When Breastfeeding Scars You.

Breastfeeding can leave scars, yet “experts” will have you believe it’s easy. Photo: Kerstin Hahn Photography

My breastfeeding journey with my son lasted 15 months. It damn near drove me insane, and it scarred me, both literally and figuratively. I will carry the scar of this experience until I die. I didn’t deserve to get this scar, yet, I wear it proudly now. The scar that proves how the medical system fails new mothers. The scar that is a testament to my resilience and resourcefulness. That also stands for exhaustion and fatigue. Pain and agony. Loneliness and frustration. And the fear I faced for months. My breastfeeding pain and trauma were not my fault.

My breastfeeding journey took me to the Emergency Room on three separate occasions (on two different continents). I saw six different doctors, three lactation consultants, one chiropractor, took four different antibiotic prescriptions and spent almost $2,000 over the span of four months. I faced ineptitude, negligence, dismissal, condescension. I dealt with brutal pain, frustration, insecurity, anxiety and fear. Overwhelming fear. What started as just a lump in my breast developed into an infection and spiralled into an abscess, which in turn opened up a gaping hole in my right breast, deep enough to insert half my pinky.

Photo: Kerstin Hahn Photography

To read the full account of what I went through, scroll down to the next section (How I Got the Scar).

There is so much you have to learn as you navigate breastfeeding. Like motherhood, it is often a lonely journey—a blind one at that. You can buy all the nursing books available on the planet, and you will still have no idea what you are doing. There are as many contradicting practices as there are “experts,” and very little of this information is backed up by clinical research or medical expertise. Plenty of it is based on trumped-up holistic claims, haphazard causation theories and old wives’ tales.

The few nuggets of helpful, truthful and proven information are difficult to find; they require trial and error tribulations, as well as sifting through insane amounts of nonsense. Neither process is built for a newborn mother who is breastfeeding (and mothering) for the first time.

We, breastfeeding mothers, should be able to easily look up clinics, experts, specialists and other support centres for our needs. This is not the case. Breastfeeding support is available at local clinics, but the help they can provide is limited to nursing techniques or household remedies: none of these could have helped me. And they didn’t.

It is mind-boggling that a practice that is as old as humanity has little medical attention and research dedicated to it. It is appalling that a nursing mother has to bounce around so many different waiting rooms without finding a solution to her problem with her baby of just a few months. And it is absurd that it was so expensive for me to get help. That it took so damn long to resolve the situation. The impact on my mental health is impossible to calculate, but the post-partum depression diagnosis that followed a few months later is anything but surprising in retrospect.

And yet, the medical community demands we breastfeed without regard for the possible challenges and health complications that arise more often than we are told. Not only are we lied to and shamed if we are not successful in our breastfeeding journeys, but we are then left completely to our own devices.

I’ve had this discussion with dozens of women, and the answer is always the same: no one knows shit about fuck in the medical system when it comes to helping breastfeeding mothers when things go wrong. I went through a similar ordeal when breastfeeding my daughter (read that story here). We are pushed to breastfeed with an overzealousness that borders fanaticism, yet we are offered no guidance nor support. If it does not come easy, we are told it’s our fault, and we are not doing it right or not trying hard enough. Yet, for all of my efforts, no one showed me the “right way” to breastfeed that would fix my problems.

To have a hole, a deep and gaping wound in your breast, is traumatizing, even more so when it happens while you are literally giving life through your breast. While you are doing what you’re supposed to do and the same people who pushed for you to do “the right thing” then throw their arms up at you when it doesn’t go well. The medical system failed me; specifically, the post-natal health system turned its back on me. It failed me, a white woman who easily accesses most services, living in a province that provides progressive maternal health care compared to other first-world countries.

It is high time for a reform in how health systems approach breastfeeding and how they support, guide and educate mothers through their experiences.

Writing this was hard. I relived all the emotions, the pain and the agony I felt during the four months it took to heal my breast. I broke down in tears more often than I expected. I felt knots in my stomach whenever I dug up each memory from this time. It’s been over four years, and it still tears me up inside to relive it all. But I consider it necessary work: the more breastfeeding mothers I speak with, the more I find that the trauma is shared by many. So I will continue to share my story, louder each time.

If you, too, went through challenges during breastfeeding and the medical system dismissed you or shamed you, leave me a comment below.

How I Got the Scar

• My right breast felt hard and lumpy. I called InfoSanté (a health hotline here in Québec; it’s a great resource) because I knew something was not right after thumbing through a couple of perinatal health books. Also, my breast felt odd. Not normal. They told me to alternate hot and cold compresses between feeds to relieve the engorgement. If after 24 hours there was no improvement, drag my ass to a hospital.
• There was no improvement, so I went to the ER of the closest hospital. A doctor saw me and said that it was probably just a clogged milk duct without a fever, and I should shove cabbage leaves into my bra to help relieve the breast. She also sent me off with a prescription for antibiotics if things didn’t improve over the next 48 hours.
• 48 hours passed, and, you guessed it, the boob did not show signs of improvement. If anything, it started getting more swollen, harder and I was feeling increasingly more pain. I took the antibiotics, even though I still had no fever. I also contacted a lactation consultant who came highly recommended, but she was out of town. She referred me to another one, who turned out to be a novice. To her credit, she came over to my apartment the same evening. She prescribed gentian violet (which has since been BANNED in Canada due to cancer risks) because, despite everything I told her, she was convinced this was a case of yeast. I had to apply the gentian violet ointment to my nipple, which is why my poor Spawn looked like he mauled a smurf to death for two weeks (gentian violet is blueish and stains a lot). It was definitely NOT YEAST.
• Frustrated, I went to see my family doctor. I knew he would not know what to do, but I didn’t know who else to turn to. He prescribed more antibiotics. They did not help. By now, I was in so much pain that every time I had to breastfeed from the right breast, I would start to tense up and grit my teeth in anticipation of the excruciating ordeal that awaited. But I had no choice; the worst thing you can do is not empty the breast in these situations.
• Also, while I was getting nowhere, a distinct lump started forming in the lower part of my breast. It grew redder and bigger every day and was incredibly painful to the touch. It was what I imagine having hot coal pressed down directly on your skin must feel like. Even just casually brushing it with a finger or towel felt like lava was going to start spurting out of it.
• Sadly, that is sort of what ended up happening. It turns out, my not-so-little lump from hell was an abscess, just getting ready to throw itself a raging party on my right tit. My family doctor knew what was coming next: it was going to open up and start purging the pus. He told me to apply a hot water compress a few times throughout the day to start softening the skin and speed up the process.
• Until one morning, it happened. I had pus leaking out of my breast. A flow of disgusting pus streaming out of the hole in my right boob.
• My doctor then referred me to a microbiology specialist to get a sample of the disgusting shit coming out of my breast so he could prescribe a more targeted antibiotic to combat the infection. And for the record, this specialist was a total, complete and utter ASSHOLE who treated me with unparalleled condescension and was more concerned by the way I was holding my three-month-old baby than handling my poor breast with any care or tact.
• Meanwhile, I had started seeing another lactation consultant, in tandem with all the other medical shit, hoping that she would help me make SOME progress. She was, unlike her predecessor, a goddamn angel. She was unbelievably thoughtful, thorough, well-versed and oh-so supportive of me. She became my strongest ally and advocate. She tried everything under the sun to help my situation, including visiting a chiropractor which yielded zero results.
• When none of it worked and the abscess made its presence known, she pulled some strings from her network to sneak me into the Breastfeeding Clinic, which I, of course, never even knew existed (and clearly, neither did my family doctor or his specialist buddy who coincidentally operates out of THE SAME FUCKING HOSPITAL). This was an epic feat considering the volume of appointment requests this clinic gets. I went in there full of hope and relief, thinking this time would be the right time and everything will be handled. I was half right.
• At the breastfeeding clinic, I was at least treated with dignity and empathy. The staff there did not dismiss my issue, and they were genuinely concerned about how long it was taking to solve the problem. Because I was still on antibiotics, the only thing they said they could do was to send me off for an ultrasound to have a better idea of what was going on inside my breast. The only place that had availability on such short notice was the hospital’s breast cancer centre. They could do nothing else for me.
• So there I was, with my little 3-month old nugget, sitting in one of the most terrifying places on earth for a woman: a breast cancer clinic. It was unsettling and nerve-wracking: my emotions were raw and my exhaustion with all the medical appointments, never mind the fatigue from caring for a three-month-old baby, and I felt exposed, lonely and agonizingly terrified. During the ultrasound, they told me the lump I could still feel in my breast was still a pocket of the infection. I asked if that was normal, given that I had been taking antibiotics for so long. They could drain it, they said, but they figured it would resolve itself since it was small. They sent me home with that reassurance and nothing else.
• Days later, I boarded a plane to Switzerland to visit my parents and sister. I flew alone with my son, and for the first few days, everything went as the medical staff at the breast cancer centre had predicted. My abscess was slowly healing, I was finishing up my antibiotic prescription, and breastfeeding was stable. I was still pumping constantly and feeding my baby as often as I could; the milk flow was not back to normal, but it improved.
• Everything was getting better…until it wasn’t. I started feeling pain again where the abscess was. Milk flow was staggered again. The lump was growing again and throbbing. My mom and I went to the emergency room in my hometown, with my son in tow, of course. The three of us sat in the waiting room, another one to add to my collection. I called my insurance while I waited to be admitted, and I got the answer I knew was coming: they were not going to cover any costs because the issue had started back in Montreal and was, therefore, “pre-existing” to my trip, so it was not their problem.
• Blood tests and wound swabs followed. I explained my story to the doctor that saw me. She told me the antibiotics I was on were not going to clear the infection at this point. She prescribed new ones and told me she would follow up with me in a day or two after speaking with the hospital breast care specialist. A day or two later, she informed me that I could wait to let the antibiotics run their course, or they could drain the abscess once and for all. I basically begged her to put a needle in me and drain the fucker. Later that day, she did.
• This was the turning point I had been hoping for. I did not have a lump anymore, and over the next two months, the wound healed and left the scar I carry with me.

It took four months of medical appointments, antibiotics, endless packages of gauze and bandaging tape, sleepless nights, public transport to and from every visit, always with my little baby in tow, constant pumping and feeding until my poor right nipple was little more than minced meat. Tears, sweat, blood and pus. No insurance coverage (because breastfeeding troubles don’t qualify as services insurance companies will cover). Impossible amounts of pain and frustration.

And I have a scar to remember all of this every day.