BOOBIE FEVER

No, this is not the title of the latest Russ Meyer film, though with my newly manifested 42D's I suppose it could be. Chuckle if you want, but Boobie Fever is serious. Very serious.

(Pause for somber and serious moment.)

It started innocently and earnestly enough, many years ago, back in the days when I WAS NOT going to have children, I consciously or unconsciously (who can really tell when memory is consulted?) made the decision to breastfeed if I was to ever (though I was NEVER going to) have a child. For many people, this is a decision over which they ponder and debate, weighing the cultural expectations of their peers, families and society against what they know is in the physical and emotional best interest of their child.

I had no such debate. Blissfully unaware of society's take on the whole issue, it just made obvious sense to me that breastfeeding was the way to go. I mean, it's 1) free 2) convenient 3) easy 4) natural 5) what they're there for anyway 6) nutritionally superior to any synthetic substitute invented by White Man Science. I couldn't really imagine choosing not to.

Of course, I suppose that I do have the added attitudinal advantage of not being particularly modest. Mind you, I'm not an exhibitionist, I've just never really grasped the taboos that this culture puts on complete coverage of particular body parts. I mean, come on... we've all got basically the same bits, right? What's the big damn deal about it?

As a child, I once asked why boys were allowed to run around without shirts when it was hot and girls weren't. My parents couldn't really come up with a reasonable answer, so I played tennis for the rest of the day topless. If not for the legal ramifications, I would be very apt to do much the same thing as an adult -- some taboos are just plain silly.

There is also this idea in Western culture that breasts are sexual objects, meaning that they are there to be attractive and for no other reason. Ironically, the biological reason that breasts are attractive in the first place is that their existence says to a potential mate "this woman can feed my offspring," though if she actually does, in this culture, she is often no longer attractive. Breasts are seen as decorative -- not functional.

Hello -- we're MAMMALS. That means we have mammary glands. What do all other mammals use their mammary glands for? Push-up bras and selling beer? (Pause to picture female raccoon in a lacy get-up, teats smooshed together, holding a can of Budweiser.) Um, no. Not exactly.

And, of course, formula companies are just too happy for these attitudes to be prevalent -- it means that they get to sell more formula. The male dominated medical profession of several decades ago largely supported these ideas, mostly out of ignorance and financial kick-backs from the formula companies, but times, they are a changin'... Every medical organization now clearly states that breastfeeding is in the best interest of babies and mothers, and this information is now even printed in most of the literature that comes with pre-packaged infant formula. Of course, with the trickle-down effect, it takes many years for the rest of the culture to catch up...

But, never having internalized or even (until recently) been aware of any of the reasons not to, breastfeeding was definitely the answer for me. Since my daughter arrived earlier than expected, she had to stay in the hospital after I was able to go home. Because of that, I needed to use a hospital grade electric pump six to eight times a day in order for all of my plumbing to cooperate with said endeavor.

No problem. Round the clock, twenty-four seven, I diligently hooked up the strange array of tubes and flanges, giving the ladies pep talks as I went along...

"Come on ladies -- we've got a baby to feed!" and, afterward, "Good job ladies!" My partner, hearing me do this at all hours of the night, would roll over and laugh. But, it seemed to work. High production is considered to be upward of seven hundred milliliters per day, and I hit that mark pretty quickly. Had I wanted to, I could have easily filled an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

All was well, though I told my daughter that I couldn't wait until she came home -- she was WAY cuter than the breast pump. I was producing a whole lot more than she was consuming, and aside from the first two days (as my body exclaimed, you want us to do what?!?), she has not needed to depend upon man-made formula.

Of course, as our illustrious house guest pointed out, I looked like some sort of quasi-fashionable bizarre character from Brazil. One evening, while sitting up in our bed room pumping, bored out of my mind while the fun went on downstairs without me, my partner appeared at the door with the end of a hundred foot long industrial strength extension cord. He unplugged the pump and quickly hooked it into the power cord, picked up the pump, then led me downstairs to the fun without interrupting my process at all.

The only remotely negative thing about this whole ordeal was that it was terribly boring, at least at first. I had to use both hands to hold the pump in place, which meant that eight or more times a day I would sit for twenty to thirty minutes doing NOTHING. I couldn't read, I couldn't write, I couldn't even meditate. (I tried, but despite my best efforts at "tuning out" any distractions, it was nigh impossible to meditate with some electronic device pulling both of my nipples once every second.)

Happily, a more experienced mother informed me of a lovely device designed by other mothers which would hold the pump in place, leaving my hands free to do other things. At last I could read and write while pumping, though meditation was still out of the question.

All was going well -- my daughter was well-fed and I was getting used to the "get up every three hours" routine which would comprise the next several months of child care. I experienced a very unique and strange sense of pride -- if someone had told me three years ago that a day would come where I would feel a great sense of accomplishment at producing more than two hundred milliliters of breast milk at one time, I would have laughed. But it was true -- I was determined that my little girl would have all that she needed, and then some. (Truth be told, I could have fed quadruplets.)

Then, one day, my happy little breast pumping world fell in.

It was late Christmas night, after all of the holiday festivities were over, and my partner and I were happily nuzzled with our daughter in the NICU at the hospital, as we were every night. She and I were working on getting her used to the idea of breastfeeding (she was still too little to really do a whole lot at that point), and before we left at three in the morning, I used their pump to finish up what she could not.

Ouch -- how strange -- there was some sort of painful lump. Huh -- wonder what that is?

We went home, and by the time my partner was done reading our nightly bed time story to me, I felt really ill, as though I was getting the flu or something. And the lump, which had started out as "sort of painful" had now advanced to the "damn that hurts" stage.

My partner found the books we had about breastfeeding (We had books on every aspect of the whole adventure -- according to Bill Cosby, that's what intellectuals do.), and found the entries about "Plugged Ducts," and worse yet, "Mastitis."

Apparently, with my newly acquired flu-like symptoms, I was coming down with the latter. We read and followed the instructions on how to deal with said condition, and I went to sleep with my fingers crossed.

I woke up in agony, feeling as though someone had driven a jagged stake through my chest, writhing around with a 103.5 degree fever. My instructions for treatment were "massage thoroughly" and "pump often." OUCH!!!! When something is that terribly painful, the last thing anyone wants to do is mess with it repeatedly and frequently, but that's what needed to be done.

With the fever, however, it was very difficult to wake up every two hours, pump for thirty to sixty minutes, then do it all again an hour or two later, but that's what I had to do if I was committed to this process. There were times that I was so weak that my partner had to, literally, hold me up and hook the pump up himself because I just couldn't do it.

The fever didn't go away and neither did the pain. In fact, the pain spread to the other breast as well. Finally, the hospital called the lactation consultant in the middle of the night, the midwife on call was roused, and a prescription for a breastfeeding friendly antibiotic was called into the local twenty-four hour pharmacy.

For the first time in, oh, about twenty years, I was actually going to take an antibiotic. Of course, my reasoning for avoiding them as a rule is that if I took them for every little thing, then they wouldn't work when I really needed them.

Now, I really needed them. I took them happily and regularly, the whole dose, just like it said on the bottle. For the duration of the illness, I had to "pump and dump" as they like to call it. But once the fever was gone, the milk was safe again. Happily, I had a HUGE store of extra milk in the freezer for just such a possibility, so there was no interruption in my daughter's meal plan.

According to the lactation consultant, this sort of thing can be more of a problem for women who have such a high production. Meaning, it's one thing to have half an ounce stuck inside of you, and quite another to have two hundred milliliters stuck in the same place. It was, no doubt about it, WAY more painful than labor.

Ironically, when I mentioned this episode to other women who had breastfed, nearly every one of them said "Oh yeah -- I had that once. Damn did it suck." Why hadn't I heard about it sooner? Of course, if my daughter hadn't been early I would have had time to read about it in the books, but I was still researching labor and delivery when she arrived.

It seems that this is a common problem for women who breastfeed, and it most often occurs within the first month of the process. Most women only experience it once, though some have recurring bouts. (My mother-in-law had it once with each of her children.) It is the reason that many doctors, a few decade ago, gave for discouraging women from breastfeeding, recommending the use of formula instead, frightening them with the horror stories of breast abscesses, surgery and death.

Of course, if it's treated properly and in a timely manner, there is very little chance of the above-mentioned atrocious outcomes, so it really isn't a good enough reason to forgo breastfeeding altogether. Though, of course, the formula companies would have you believe otherwise...

I recovered, and after a few days of less than average production, went on to nearly fill our deep freezer with small two and half ounce vials of stored milk. We began planning our meals around what had to be taken out of the freezer in order to make space for breast milk. (Honey -- we have to eat pot roast tonight -- there's no room for it in the freezer anymore.) My partner and I debated over whether or not we could make ice cream or something out of it and threatened to use it on each other's cereal. Eventually, I moved more than three hundred ounces of it to the deep freeze of a commercial meat locker, freeing up enough space that we could stop having our meals dictated by what needed to come out of the freezer next.

Luckily, there are milk banks around that will take excesses like this so that premature and sick babies who don't have the benefit of mothers who pump still receive all of the immunological and nutritional plusses of human milk. After all the time and effort that it takes to pump, it's good to know that it will go to a good home and help out with a worthy cause. And, should I ever have another occasion to need stored milk (as I did with this illness), I certainly have plenty of it in reserve for my daughter.

Had I known then what I know now, I probably could have avoided the whole situation. If, when I first discovered the lump, I had started massaging and pumping like mad with the aid of hot and cold packs, it might not have progressed the way that it did. Since then, I had one more bout of "near Mastitis," but since I knew how to treat it RIGHT AWAY, nothing too severe ever came of it. And, now that we're on a more normal schedule (i.e. not needing to rely on an artificial pump), it is much less likely to reoccur.

So that is the story of The Dreaded Boobie Fever, as my partner so humorously called it throughout the ordeal. (Pause to let the melody of the song Boogie Fever embed itself deeply into the background of your consciousness...) Despite the terrible pain and discomfort (it really was worse than labor), we managed to keep up a good sense of humor about it. (Boobie Fever, The Musical!)

And, if I had to experience Boobie Fever, I am thankful that it could be treated with rest, massage and antibiotics since, at the time of this writing, there is no known cure for a Russ Meyer film.