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You have become a thing, the doctor says. I sit there for them all to see in the corner of the room with an instrument on my breasts, swing door opens, shuts, and he is walking outside in the hallway with our screaming child in an open stroller, it’s what they had available. The baby is five weeks old. We had been waiting for over an hour in the lobby at the children’s ward, after the paediatrician had called the hospital during a routine check-up.

I’m sending over a little one, he said, you need to see her, I’m worried, she’s too small, he said. Now, I don’t want her to catch anything while she is there, okay? he said to the nurse.

We’d waited in front of a small wooden playhouse based on a television show, about Teddy and his best friend Chicken, who really cannot speak and whom he bosses around. It took ages.

No milk comes, no matter how hard I try. I pretend that it will – I have it all under control. Soon it will come. It will! It will flow.

It has to flow.

It does not flow.

I manage ten drops into a large bottle.

You must be admitted, the doctor in white says in a hurry, she makes fast decisions, she has to, after studying the baby’s tiny yellow body on the examination table. She is too thin, she is.

It does not flow.

They can learn, they say, when they call the admissions office.

But we learn nothing.

I don’t sleep. I don’t sleep there either. I haven’t slept since the baby. I may have passed out, but that is about it. There is never any time when I sleep.

A loneliness that I haven’t known before has come. I hadn’t seen it coming, but there it is. I will never ever be able to tell anyone, about this.

The baby hallucinates at my breast. She sees everything I cannot.

We discuss painkillers, nappy brands and the colour of shit. My nipples like rocks.

My labia had been torn in two, they said. That was weeks ago, but I still haven’t looked. It reeks, that’s all I know. They’d checked the stitches after a day or so, carried out the mandatory conversation with the parents after the happy event. A standard birth, the woman behind the screen said, with just a few complications. He, in particular, could hardly speak of it, he had been terrified, but they ought to get over it– especially now when there was plenty for them to attend to.

We are in the neo-natal ward for who knows how many days. Nurses come in and out. They all want to look at my chest and see me feed. They share different perspectives, enough advice for an army. The baby wants to be close to me all the time. She’ll have to be fed through a tube. Do you think you can handle it when we insert it, they ask, and I sit, I must sit, and I say I prefer not to, and please could they only talk to me about this feeling? They run it through the baby´s nose and into her belly. I try to fight down the tears.

Five weeks have passed of my constant attempts at producing. I have been moved and shifted around. Interrogated and observed. Every three hours an alarm goes off. I must get up, sit up straight in an armchair in the corner, wheel the machine out, attach the cups, on. I listen to the pull, staring at the swollen lumps, the darkened area, waiting.

Why did no one ever teach me about the complexities of breastfeeding?

On the night of the birth an elderly nurse had come in, the baby kept crying. I had no milk, who did, and she gave her a small shot, just enough, and the baby slept five to six hours. But what I did not know was that this small unceremonious act had ruined my every chance. It had destabilized everything.

Every drop must be sealed in a bottle, and so I walk down the lit hallway to the other end of the ward to a small room where a tiny fridge stands on a steel table. I stick my daughter’s name on it and place it in there. Every three hours, I produce no more than a centimetre; others fill jars of thick cream.

They want me to try to feed her from a bottle. To attach a small straw to my breast, they mean well, this is so the baby will still suck and think she is getting the milk from her mother even when she isn’t. They are all nice. They tell me the same things again and again; they go through the routines. The baby’s stomach hurts, and every evening, she is inconsolable. They give me all advice in the book. I don’t tell them that I have heard it all before, too tired.

A physiotherapist comes to work with the baby. She moves her little body in her hands like a doll, a craftsman moulding clay.

I have asked that no one visit. They all want to visit. I get messages offering help with laundry, delivery of goods. They want to see the baby, of course they do.

Perhaps you should give up, he says, late at night, when he cannot go on like this. Our view from the window onto a construction site, someone died after a fall.

The nurses agree I should give up, no way I’ll produce the milk the baby needs after nights of just one centimetre.

I manage to escape to the other end of the ward into a large leather massage chair. I sit in the dark for just a second or two, but I must hurry. I haven’t gone through all this to give up now. I know this, I’m the only one who knows this, and this is what others see as a kind of madness.

After about two weeks they allow us to leave, the baby has gained enough weight, and I tell the nurses that I will start on the goddamned bottle, but may offer a breast now and then, although they think it’ll never work. If only I could hear myself, that would really be something. I must convince them I’m sane. They look at me in concern, and I’m not sane, but it is part of it, to go to this place. I know something they don’t. I know right now what it’s like to be in here. In this place.

On my way back, I bump into a mother from the pre-birth course, and she tells me that no one in the group breastfeeds anymore.

They have all given up.