Anyone who has ever breastfed can tell you it’s not an easy undertaking. The act of using your body to nourish a child can be emotionally and physically taxing. You’ve likely heard more than a few horror stories that prove it.
A painful latch, bleeding nipples, and clogged ducts are commonplace. But one woman recently shared her breastfeeding story on TikTok and honestly, it sounds like something out of a scary movie.
'You know it's going to hurt,' the mom said of her early breastfeeding days.
The story was so horrific that as she narrated it, this mom, who goes by @brookesobasic on TikTok, played some very fitting spooky music in the background for a video she called “I Wish Somebody Would Have Told Me: Breastfeeding.”
Brooke’s story began like the story of so many breastfeeding moms. Her child was struggling to latch. “Every time you go to latch your baby on, you’re clenching your a– cheeks together because you know it’s going to hurt,” she said in the clip.
'My nipple started turning black,' Brooke shared.
Brooke was a 15-year-old who had just given birth, and despite the pain of breastfeeding, she thought her son’s latch was good. She had seen lactation consultants and felt encouraged. Eventually, though, her body indicated that something was very wrong.
“My nipple started to turn black at the base and white at the tip,” she explained. The condition, Brooke noted, is called vasospasm and necrosis. That means there’s a lack of blood flow getting to the tissue and it begins dying.
Brooke's son almost choked on her nipple.
One day, Brooke latched her son on her breast as usual. He was nursing and all of a sudden he stopped. She looked down at her son and saw that he was kind of choking. “My nipple broke off and he had it in his mouth,” she said.
Naturally, Brooke started to panic. She was freaking out. Thankfully, her mom and sister were there.
Brooke held the detached nipple in place with a bandaid.
They fished the nipple out of her baby’s mouth, Brooke rinsed it off, and she put it back on with the help of a bandage. She said that was the last time she ever breastfed that baby.
But in the text of her video and in a follow-up TikTok, Brooke shared that she successfully breastfed three babies after that and doesn’t want her story to discourage others from breastfeeding their children.
It sounds like it would be excruciating, but Brooke explained that there was no pain with the part of her nipple that fell off.
Breastfeeding wasn't the only thing causing her nipple issues.
Brooke shared that because she had this child 18 years ago, things have changed in terms of breast health and breastfeeding. She said during that time, people encouraged women to rub washcloths on their nipples to toughen them before the baby arrived. Also, because she was a week past her due date, she might have been a bit too aggressive with her nipples in an attempt to induce labor.
“And because I was 15, there was a lot of pressure that I felt to prove people wrong and make it seem like I was perfectly fine and I was going to be this supermom. There was so much doubt on me being a teen mom,” she explained.
Brooke doesn't want her story to discourage other women.
Now, years later, she knows she needed to stop breastfeeding her baby. Her nipple fell off just two weeks after his birth. As for what happened to that nipple, Brooke said it couldn't be reattached and didn’t regrow completely.
At such a young age, however, her body was still growing. She said a nipple is there — just not the original one, which dried up “like a piece of beef jerky” and fell off.
Brooke washed it down the drain.
Her new nipple is small and flat but still functional.
