Tuesday, September 05, 2006

MilkBrained Again

Aborted July's attempt at inducing due to the inconvenience of lugging big heavy pump around everywhere. Bought myself a new hand pump though, totally manual and light and small-ish. Then had a few days away road-tripping with the Boy, and decided that sitting in the passenger seat for hours on end was the perfect setting to just kick back and relax and pop motillium and pump. This was 8 days ago.

Still pumping 4 or 5 times each day for around 10-15 minutes each breast (if I have time), and taking 20mg of motillium 4 times a day. Its working I think. Getting white drops, which do appear to be milk. Breasts get sore when its time to pump. Much bigger. Getting shooting pains when I pump, and sometimes in between. Short but sharp! Fingers crossed that these are let-down ouchies.

A friend who is a nurse told me this afternoon that I had that look of new mothers, like I had just put the laundry in the oven or driven away from the shopping centre and left the kid at the checkout. Its about how I feel. Keep wanting to cry when I pump, and its not the pain (that is bearable, and more like a hard massage that hurts good than completely undesirable agony) but more some wave of hormonal(?)emotion. A welling. A spilling. A bursting of a dam. Or maybe more of a slow seeping.

Still very self-consious about pumping in public. Have organised access to my supervisors office when am at Uni during office hours, and can also sneak into one of the empty research rooms in my building. Stayed at my parent's place over the weekend and pumped in the middle of the night and massaged when I could so that I didn't need to explain it. Is funny, its something that my mother taught me in one way- breast is best. I knew that lanolin was good for cracked nipples when I was a child, knew that breastmilk was a wonder fluid and made biscuits and playdough from recipes in the Nursing Mother's Cookbook. Milkiness is something we could bond on in another context, woman to woman, sharing tales of milky trials and tribulations. But I am not a mother, there is no baby, its a natural womanly function brought about rather unnaturally. Or...? Anyway, I can't imagine how to explain my reasoning, or justify it. So I snuck around with my hands up my shirt, didn't wince when the pains struck me and didn't show my drops to anyone.

Went to the Ginseng Bath House last night for a soak and a scrub and while being sluiced down and having my skin sloughed off it occurred to me just how fabulously funny it would be if my tits were to suddenly start spurting while being massaged. And then I imagined my milk flowing out into that warm ginseng bath, milky tea...

1 Comments:

Blogger mayhem said...

Hey fraggle!

Once you start flowing- you gotta organise a cleopatra milK bath!

thanks for spa company & tofu btw

keep on pumping

7:12 pm  

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