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Talk about a nip slip.
A California mother of six is unlocking a new fear for pregnant and nursing moms across the globe after revealing on TikTok that her nipple fell off and nearly choked her infant son while she was breastfeeding him.
“I latched my baby boy on. He’s nursing and [then] he stops,” Brooke, who goes by the handle @brookesobasic, says in a video shared to her trending “I wish I knew THIS” TikTok series.
“I’m looking down [and] he’s kind of choking,” she continued. “My nipple broke off and he had it in his mouth.”
In the cringeworthy clip, which scared up more than 1.5 million views, the 32-year-old stay-at-home mom explained that leading up to the harrowing event her nipple had “started to turn black at the base and white at the tip.”
Brooke says she was only 15 years old at the time, and she didn’t understand what was happening to her body. She noted the discoloration was a symptom of vasospasm, which occurs when the blood vessels supplying the nipple tighten, reducing blood flow to the area.
For breastfeeding moms, a vasospasm can affect the flow of milk from the nipple, and it’s often an indicator that the baby is not attached well to the breast.
Brooke also cited necrosis, dead nipple tissue, as an issue.
But in the nightmarish moment, and without any medical information on hand, an admittedly panicked Brooke “started to freak out.”
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” she recalled, adding that she was with her mom and sister, who urged her to try to reattach the nipple.
“I rinse the nipple off in water, and I put it back on,” said Brooke. She then called an “advice nurse” for help.
“[The nurse] told me that if the nipple is still alive and has enough blood flow in it, that it can actually reattach itself,” Brooke said, adding that she stationed the nipple back onto her breast and strapped it in place with a Band-Aid.
In a follow-up video, she revealed that the nipple didn’t reattach. What’s left is a small, flat and functional “nippy,” she said.
“My nipple is not perfect today, but it’s still here,” she said with a laugh. “That was the last day I ever breastfed that child.”
And although she initially vowed to “never breastfeed again,” Brooke confessed that she did nurse three of her other babies after the alarming episode.
“Where I heard breastfeeding was painful and hard to adjust to, I never knew that my nipple could actually detach.”
Many of her gobsmacked social media followers had no clue that a nip could unzip either.
“New fear unlocked,” penned a shocked commenter.
“Never in a million years [did I] think this could happen,” said another.
“The way my jaw dropped. Did it not hurt that much?” asked an equally stunned audience member. To that, Brooke responded saying, “It didn’t hurt at all. The nerves were gone already, lol.”
In a subsequent post, Brooke assured her stupefied cyber watchers that losing a nipple while breastfeeding is so “extremely rare” that experts haven’t even given the occurrence an official name.
And she noted that the incident occurred nearly 18 years ago, before Googling medical problems or getting help from social media communities was popular.
“This was back when they used to tell us to get a wash rag and scrub our nipples … around 36 weeks [pregnant] to toughen the nipples up,” said Brooke, who also confessed that she aggressively stimulated her nipples in the hope that the friction would induce labor.
“So my nipples were beat to hell even before the baby was born,” she insisted.
The mom also scoffed at cyber creeps who offered to buy her severed nip for their own keeping.
After unleashing that horror story, and while cradling her newest baby, Brooke said: “I hope that no one is afraid to breastfeed.”
“This was just due to me being a complete psycho, apparently,” she joked.
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