Today I'm honored to have Jenn Michelle guest posting on the blog. Jenn Michelle was diagnosed in May with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had to wean her daughter in order to start chemotherapy, and is pumping in hopes that she will be able to resume nursing once the treatment is done.
The pictures in this post show Jenn Michelle with her daughter, Jenn Michelle and her daughter at their last nursing session, and "nursing" now. In another post, Jenn Michelle says that her daughter now kisses and hugs her breasts and her scars all day long: "She's trying to make her mommy all better with her kisses, because she knows that's when she can have her nursies back."
6/13 Yesterday afternoon, shortly before 12:30 pm, I nursed my sweet baby girl for what I can only pray was not the last time. I sobbed silently, my tears dripping onto her curls while a swarm of my closest friends and family buzzed around the kitchen. I was losing my religion in the living room and the day was only halfway over.
6/14 The first night after my treatment was awful. Nugget sobbed hysterically in my arms, giving way to heavy sighs between her defeated attempts for true comfort, until she finally fell asleep. I cried, and cried, and cried. And between the tears I apologized over and over to my sweet baby girl for being sick.
6/24 I was so angry the first few times I pumped after staring chemo. It was like rubbing salt in the wounds. I couldn't nurse Nugget and I had to stand uncomfortably in the bathroom watching my milk fill up plastic bottles instead of a happy baby. And then as I would dump the ounces of heartache down the sink a new wound would appear like a gaping mouth to catch my salty tears and sting my aching soul.
You won't find much if you Google "cancer" and "breastfeeding" except for articles about nursing after breast cancer. "Chemo" and "breastfeeding yields the same contraindication tagline over and over, and "cancer" and "breastmilk" mostly just points you to article after article about this guy who drank breastmilk to fight his prostate cancer. Those, mostly sensational and local news articles mention milk banks selling milk to cancer patients when they have an excess available to sell. It costs $3 an ounce.
I've had plenty of time to think about that guy and those $3 ounces while making up songs to the pump's rhythm and calculating how much I'd just poured down the drain. Warning! Here comes the crunchy freaky part. Why the !?@* would I want to keep dumping my milk down the drain when other cancer patients are paying good money to get their hands on it? I don't know what exactly it might do for me, but it sure won't be doing anything at the bottom of the sink, that's for sure. So I sucked it up and sucked it down.
It was sort of gross at first, though exactly why I'm not sure. I think it was the temperature. I can't think of any beverage I regularly consume at body temperature. But now I'm used to it and pleased by the thought that I might actually be doing something to help save my own life.
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