This Is What Mastitis Looks Like — and All Breastfeeding Moms Need to See It

After making it officially a year of breastfeeding, one mom is ready to share her story, but not because it's positive or inspirational. Instead, she's getting real about the difficult and less glamorous sides of nursing that many don't talk about but all women should know about.

Before even starting her caption, she made a major statement with her photo choice: instead of posting a glamorous snapshot while breastfeeding her baby, Rudy, this new mom opted for a raw photo of her red, engorged boob to show exactly what mastitis looks like. This painful condition can occur when there's a blockage of milk ducts, but it wasn't the only breastfeeding complication that she had to learn about on her own — because nobody taught her.

Instead of focusing just on the positive and minimizing her breastfeeding reality, she continued to open up about all of the things that she didn't know in the hopes of helping other moms. "Breastfeeding did NOT come easy for me. My milk came in after five days," she wrote on Instagram. "I wasn't aware that it could take that long, I didn't even necessarily know what 'milk coming in' meant."

She explained that she was the only breastfeeding mom in the maternity ward after giving birth and that the only other woman who even tried to nurse gave up after 12 hours because she also wasn't aware that it can take time for her milk to come in. "While the other babies slept with full bellies, my son screamed and cried attached to my breast through the night. (What was cluster feeding? Nobody told me)," she wrote.

When she got home from the hospital, the problems only continued to escalate as her nipple "literally cracked in half" as she continued to try to nurse. "I have never felt such pain, I dreaded every feed, but persisted with tears in my eyes until I was healed. (Nobody taught me that breastfeeding could be painful, nobody taught me what a good latch looked like)," she wrote.

When she was out with her baby, she would only feed her son in a bathroom or with milk that she had pumped because she felt embarrassed about breastfeeding in public and didn't want to make others feel uncomfortable. "This resulted in clogged ducts and engorgement. (I feed freely in public now, and have done for a long time. F*ck this backwards society!)," she wrote.

But before she came to that realization, the mastitis developed. "I remember waking up at 3am shivering, putting on my dressing gown and extra blankets, and trying to feed my son," she wrote. "The pain. It was excruciating. I was shaking and sweating but freezing to my bones."

As her fever rose and she began to throw up, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. "I had developed sepsis overnight," she wrote. "This was because I was not able to recognize the more subtle signs of mastitis (as I had seen no redness that day)," she wrote.

Although she refused to let the pain or the hospital stay end her breastfeeding journey, she realized that all of her suffering came down to one thing: