V.painful bite wound from breastfeeding. Any advice?

[Fagin99]

My 10-month-old bit me on the areola, very close to the nipple, about three days ago. It's been getting worse with each feeding and is now bleeding a bit. The pain is unbearable when feeding, I could cry. I just don't know how to heal it. Putting a plaster over it (even during feeding) helps a bit, but I'm not sure it's enough. I've been putting Lasinoh on it, but I don't think it's doing much.

I have a manual pump which I don't really enjoy using, but I wonder if just pumping from that side might help?

I also wondered about nipple shields, but wasn't sure if baby would accept them after 10 months?

Has anyone successfully treated this? Any good cream or anything?

I don't think it's infected, but I'm keeping an eye on it. Thanks very much xx

Ouch!! As well as a localised skin infection, be very alert to any signs of mastitis as bites are one of the key infection causes. Personally I used to just feed off the other boob and express/pump until comfortable until it's healed. Sometimes supply would drop off in that boob but as soon as they were feeding again it ramps up again.

When this happened to me I couldn’t keep feeding from that side and even found pumping was still causing the wound to be sore/ scab to come off early. I ended up hand expressing for a good few days just enough to try and prevent mastitis and just keeping it dry/ letting it heal lasinoh is a good idea as well.

Best to give it a good chance to heal without further irritation, supply might drop off a little but it will come back absolutely fine once you start using it again.

Lanolin or if you need/can avoid feeding from that breast for a day or two use sudocrem.

No need to worry about supply at this point - it's well established and will pick up again quickly. You'd need to stop feeding completely for a couple of weeks for your supply to go. Hand express for comfort.

Is it a "teething" bite or something else? I had a biter who I worked out would chomp if I wasn't paying them attention (in addition to feeding them - little bugger). If it repeats it might be worth considering whether there's a trigger to the biting though at 10m it's probably teething.

Hope it's feeling better soon.

Thanks very much for your replies. I've just had a very stressful hour trying to encourage a distraught baby to feed from the bitten side, but he was suddenly having none of it with a plaster there.
I dug out my old manual pump at 1am in sheer desperation. It thankfully didn't hurt too much to use - hopefully I can keep this up to avoid mastitis (which I'm prone to) whilst it heals.
Thanks for your shared experience of pumping for this purpose.

It's definitely teething. Hopefully now the teeth are through he'll back off a bit with clenching his jaw.

Going to try to sleep now - oh, the clocks have gone forward, lovely!! A lost hour is just what I need!

Thanks again.

I found my bites healed best with canestan (a tip from a midwife ) and I expressed by hand that side until I healed x