Warning: Bad advice and Mastitis

While in hospital after giving birth to Jude I tried to make use of the supposed deep well of knowledge that were the nurses and midwives surrounding me. I thought "I'm going to be out on my own soon. I should ask all the questions I can think of now so I am prepared when I go home". In retrospect, I wish I'd done anything but ask for help.

36 solid hours with not a wink of sleep following labour, my first night in hospital saw me falling apart at the seams with fatigue. At 10pm a night nurse told me I had a "sleepy baby" and I needed to wake up every 2 hours to feed him. She told me to set my alarm for midnight. She took Jude to the nursery so I could have a short uninterrupted sleep before I had to wake up again. All I could do was cry but I wanted to do the right thing by my son, so I set to work feeding him constantly without any sleep.

The next day the paediatrician came in and was horrified to see on Jude's chart that he had been subjected to a blood sugar test and that I had been subjected to feeding round the clock. "He doesn't actually need to eat," Dr Withers told me. "His stomach is the size of a pea and it's full of amniotic fluid. The only reason to feed him is to give him a little colostrum and get some practice at breastfeeding."

All the same, the idea that I had a sleepy baby and that something was wrong with Jude stuck with me and I couldn't stop waking to feed him. I just wanted to be a good mother to my little innocent baby boy.

Now, Jude was a natural at attaching to the breast, but being a first time mum I didn't know what correct attachment really was, so I asked the nurses to check each time I fed Jude. They kept telling me conflicting information. "He's not attached properly, you can tell because you can still see some areola. He should have all the areola in his mouth," one nurse told me, ignoring the fact that all women have different sized areolas and that my son was incredibly small with a little mouth.

I kept taking him off my breast and reattaching him, but this constant tug-of-war on my nipples was absolute hell and it wasn't long before my nipples were cracked and swollen.

During my last night in hospital I felt my milk come in, and I was discharged from hospital the next day with hugely swollen breasts and very sore nipples.

That night at home I took a nap and woke up at 7pm shivering uncontrollably with my right breast throbbing painfully. I tried to take a hot shower to warm up but I could barely stand and when I got out of the shower I was freezing. I took some paracetamol and the shivering finally subsided after 2 hours, but I knew something was wrong.

The next day I felt terrible and made my way to the GP. It was Sunday so I had to wait for almost 2 hours as people kept coming in off the street with apparent emergencies that were getting priority over me. Finally I burst into tears and told them I was in pain and I had a 5-day-old baby waiting for me back home. The nurse on duty said "you should have said something, honey," but I failed to understand why the girl with 3-month pregnancy morning sickness was being treated as an emergency when I had been waiting patiently with an actual appointment, I didn't think I needed to say something in those circumstances.

The GP took one look at my red swollen breast and diagnosed mastitis. He prescribed antibiotics and I started the course immediately but it took about 3 days for them to work. In the mean time I continued shivering with fever while trying to breastfeed, but my nipple was so swollen Jude could no longer attach to my right breast. The engorgement of milk was unbearable so I rushed out to buy a breast pump, even though I was sick with pain and fatigue and just wanted to stay in bed.

Pumping the swollen nipple was hell but I had to persevere or risk losing my milk supply, plus I had to get rid of that built up milk and try, try, try to unblock my milk ducts.

Fresh out of hospital with no idea what I was doing I found myself living this torture. All my questions and search for knowledge in hospital had not only given me nothing of any value, but had resulted in me getting very sick and it set me on an early path in the worst possible direction. I wouldn't wish mastitis on anyone, but a new mum fresh out of hospital with no one around to support her ... there couldn't be a worse scenario.

Since then I bought some parenting and baby books that explained things much better and made a lot of sense to me, and showed me that the nurses in hospital were completely wrong in everything they told me. If I had my time over I would do things differently, because I feel like I lost the ability to sit back and enjoy the lovely first week of my son's life, back when he slept all day and his needs were very simple.