No More Totes/Isotoner for Me

I am so, so, sooooooo angry.

I'm supposed to be working on peace and compassion and trying to let go of resentment.

But after I read THIS article yesterday I posted a very resentful, very non-peaceful update on my facebook page:  "T. is totally disgusted and thinks the Ohio Supreme Court shouldn't be allowed to take unauthorized pee breaks even if their painful bladders swell to the point of near-rupture."

So there.

I cannot possibly understand a) why any woman should be denied the opportunity to express breast milk if she needs to; b) how the need to express breast milk can be said to have nothing to do with a woman's "sex or condition;" and c) how firing someone because she needs to express breast milk can be considered anything other than patently discriminatory, especially when people with painfully full bladders have all the right in the world to get relief without permission.

Breast engorgement can be EXTREMELY painful.  Without relief, milk can spurt out at embarrassing moments and stain clothing, making the situation quite public.  Was the Isotoner company expecting this employee to go without relief ALL DAY?  I'm sure it would never impose such restrictions on their male employees who were doing a little peepee dance in the production line because their bladders were so full.

When I was nursing my son I had different reactions from different people.

When I went to the old-timer chief of surgery at my med school during my surgery rotation to ask for permission to drive home during my lunch break so I could nurse my son, to my great shock he said, "Of course!"

His young male chief residents, though - maybe because they hadn't had children of their own yet? - were less understanding.  I was begging to scrub out of surgery one time and one of them at first wouldn't allow it.  I was in so much pain that I was practically in tears.  Milk was starting to come out onto the front of my scrubs.  It was at that point, when it was a threat to the sterile field, that I was finally allowed to go.

The nurses in the OB/gyn department didn't want me pumping in the nurses' locker room.

The OB/gyn chief resident warned me not to use the back room of the residents' lounge.

The surgery residents were ok with my closing the door to the call room in the surgery residents' lounge but one of them jokingly called from outside, "Do it out here!  Do it out here!" When I opened the door one of my filled bottles was still on the night table waiting to get put away, and this resident or his buddy next to him said, "Oh my gosh, it looks just like real milk!'

I had to laugh.  "It IS real milk, man!" I said.  

I tried my best to keep up the nursing during those rotations, but after three months, my milk dried up, and on that day, I held my son and cried and cried.

Nursing is a deeply personal decision, and I think women who choose it should be supported in their efforts, not criticized or undermined, and certainly not persecuted or punished.