump and connecting it. The idea of this is that you are priming the pump so to speak: you are warming your breasts up for the breast pump, and letting them know that hey, it’s time to start letting all the milk out. This also is supposed to produce a faster letdown on both breasts.  If you are not familiar with breast-feeding terminology, a letdown is when your breasts are literally spraying milk out of them. The way that breast-feeding typically works when a baby is nursing is that in the beginning, when the baby latches on, they will do these fast, quick sucks to activate your breasts to start letting the milk flow. This initially starts out as little drips. But after about a couple of minutes of these short, fast sucks, your breasts will get the signal that your baby needs to eat, and then the let down, or the milk spraying, will start. When this happens, the baby’s sucking is supposed to change from fast and short to long and slow to then gobble up all that spraying milk. This is also how electric breast pumps operate in terms of their settings to mimic a nursing baby. Every woman’s body is different, but a let down will typically last about 10 minutes on a pump, and it may actually be shorter than that with an efficiently eating baby. I have read about babies that were so efficient on the breast that they were able to get all of the milk out in less than five minutes. That’s pretty freaking crazy, and unfortunately, I know that will never be my baby… 

Anyway, I figured that it would be good to learn to do hand expression anyway, since I may not always have my electric breast pump with me, and in case I ever get engorged, I could easily let the milk out naturally with my own hands. Because as all of these websites say, you already have a breast pump that you own that’s free: those are your hands. So I learned the techniques to do hand expression, and I guess you could say I went a little bit crazy with it. I did it so much over the course of about two weeks that I ended up giving myself a semblance of tendinitis in both of my thumbs. Now, when I try to do things like  cut my nails, press buttons with my thumbs, and even put thick lotion on my hands, my hands hurt. I was even waking up with all of my fingertips numb. My ring and pinky fingers have limited mobility as soon as I wake up every morning. I have to use rubber bands to stretch out my fingers in order to just reach out for my cup to drink water in the morning. 

This was completely ridiculous. I had already exacerbated my cubital and carpal tunnel issues in my hands, wrists, and elbows, and now my thumbs were becoming disabled. This was all because of my obsession with increasing milk output. I kept telling myself that I was doing this to  give my baby more milk, and in the process, I was disabling my own body. I can’t even put lotion on without pain! So, I decided to reduce the amount of hand expression I was doing and limit myself to a small number of times on both sides per pumping session. This way, I would still feel like I was doing the work, but doing less of it and still having all of my body parts intact.

This is a mother’s sacrifice… And obsession. I hope I do not kill myself in the process I’m trying to get my baby some damn breastmilk.

Around the time when I started using my new flanges last month, I noticed that my right breast was suddenly not producing its usual amount. To give you some context, the way that pumping tends to work, and nursing in general, is that one breast will tend to produce more milk than the other. For the vast majority of lactating women, the right breast produces more milk than the left. Whether this is a chicken and an egg situation, I have no idea, but since the beginning, my baby has always preferred nursing on my right side. And whenever I have pumped milk with my breast pump, my right breast has always produced approximately double what the left produces. That is really frustrating when you see the output and how different they are on both sides at the end of a pumping session. You wish, while looking at this, that they would both just produce the same amount and be more predictable like that. But, that’s just what you have to deal with. So, who knows if it is my baby who created this lack of evenness or if it’s just the way my breasts naturally are, but it’s still annoying regardless of the reason.

So you can imagine my annoyance, confusion, and horror when one day I was pumping with my new silicone flanges after seeing that my output had doubled for both breasts given my elastic nipple situation, and I saw that my right breast actually produced half of what my left breast produced. I looked at the output, put the bottles side-by-side, and just wrinkled my brow. Is this a fluke? I thought to myself. What the heck happened to my right breast? Why was it producing less than my left breast, which was supposed to be the slacker boob? I immediately went to take all of my plastic flanges of both side’s sizes and started doing some experimenting to see if the change in flange was what was freaking out my right breast. I spent the entire afternoon that day trying to troubleshoot. I did a bunch of Googling, to no avail. I had no idea what the hell was going on, and it was making me anxious because I was already an under supplier of breast milk, and to see that my dominant breast was not producing as much as my slacker breast terrified me. Was I drying up?? We are only just a month in! I need to produce more milk for my baby to drink!!

And then, like a knight in shining armor, Andrea, my Cleo lactation consultant, texted me. We were far outside the outreach window after our last meeting, when I was technically able to chat with her and ask for her advice, but nevertheless, she was a super human and part therapist to me, and she was asking me how I was doing. I told her the situation and explain to her what happened. I told her I was freaking out. I needed advice. With zero hesitation, she immediately texted me back and suggested that perhaps, I had a milk clog. She told me that I should go into a hot shower, and slowly and gently massage my breasts all over in circles to identify a lump. And once I found that lump, continue to increase the pressure while massaging and using a hot compress or the heat of the shower water to get the clog out, and to do it ASAP.

Oh shoot, I thought to myself. I have a milk clog already? A milk clog is basically a blockage in one of your milk ducts. When you are lactating, you have all of these milk ducts that are running through your breasts. The milk ducts all run with the same endpoint: your nipple. The goal is to get all of the milk out of your nipple. And at some point, depending on how thick and fatty your milk is, and how much you are pumping and or nursing, some of your milk may get clumped together and clogged up. The fat will accumulate in one of the ducts and just get stuck. This will cause a blockage of milk in your breasts, which would then result in your output decreasing. Women who are most susceptible to clogged milk ducts are, but not limited to: those who are not expressing, nursing, or pumping regularly enough, those who have a baby who is an inefficient eater on the boob (well, that sounds familiar), those who just happen to have fattier milk on average, and women who are attempting to wean off of breast-feeding altogether but do not do it slowly enough for their bodies to register this. If you do not address a clogged milk duct right away and quickly enough, this could result in a lot of pain, and in the absolute worst cases, mastitis, which is a condition that can give you a fever, chills, and have you go on a course of antibiotics that needs to be prescribed by your doctor. No one wants to experience that kind of hell while attempting to nourish their baby.

It was also confusing to think about having a milk clog when at that moment, I didn’t even feel anything. I wasn’t having pain, and in the beginning when Andrea suggested I massage around and look for a lump, I really did not feel one. But a few hours after this, I started feeling pain on the right side of my right breast closer towards my armpit. And when I started massaging in that area, I realized that there was a lump that was right there. And that was really freaky. That night, I told my night nurse that I had a clog, and she gave me this serious look. She said that I needed to spend time in a very hot shower and take a wide tooth comb and comb HARD down towards my nipple. Constantly put pressure on the lump and push on the lump towards the nipple over and over and over again until the clog came out. The grossest and messiest clogs actually come out as big thick white clots… and yes, that big, thick white clot is going to come out only one way, and that is through the tip of your nipple! I was terrified to think of what this was going to look and feel like, but alas, all women’s bodies are very different. For some women, it will come out as a big white clot, as though it’s a big fat white booger. Sometimes, that big white booger coming out of your nipple can also have blood in it. This is not for the faint of heart as you can tell. For other women, it will come out as milk gushing out of your breast like a fountain, fast and furious. And for others, they will not feel anything. It may just come out while pumping or while nursing your baby. And in that way, that would be the most ideal because you would not lose any of the milk.

So I spent the next couple of days trying to get the clog out. I used the wide tooth comb method, and I repeatedly used my Haakaa manual breast pump filled with Epsom salts and warm water and suctioned it onto my right breast. This is basically supposed to use heat, the healing power of Epsom salt, and suction to suck out the clog. I am not sure which method was actually the reason for my success in getting the clog out, but in the end, I was finally able to remove it. The lump was no longer there when I rubbed the right side of my breast, and my output had slowly but surely returned back to normal. I never experienced a big white booger flying out of my breast thankfully. I also never experienced milk spraying everywhere. So lucky me, no big mess. However, what was remaining was a big fat scab right where the clog was on the right side of my breast. And that eventually resulted in a very visible and ugly scar.

So I guess this is yet another postpartum scar, and one that I was not anticipating… at least not this early. I was anticipating getting a milk clog at some point during my breast-feeding journey, as most of my mom friends had warned me about this. I thought that I was preparing in advance by purchasing a bottle of sunflower lechithin pills and putting it in my cupboard. I even took one pill a day for the first couple of weeks as my milk came in to sort of smooth out the fattiness of the milk in case a clog were to appear that early. I increased my dosage during the period when I had that clog. Who knows if this actually helped. But I would like to think that since I spent money on these pills that they did help.