shakespearemom

Disclaimer: This is not my typical blog. If you are squeamish about breastfeeding, skip to something else and come back tomorrow, when I’ve posted something about writing again.

I am reminded weekly about thrush. I check out several mommy sites, and also get daily e-mails, and a week does not go by that I don’t find some poor nursing mother who is enduring terrible breast pain while nursing. And even if she’s be diagnosed with thrush, she is still in pain, taking some pathetically useless prescription like Diflucan or Nystatin, hoping that some day the pain will go away.

I know that pain from personal experience. I had to take antibiotics when my daughter was only a week old, and I developed thrush almost immediately. Thrush, in case you don’t know, is a yeast infection, but it’s one which lives off of breast milk–thrives off it–and when it sets in, it not only spots the inside of the infant’s mouth with white film or nodules, but it makes nursing extremely painful. Imagine a six-inch jagged knife stabbing into your breast while you nurse, and you’ll have a just about perfect impression of the pain.

Yet it took me nine months to get rid of this terrible pain. And it wasn’t because my doctors hated me, it was because they simply didn’t know what to do. All they knew was what pharmaceutical companies told them. And if it wasn’t some registered medication, they didn’t know about it. I tried Nystatin first–and refilled it–with no change. I tried Diflucan for a month, paying over $300 for it because my insurance had only approved one pill per month, and I needed four.

Our only medical options exhausted, I tried gentian violet, which lessened the pain a little, but in the meantime stained my entire stock of bras a funny dark purple color. I ruined several blouses and my entire daughter’s wardrobe in the process, too. I tried it for a whole month, but in the end, the pain was still there.

And then I found the miracle cure–a cure so potent that a whole gallon of the stuff costs about $1.50 at the grocery store. Vinegar. Turns out vinegar is yeast’s natural enemy, and a solution of 1 part vinegar to 5 parts water, swabbed on all the infected areas, will wipe out the pain inside of an hour. REALLY. And it’s safe, non-staining, and non-toxic enough to swab inside a newborn’s mouth. REALLY.

But nobody knew about it except the La Leche League…and it was only some obscure notation in a pamphlet that I found. Even its members didn’t know.

Now, any time I find a woman in this horrible situation, I tell her the cure. My aunt, a pharmacist, calls me about it when she has a customer who is buying Nystatin. But how can I get the word out to everybody–Doctors, pharmacists, midwives, other moms, etc.? The pharmaceutical companies won’t help, not unless they can make the solution themselves and sell it for $35 a bottle (when I could make it for 5 cents). If it doesn’t make them money, nobody will advertise it.

Maybe that’s it–maybe I need to write a pamphlet on it, have it it printed (I’d be willing to pay for that), and supply it to all the area hospitals. But that wouldn’t be enough, for I doubt whether the doctors would read it. I’d have to schedule time with OB/GYNs, family doctors, and midwives, along with health clinics, etc., so that I could explain it to them.

But I don’t have the time for all of that. Even if I had the energy, I don’t have the time to make thrush the end-all and be-all of my existence.

Any ideas? How can I get the word out? I won’t ever nurse again, God willing, but no one should have to feel the pain I felt.

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