How to roll up a facecloth to better expose the landing pad of a woman's breast. Dr Pamela Douglas, Nova Health Co 20_10_23

Dr Pamela Douglas21st of Dec 202322nd of Sep 2024

The video above shows how to choose and then tightly roll a facecloth, to use as a tool for better exposing the landing pad of a woman's breast (2 minutes 15 seconds).

Photo 1: not enough exposure of the landing pad

The photo below shows the fall of this woman's left breast. She has her bra rolled tightly inwards and tucked up high where her breast meets her rib-cage, which partly lifts and exposes the landing pad.

However, you can see that there is likely to be a problem bringing the baby to the breast for a deep face-breast bury, because of the way the landing pad of her breast is resting very close to her abdomen.

When her baby is snuggled in closely, there is a rotation or twist of baby's little spine and neck, because there isn't enough room to fit in the whole of her body and shoulders in close to her mother's body without twisting (or rotating) baby's neck, spine or pelvis.

This is resulting in nipple and breast tissue drag, accompanied by persistent nipple pain and damage. The case of this woman and her baby, and our consultation together, are found here.

Photo 2: using a rolled up face washer to better expose the landing pad

Because this breastfeeding woman already uses her bra in daily life to help expose the landing pad, as above, we found that the smaller facecloth (white) tucked in tightly on top of the bra, helped to better expose the landing pad.

The larger (grey) rolled up facecloth (Photo 3) was too big, and slipped out when we experimented with that. We don't want a rolled up facecloth to either fall out or impinge upon the landing pad! Perhaps when she is not wearing a bra, the larger (grey) rolled up facecloth will be best. This mother will experiment, now that I've described to her what we're trying to achieve.

Photo 2 shows the lift to the landing pad that was achieved with the smaller (white) rolled up facecloth.

Photo 3: how to tightly roll up a facecloth to better expose the landing pad

The photo below shows you how tightly the facewasher, folded in half, is being rolled. The cloth

Needs to be rolled up very tightly, and
Shouldn't protrude much beyond the width of the breast, or it might get in the way and make it harder for baby to snuggle in very close to your body and find a stable position.

Next up in Clinical demonstrations

NIPPLE PAIN WITH EVERY BREASTFEED AND VASOSPASM: Christine and second born 4-week-old Jack. Dr Pamela Douglas Masterclass 28 February 2024

Christine wrote in an email prior to the consultation:

My boy Jack is 3 weeks old (DOB 31.1.24) and since day 1 I’ve had painful feeds. He’s my second baby. He compresses my nipple (pinching) and despite lots of LCs, osteo, the online Robyn Thompson method and 2 paeds review I am still having pain with every feed and nipple vasospasm.

Main causes suggested have been oversupply and fast letdown (true)- so I compress before every feed and the other suggestion is posterior tongue tie (very controversial I understand)! No improvement and no plan really from here.

I would love some support to continue breastfeeding without pain.

My reflections afterwards

I do like to believe that it's possible to run very effective online breastfeeding interventions, pretty much as effective as F2F. But I confess after working with Christine tonight I reflected that I would have liked to have...