by Mary Jessica Hammes
September 16, 2010

The image is arresting. The mother and baby snuggle on the sofa. The mother’s hair is shorn; her eyes are closed in a slight grimace. Her shirt is up. Her baby girl nestles against her, one tiny fist softly resting on the mother’s naked breast.

“This is what my cancer looks like,” Jenn Michelle Pedini, a mother living near Richmond, Virginia, wrote when she posted the photo to her blog. “This is how my daughter copes with my illness.”

On her blog, Bits of Myself, Jenn Michelle has candidly written about the course of her treatment for Hodgkin’s Lymphona and her desire—and success—to resume breastfeeding after two separate rounds of chemotherapy.

It started in January of 2008, when Jenn Michelle had a mystery fever that lasted around a month and required two rounds of antibiotics. “It is officially the fever that will not die,” she wrote. The fever did, in fact, go away, but then came back, and after bloodwork, an X-ray, a CT scan, and a biopsy, she was diagnosed with the cancer in May. At the time, her daughter, who goes by the online handle Nugget, was 15 months old and still very enthusiastic about breastfeeding. A month later, the pair was forced to put breastfeeding on hold for eight months of chemotherapy treatment.

“We were striving for the WHO goal of 2 years,” Jenn Michelle said in a recent phone interview. “I had planned to practice child-led weaning. I didn’t work this into my plan at all.”

When Jenn Michelle was diagnosed,  “We were firmly entrenched in breastfeeding land,” she said. “It was crushing to hear…I was devastated. I felt so committed to [breastfeeding] that as long as [breastfeeding post-chemotherapy] wasn’t going to hurt her, no one was going to tell me I couldn’t nurse my kid…I was damned if I wasn’t going to go back to it and give her the opportunity to nurse for two years or as long as she wanted to.”

She talked to her daughter about how they’d have to stop nursing for awhile, and their achingly sweet last nursing session was photographed for the blog.

And then, Jenn Michelle took charge.

Even though she was an oncology patient, she had a lactation consultant visit her in the hospital. She became intimately familiar with the book Medications and Mother’s Milk and its author, Thomas Hale, who would answer her questions in his web forum. (baby gooroo recently reported on Hale’s success in creating a national call center that gives the latest evidence-based information on the use of medications while breastfeeding.) She also became friendly with renowned Canadian physician and breastfeeding advocate Jack Newman, who would promptly answer her e-mails asking when she could resume nursing after treatment. She was supported in her quest to resume breastfeeding by her family doctor, oncologist, and immediate family.

According to Newman, women are often wrongly told they cannot breastfeed while taking certain medications. At his website, he includes a lengthy list of medications deemed safe while breastfeeding. When it comes to radioactive scans, not all of them require breastfeeding cessation, he writes. Some scans do require a mother to stop breastfeeding; in those cases, he suggests pumping ahead of time to provide milk for the baby while the scan is performed. After the scan has been performed, you can pump and possibly save the milk for later—with some scans, the radioactivity present in the milk eventually disappears, so you can pump, store, and then use the milk in 6-8 weeks.

“I really had to seek out doctors who had that [breastfeeding] experience and knowledge and would offer their insight and opinions,” says Jenn Michelle.

Unfortunately, during chemotherapy, Jenn Michelle’s breast milk was considered unsafe for Nugget to drink, so she “pumped and dumped” for a few months to keep up her supply, anticipating Nugget’s eventual return to nursing. She also began reading up on adults consuming breast milk as a cancer treatment. She had her own free supply right there and figured it couldn’t hurt. Her doctors gave her the OK, and she experimentally had a taste of her own milk. “It was sort of gross at first,” she wrote for another blog, but she got over the taste pretty quickly. For three months, she pumped twice a day and drank everything (around 4 ounces per pumping session in the beginning, before her supply began gradually decreasing). After that, she grew tired of pumping and stopped, finding that if she occasionally hand-expressed milk, her supply still existed.

Meanwhile, Nugget—who had never had formula or cow’s milk—continued to eat her regular diet, just without the breast milk. When she nursed again in April 2009, she was 2, but had not forgotten how to latch on.

“Nursing was always a part of our daily vocabulary, even when she wasn’t nursing,” says Jenn Michelle. “Her best friends her age were still nursing, so she saw that. She herself never seemed to lose interest in it. She talked about it a lot on her own. [After chemotherapy] I told her, ‘If you want to nurse, you can nurse,’ and she did.”

After her chemotherapy treatment, Jenn Michelle continued to have medical appointments, some of which required radiation. Once again she became her own best advocate when it came to figuring out when it was safe to nurse. More than once, Jenn Michelle used Hale’s Medications and Mother’s Milk to correct hospital staff when it came to safety and breast milk.

And then, just two months later, the cancer came back. Again, neither she nor Nugget were ready to stop nursing.

“This is beyond horrifying,” she then wrote on her blog. “I can’t believe we have to go through this again. I can’t believe I have to force my baby girl to stop nursing again. The chemo, that’s nothing.”

Her blog was useful for sharing her progress without having to “rehash it over and over in individual conversations,” she said. “When people say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ all they want to hear is that you’re fine.”

She likes that her blog helps other women facing similar situations, and they don’t feel so alone when they read about her story. Still, a lot of times, when the blog had become so cancer-centric, updating became a burden. “I’ve often stepped away from it,” she says.

Once again, Jenn Michelle and Nugget put breastfeeding on hold during four more months of chemotherapy, resumed it again for a few weeks that fall, and then put it on hold once more for a stem cell transplant.

“By that time, it was her third time of start-stop, and she wasn’t fazed,” says Jenn Michelle, who once again resumed breastfeeding Nugget after the surgery.

This past April 2010, no cancer appeared on her scan. Just this month, her Mediport (a reservoir and catheter device that is implanted under the skin, making it easy to directly infuse medicine into the blood) was removed in a process that went very smoothly. Jenn Michelle senses that a naturally-arrived weaning age is right around the corner, as Nugget, now 3, only nurses at night. While their nursing journey gradually comes to an end, Nugget knows that being able to nurse at all is a sign of her mother’s recovery.

When Nugget began breastfeeding for what is likely her last round, “In that choppy toddler talk, she’d say, ‘Mommy all better, I do nursies again.’”

Mary Jessica Hammes is an Athens, Georgia-based writer, trapeze instructor, knitter, gardener, comic book enthusiast, and hula hooper. She is mom to Tommy.