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Home › Articles › Overcoming Difficulties › Nursing's Got the Better of Me

Nursing's Got the Better of Me

Through It All

By Jenn Director Knudsen

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I got mastitis on my 30th birthday – for the third time.

I knew the tell-tale signs: insidious headache that starts at the base of the neck; swollen joints, especially the knees; exhaustion, despite a good night's sleep; not to mention redness at the site of the clogged duct, which feels like a jagged stone is lodged in there; and fever.

For a week I'd had that clogged duct. I'd tried to work it out with the arsenal of remedies provided by the five lactation consultants with whom I'd conferred since my daughter – then 6 months old – was born.

Massaging the duct prior to nursing didn't work, nor did icing the lump after nursing, nor did wearing – for a half-hour at a time – a few leaves of green cabbage, strategically cupped under my breast in an attempt to decrease my milk production and maybe – just maybe – keep the duct from getting infected.

No such luck. I got a fever the day I turned three decades old, ate a slice of decadent chocolate cake and washed it down with dicloxacillin, an antibiotic I'd need to take twice daily for 10 days. Happy birthday!

My mom had furnished the birthday cake. She cut me a slice, looked into my rummy eyes and asked, "What'll it take to get you to stop nursing?"

"Alyssa's first birthday," I said.

Mom wasn't trying to sabotage my plan; she merely felt terrible for me, given the ease with which I get clogged ducts and breast infections. But nursing had become too important to me – to Alyssa and me – to let a few days of feeling like I'd been crushed by a semi cause me to give it up.

I love nursing my daughter and know it's a privilege to be able to do so. But for the first eight weeks of Alyssa's life, I thought breastfeeding a horrible torture that couldn't possibly be worth the pain and frustration.

I developed mastitis only two weeks after giving birth. My fever spiked at 103 degrees F before I – in my postpartum haze – realized what was happening and quickly starting downing Tylenol and antibiotics. In two days my fever was gone. In 10 days, the infection was eradicated, or so I thought. Six weeks later, I got another breast infection. That time, my fever only made it to 102.

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