Six weeks down the line, I felt I had really turned a corner with breastfeeding. My nipples were definitely starting to heal, and C seemed to be getting plenty of milk. Admittedly, she was pretty noisy at times (‘clicking’ noises were a regular occurrence) but as the milk was clearly going down her I didn’t really worry when I noticed a pinkish patch starting to appear on the inside of my left breast.
A couple of days passed, and the patch had turned into a definite rash: a wedge-shaped stripe running from the top right to the nipple of my left breast. It didn’t hurt, and I still wasn’t overly perturbed, but I thought I should probably find out what it was.
By this stage, contact with the health visitor had long since ceased, and although I had planned to ask at the weighing clinic, in the end it just didn’t seem the right time. In any case, my recent experience had taught me that the most likely response of any health professional would be to recommend I speak to a counsellor, so I decided to pre-empt them, and got on the phone.
This time I decided to call La Leche League. Like the NCT counsellor I had spoken to previously, the lady who answered the phone had a pretty brusque bedside manner. Never mind – I needed answers, not sympathy. When I had described my symptoms, she replied, without skipping a beat, ‘ah, classic early stage mastitis.’ What?! But it didn’t hurt! This, she agreed, was unusual, but she suspected it was because I had caught it so quickly. If I left it any longer, the pain would definitely arrive. How old was my baby?, she asked. When I said 6 weeks, I could almost hear her wearily shaking her head at the other end of the phone. ‘This is such a common problem at this stage. Women think they’ve really got the hang of breastfeeding and become complacent, so they don’t adequately respond to the fact that their baby has started to get much heavier, and he ends up being poorly attached.’ My heart sank. I had been thinking that I’d pretty much got it sorted. I’d been a bit worried about the clicking noises, but had put them down to the torrent that was released by my letdown these days. Whether or not that was the cause, it seems I should have heeded them as a potential sign of a poor latch.
I put down the phone relieved that I had caught the problem early, but somewhat panicked at the thought of what it might turn into if I didn’t (a fever and a potential hospital admission. No pressure then.) Although her advice – to avoid further inflammation by keeping the breast as empty as possible – seemed straightforward enough, following it involved solving a latch problem that I hadn’t even realized existed. Feeling pretty fed up, I picked up C, and set about perfecting my breastfeeding technique all over again.
The Truth About Breastfeeding 