Breastfeeding and D-MER

It's taken me a while to complete this post. Why? Because it's hard to type with an infant suckling at your breast!

Yes, we are breastfeeding. At the moment, we're even doing it exclusively, and O is growing like a champ! It isn't terribly difficult, painful, or frankly that interesting. Several times a day, I hold O so his little mouth is near my breast, he latches on and drinks his fill, and then I bounce him up and down a few times until he belches. No muss, no fuss (well, okay, sometimes burping turns into spitting up and there's a little muss and fuss.)

I know we're very lucky to have had such a good experience. I was bracing for the worst, based on articles like this one, and instead we got through with only a few minor hiccups. The beginning was a little rocky, mostly since my milk took six days to really come in and in the meantime O was turning Jersey Shore levels of tan from jaundice, so for about a week we were plying him with formula in order to stop his weight loss (13% at the lowest point, not great!) and prevent him from having to go under the special lights at the hospital. My nipples also took one for the team, to say the least: it hurt them quite a lot to have near-constant sucking from a hungry baby, and lanolin was my constant friend for the first three weeks or so. But then, as with everything relating to newborn care, it started getting easier. He went longer between meals, my milk seemed to satisfy him more, the pain disappeared completely, and I even figured out when I could pump a little to put something away for a rainy day. My supply is meeting his demand pretty much as I expected, and hopefully it will continue as I go back to work. If not, we'll start giving him some formula, which is hardly the end of the world.

There's only one notable thing about my experience with breastfeeding that I want to mention in case it ever helps someone else. For several weeks after giving birth, I didn't feel my milk let down the way I had been told to expect (tingling, a "whoosh," warmth, etc.) I also didn't feel a particularly warm and fuzzy feeling while nursing, but whatever, I was sleep-deprived and hormonal and things were all topsy-turvy. About a month into it, however, I finally felt my breasts tingle a bit right before or during the beginning of a feed. If I didn't happen to be nursing when it happened, my breasts would even leak a bit (thank goodness for breast pads.) Ah, I thought, this is let-down! And once I had identified it, I also noticed that I would have a very weird and unpleasant feeling about 60-90 seconds before my breasts started tingling and leaking. It was a fleeting sensation of dread, of revulsion, of sheer unhappiness and depression. Just a wave of blah. I wasn't actually unhappy, far from it, the feeling just came over me no matter what I happened to be doing or thinking when my milk let down. It ended as quickly as it had begun, although it would recur if I had multiple let-downs during a nursing session, but usually not as strong. 

I mentioned it to my mother, who remembered it well from her own days nursing, and that made me feel better. It didn't bother me too much once I identified it, because when the bad feeling came over me I could say to myself, this is fake, it's not real, just ignore it. But I love my obsessive researching and my Dr. Google, and presently I thought to look up my symptoms.

Lo and behold, I discovered that not only was my vague bad feeling real, it had a name: D-MER, or Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex. Well, what do you know! It seems to be rare, but it's actually documented in medical journals, and it may have to do with the release of hormones during nursing and a temporary drop in dopamine. It's not a sign of postpartum depression (thank goodness) and it doesn't mean there's something wrong with my body or my baby, which I appreciate. It's just weird, and annoying, and frankly those two words can be applied to quite a lot of early motherhood experiences.

So - if you feel an ill-defined sense of unhappiness before or during breastfeeding, you are not alone! That and having a tube of some primo lanolin or nipple cream on hand before you come home from the hospital are my two biggest pieces of nursing wisdom. Good luck!