One breast is enough: able to nurse from only one side, this mother still produced ample milk for five children.

Publication: Mothering

Publication Date: 01-MAR-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Mothering Magazine

I HAVE BEEN BLESSED in my lifetime--I have had the pleasure of placing five children to my breast. That singular term, breast, is very accurate. Pour of my children have benefited from my having nursed them to the best of my abilities as long as I could.

My breastfeeding tale is fairly unremarkable compared to those of other breastfeeding mothers, who have tried and, with difficulty and tack of knowledge, eventually succeeded in fully nourishing their babies at their breasts. My situation is different--I am a unilateral nursing mother.

My story began 33 years ago, on a chilly November morning. I was six years old and had just finished letting the cat out. I turned around and saw that the stove was on. As I attempted to turn the stove off, my pajamas caught fire. I received third-degree bums that covered 30 percent of my body, including half of the front of my torso, and obliterated my right nipple.

When I was 25, I began looking into what I would have to do to be able to breastfeed. My plastic surgeon had told me that I could, but that I would have great pain and pressure in my right, burned breast, and that he had heard of no procedure by which that breast's milk ducts could be opened to relieve the pressure.

A few years later, I saw another surgeon. She told me that the ducts could be surgically opened (no small feat!) when I began lactation. I would then have to keep expressing milk to keep the ducts open until the healing was complete. I would endure some pain, but I was dated to have found someone who would go the extra distance and at least try.

I continued my inquiries but found nothing about my particular situation in the medical and nursing texts I read over the years. Even during my initial training as a diploma nurse, education in lactation was greatly lacking. I was under the impression that a woman's breasts worked together--the one friend I had who was a mother leaked from one breast when using the other. In my case, there was no place for this leak to go. But I badly wanted to nurse and decided...

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