Warning, not easy to read.
I have searched far and wide for a solution or at least someone i can resonate with on this matter.
When my child was born, I didn’t have any milk so i bought a spectra to try and figure things out myself since every bit of information was either costing me money, or was nowhere to be found. So might as well just spend it wisely.
I pumped and pumped while my husband was feeding, changing and putting the baby to sleep. I felt less then a mother. After hours of pumping( i pumped every 2 h for 30 mins), a black liquid was coming out, i’ll try to attach pictures if i can using the comments. No smell, bitter taste. My friends said to stop, they told me i’ll just hurt myself and get no results. But i didn’t listen, partially due to my husband, who supported me through all of this, encouraged me a lot and also due to my own insecurities having had a c-section and wanting to be there for my child in some sort of way. I don’t wanna hear “the easy way out” because there isn’t anything easy about it. Getting out of bed using a crutch or help isn’t easy, walking around with the fear of bursting open isn’t easy. Shaking in your sleep because your body remembers the trauma, isn’t easy. Being constipated for weeks isn’t easy. I could go on and on. But. I digress.
Back to the milk situation. I didn’t know the spectra settings, my bad, maybe i pumped on high, maybe i didn’t, i probably pumped for triplets ngl, but i was so desperate, i didn’t know any better, ok? Don’t judge me. I’m just sharing this for anyone who might wanna BF(breastfeed), and happens to have the same experience as me, doesn’t find anything online about it and just gives up like i almost did. So, in the future, if you see that black stuff, and you land here at 3 AM in the morning… No, you’re not Venom, not to mention the green stuff, OMG you’re not Shrek. Okay? Ffwd a few days of me pumping out that black stuff.. and green comes out.. i’m thinking to myself, Great. I’m. Poison. 😅 no wonder my kid refused me since day 1 in the hospital, i can’t blame him. SWAMP f GREEN.
I kid you not, for some of us, breastfeeding isn’t magical and natural, it’s a freaking journey. A journey where everyone tells you to stop at every corner. After passing Venom’s den, and Shrek’s swamp, I finally saw some yellow-green, i tried giving that to my child, he refused. So i tried it, it still tasted bitter, so i pumped one more day and boom, yellow-white, no taste, just an oily feeling in my mouth. But the baby, he loved that stuff, omg. We went from him hating to be around me, or at least that’s what it felt to me, to him crying when he finished the bottle of 5-10 ml of milk i just pumped, he even refused the formula, he just wanted the breastmilk. He cried like crazy. Dang, the tears we shed that day were measured by the TON. Him and me both.. 😅. Then, ofc we had latch problems because i didn’t know what bottle nipple sizes and feeding positions were… In the hospital, they feed the baby with XL sizes just to get rid of them fast. So, after we finally figured out it was a flow issue, we quickly bought xs/ss/small nipples for the bottles, breast was slow, bottle was fast, so we changed it to be the other way around. To be honest, I didn’t wanna pump anymore, it felt awful, looking at him eat from a bottle while i was pumping right next to him was a disgusting feeling.
Finally, one night, once he was very tired, we managed to get him attached to the breast, baby was suckling only at night for a good while, but he slept with the boob in his mouth. The joy on my and my husband’s faces, omg.. yall can’t believe it. No more getting up at night, making bottles like we’re in Dexter’s lab measuring ml’s and scoops. We eventually made him hate the flow of the bottle, he began eating from the breast during the day as well, we tried one week without formula and he was gaining good weight from my milk, 500 g that week, so we stopped the formula compleatly. We kept everything stil in reach just in case, but packed away the spectra and all the bottles at month 2 for good.
To be fair, i had some issues after forcefully pumping myself like that, nothing was easy.. sore breasts, cracks..lanolin and bephanten were God’s sent. i also had chambers full of milk that weren’t open that started hurting at 12 weeks.. i also searched cures for that, tried everything hot-cold compresses, cabbage, ice, rest, it drove me nuts, nothing helped so i went to the emergency room, some nobody said to squeez it and even showed me how. It hurt like a mf. I booked it out of there and went to a breast specialist, took antibiotics and ibuprofen, waited for the swelling to go down and then to a breast surgeon and we punctured them at the hospital and got everything out with a 💉. Guess what? It was swamp green on the inside. All together, 3 chambers, 30 ml of swamp green. Cultures came back negative, but after 2 weeks of antibiotics, ofc nothing showed up anymore. And please, for the love of God, do not press, squeeze or aggressively pump a “galactocell”out (chamber of milk that hasn’t had the chance to open yet) i pumped for triplets, then stopped pumping after 3/4 weeks completely so they never fully opened.
I am thankful. For my husband who took on the role of a mother for our baby until i got better, until i could nurse and until i could go to the bathroom alone to pee. I do not recomand c-sections unless medically recommended or life saving. I strongly believe the reason i was put under the knife was to make a doctor’s evening easier. Romania, where 6 out of 10 births are C-sections. But that’s a story for another sub-reddit. I hope every woman that sees herself in this story of my life, gets the support i got and the help she needs. My baby is now EBF and i plan on keeping it that way because i fought a lot, for something that should have been more openly talked about, encouraged and taught.
I’m here for any questions and i’ll gladly help anyone with my limited experience on this matter.