My Story
Nobody tells you breastfeeding can be hard while you’re still pregnant. I found that out the moment my son was born. By the first week, I was in pain. When I mentioned it, I kept hearing the same thing: that’s normal, it’s just part of it. So I believed them. I told myself this was the sacrifice you make for your baby, and I kept going, in pain, for weeks.
Then it changed. I started getting chills and a fever, and I noticed a lump that kept growing. That’s when I finally got scared enough to see a doctor. It was mastitis. They tried to draw out the infection with a syringe, but it didn’t work—the infection was too far along, and I needed surgery.
The surgery itself went fine. It was the day I came home that things went wrong. I started shaking uncontrollably, and I felt myself losing control of my own body. I ended up back in the ER, and the doctors told me I’d gotten there at exactly the right moment.
I came so close to it going a very different way—over something I’d been told for weeks was just normal.
When I got pregnant again
I was scared. I even doubted whether I’d try to breastfeed at all. But I wanted it so badly for my baby that I decided to do things differently this time: educate myself, prepare properly, and stop assuming pain was just something to push through.
I built a kit before I ever felt the first latch. And this time, when something didn’t feel right, I didn’t just endure it—I unlatched, repositioned, and tried again. I paid attention to how I held my breast, how I held him, and how my hand was placed. Latching correctly turned out to matter as much as anything in the kit.
I still had pain. That part didn’t disappear completely. But this time I had the tools and the knowledge to manage it instead of just surviving it. By around six weeks, the soreness had faded. And somewhere in there, without realizing exactly when, I stopped being scared.
I can’t say that what worked for me will work for every mother. Every breastfeeding journey is different. But I do know how different my second experience was once I stopped believing that I simply had to endure the pain and started preparing, learning, and paying attention to what my body was telling me.
That’s why I’m sharing the things I used and what I learned along the way. If another mother finds something here that makes her journey a little easier—or helps her realize that she doesn’t simply have to suffer in silence—then sharing my story was worth it.
