D-MERrrrrrrr

Here's something weird.

I need to warn everyone who's in contact with me between now and, say, 12 months from now. I have inappriate dopamine activity and possible brain damage. The latter has been studied in lab rats whose sleep in repeatedly interrupted. Bim shared this with me when I was complaining about the
ever-increasing number of names and words I feel I have lost forever. I suggested I need to play more Boggle. He suggested I need a good night's sleep.

The dopamine problem has a name (I knew it had a name. It had to have a name!). It's called Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex (D-MER). That's dys-phoric, the opposite of eu-phoric and YES, it has an acronym. (D-MER); therefore, it is real.

This picture is NOT pretty funny.

I first experienced this when nursing baby Ally. Without warning I felt a buzzing in my hands and an immediate drop in my mood. So sad, so suddenly. It's not post-partum depression and it doesn't even last for more than a minute or two, but it's a consistent physical reaction to breastfeeding. Because it happened to me every time I nursed Ally, and then Liv, and now Emmett, I assumed that it happened to everyone. And because it ends as abruptly as it begins, I forgot to investigate when I had my hands free to look it up (see: brain damage).

One day as I was experienceing D-MER I started describing it to Lauren and Bim and for once I thought to have one of them hand me my book, "The Nursing Mother," Sure enough, there was a perfect description of what I experience:

Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex is a condition affecting lactating women that is characterized by an abrupt dysphoria, or negative emotions, that occur just before milk release and continuing not more than a few minutes.

There's a website too: www.d-mer.org.

Since then I've asked around, especially in the nursing mothers' room at church, to see if any of the other milking moms get it. Nope, just me. But based on the number of page views on the official website, I am confident that there are dozens of us.

So there you go, posterity. Maybe this will be relevant to one of you someday.