Hand Expressing Breast Milk

Happy Mother's Day!

It's story time!

Remember in my work re-cap yesterday how I said it started getting rough as the week went on? Well, by the time Thursday came around I was feeling pretty sleep deprived. It was tough getting up for work and it was getting tough driving home after a long day. When I get tired I get pretty spacey. I mean, I'm pretty spacey all the time anyway. I was always the kid who did her homework diligently and then forgot to put it in her backpack the morning it was due.

So Thursday morning rolled around and I was really dragging. I managed to get the Little Man fed, changed, and I ate and packed my lunch and then OMGTIMETOLEAVERIGHTNOW!!!11!!!!!1!! I rushed out after kissing my baby and my husband good-bye.

After a decent first block at work, I went into my cooler to grab my pump flanges and bottles. They were...MIA. WTF. I realized that I had left them at home in the dish drying rack. This was not good. This was very not good. On each of the 3 days previous I had pumped between 17-20 ounces of milk at work. Now I had nothing to pump with.

I double checked inside my bra - at least I had remembered the nursing pads and a sweater. Sure it was 80 degrees out, but I could pass myself off as feeling a bit chilly, right? I decided to tough it out until lunch, and then possibly express some milk into the sink in the break room bathroom. When that time came I eyed my co-workers eating lunch in the break room...and then decided that I would feel too skeeved jacking my boob off into the sink at work.

As soon as I could get away with it, I left work. I raced home, looking forward with great anticipation to relieving the intense pressure that had built up in my chest over the course of 9 hours. I got home, ran past my husband and the baby to get all set up and went to go plug in the...oh crap. I left the actual PUMP at work. WTF again!! Now I was really panicking. I was starting to actually get swollen.

Then I realized...oh hey. I was going to hand-express into the sink at work...why not hand-express into the pump bottles?

So I did. I finessed and squeezed and rolled my fingers and finally got a rhythm going. And between both breasts I got 6 ounces into the bottles over the course of about 20 minutes. I could have gotten more, but holy crap did my hands hurt.

Also, I found that I was REALLY grateful to myself for deciding not to express at work. My pants got soaked. I was so engorged that with each let-down the slightest touch would send milk shooting out of my breast in all directions...most of it into the bottles, but enough sprayed elsewhere that I ended up needing to do a load of laundry and take a shower.

I might have cried a little. My husband is lucky to have survived the afternoon after mooing at me. But it's all over, and lesson learned.

The moral of the story? DON'T FORGET YOUR PUMP STUFF...for the love of God, just don't. At least not if you're producing enough milk to nurse Octomom's brood. It's not fun and it's really not pretty.

Oh, also try to get enough sleep. Lack of sleep makes people wacky, yo.