Warning: v long post- sorry!
I'm mum to a gorgeous nearly 7mth old girl, who was almost exclusively breastfed until 5.5 months and is now still feeding from me well, but enjoying some solids too. I had a fairly hard time with breastfeeding to begin with and wanted to share my story to see if others had experienced similar and hopefully to help out others too.
Breastfeeding was always painful from the word go, and to begin with was probably the normal pain that most breastfeeding mums have to put up with to get going. My daughter was smallish at birth- 5lb13oz and a couple of weeks in she didn't put on weight and we topped her up with some formula once or twice a day for a week or so. I think some of the problem with her lack of weight gain was that I was using nipple shields to make feeding bearable which probably reduced my milk flow. That did the trick with her weight gain, and she continued to thrive, and I continued to feed through gritted teeth.
My nipples never looked particularly sore but whenever I discussed my concerns with various health visitors, friends & family the focus was always my daughter's latch. Eventually the pain got worse when she was about 3.5 months old and I saw my GP. I thought it was thrush so he prescribed fluconazole, but also took a swab to make sure. The pain did seem to lessen whilst on the fluconazole but the doctor called a few days later to say the swab had cultured staph aureus so I needed to be on antibiotics and prescribed flucloxacillin. Altogether I took 5 days of fluconazole and then a week of the antibiotics, and breastfeeding has never been painful in the same way since. I'm not sure if it was thrush which didn't grow on culture- cos fungal things are harder to grow in a lab environment anyway, or a low grade mastitis that never got to a level of giving me fever etc as my daughter was feeding very regularly. Or maybe it was a combination of the two?
I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had a similar experience, or if anyone reading this is experiencing a lot of pain beyond the first couple of weeks and your nipples don't look too bad, please consider going and getting swabbed and let me know how you get on!
Maybe it did just take my body ages to get used to breastfeeding but Im convinced a swab earlier could've helped me a lot.
Hannah x