breasts like balloons

[fizzychew]

i have just recently stopped breastfeeding my 13 month old son i have taken him completely off the breast and now my breasts have filled right up and are causing me extreme pain.any advice on how to get rid of pain and milk

It's easier if you reduce feeds slowly ... how often were you feeding him? When did you stop?

I think the general advice is to just wait it out, but some suggest expressing some milk to ease the pressure.

Wear a comfortable bra, take paracetamol and/or brufen till pain settles. Try not to express because that will stimulate more milk, however if you get really really engorged to could express till comfortable. Will take a week or so to settle.

have already took him completly off, I have expressed it to try and ease the pain but it has come back twice as bad as before.

I think the pain will go away faster (in the longish run) if you don't express.

Ok thanks i will try not to.

I had this problem whilst breastfeeding my 2nd DS (2 years ago now).

We stopped BF at 7 1/2 months and even though he was only on 4 feeds (ish) a day, I still filled up so I looked like Dolly Parton! I had to wait it out and, YES, it is EXTREMELY painful.

You can take paracetamol and ibuprofen - 4 hours apart but don't take them together, there needs to be a 2 hour separation. So 8am paracetamol and 10am ibuprofen then 12noon paracetamol and 2pm ibuprofen etc, make sure you don't exceed the dosage and I used to try and space them out so I was taking them in the middle of the night as well.

I also tried EPSOM SALTS which a lot of people told me about, I took three lots per day. Is supposed to dry your milk up quicker but I don't really know how well it really worked.

Finally I put some savoy cabbage leaves in my bra to help relieve the pain but again, I don't really remember if this helped much.

It's quite hard to tell what worked for me realistically - all I remember is that it took 2 weeks for my milk to start drying up and everyone said it would be over in a week for me and it wasn't

I do remember being told NOT to express (and I didn't) but I did put those avent breast shells into my bra to help relieve the engorgement, maybe for 10 mins a day until it was enough to bear.

HTH - Kez