Day 10 (Boobs)

In honor of this post, I thought I'd write about my boobs, since my world seems to revolve around them. I have a lot to write about with my recovery and Ben being in the NICU for ten days and counting, but I have to honor my reality that some things are still too painful to write/talk about and Zac doesn't need to have Mama hunched over a laptop computer sobbing...again...ok three times this week. Let's just say that my coping skills are being stressed in ways that I couldn't imagine before Ben's birth.

But my boobs...man, boobs. It's fun to write, but not fun to live with. I was worried my milk wouldn't come in because Ben came early in an emergency situation, but bodies are smart. A lot smarter than we give them credit for. With Zac, my milk came in on Day 3 while sitting in a chair waiting for pain medication at CVS. With Ben, my milk came in on Day 4, while leaving Red Lobster. It's funny that I can know the exact moment my boobs go from aesthetic to utilitarian. It's also incredibly painful to have your boobs suddenly fill up with milk and swell to a size that you didn't think was humanly possible.

I've been having a huge problem with engorgement over the past six days. My breasts get so rock hard and painful that I can barely move. Since I didn't end up at the hospital where I had all my prenatal care, my Maternal and Fetal Psychiatrist doesn't have privileges at the regional hospital where I delivered and where Ben is staying. The NICU has decided that the medications I'm on (and was on my entire pregnancy) are being transmitted through my breast milk and are too dangerous for Ben. So, I've been pumping and freezing my milk. And I pump. And pump. And I take hot showers and drip onto the bath mat and put cold cabbage leaves in my bra until I start to smell and then I pump some more. I can't even tell you how much milk I have in my freezer. Enough to run a small infant daycare center.

Pumping with no baby in sight is a soulless enterprise though. I've been doing it for ten days now (I started in the hospital). I try looking at pictures of Ben while I'm doing it and I even bought a hands free pumping bra so I can read or check Facebook, but I still know that I'm hooking myself up to a small machine that pumps milk out of my breasts. My breasts are so sensitive now that I can track time by them. I know when it's been two, three, or four hours since my last pump. It's just hard. Pumping with Zac was always something I did at work to continue him on breast milk while he was at daycare. Right now, I just feel like I'm biding time until I can get Ben home and I pray that he'll go back on the breast after weeks on a small Similac bottle.

I went to the ER on Sunday when my blood pressure spiked and I had a head ache. I was there for close to five hours with an IV that didn't work (that's another story) but by the time I got home, it had been 12 hours since I had pumped. When the nurses and doctors asked me about my pain level, I had to ask them which pain they were referring to: my head? my uterus? my incision? or my breasts?  KGII drove me home at 1am and I just wanted to go to bed, but I knew my breasts would be so full and hard that I wouldn't be able to go to sleep. I started to cry on the short ride home and told him that I didn't know if I was strong enough to pump long enough to wait for Ben's release from the hospital. I don't think he realized what he was saying (and I'm not always trying to paint him in a bad light on this blog) but he told me that I had to continue pumping so I would be ready when Ben came home. I realized at that moment that he and I had never had a conversation about breast feeding vs formula feeding. It was always assumed that I would breast feed because I was lucky enough to do it for eight months with Zac. This just feels so much harder, emotionally and physically. I was ready to give up that night. KGII got all my pump parts assembled and helped to my chair and I pumped, while crying. I wake up in the middle of the night needing to pump. It's the last thing I do at night and the first thing I do in the morning and I'm tired. I just want to sleep and my boobs won't let me.

It feels like pregnancy and motherhood is a process of acknowledging that my body has to come before my mind, at least for a while. You can't rationalize with huge boobs. You can't make a pump any more friendly. A uterus does what it wants to when it's carrying a child. So much is out of my control and some days it's easier than others to accept that.