After 24 hours of labor, I thought the hard part was over.

Then my nurse showed up with a small diaper filled with ice. And it wasn’t for the baby.

“This is one of our tricks to reduce the swelling,” she said, while carefully positioning it under my hospital gown.

My recovery, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going to be as simple as I had envisioned.

And neither was breast-feeding.

It began with a nipple blister — yes, you read that right. It’s a common complication that happens when milk gets trapped under the skin. The pain was second only to labor — and the difficulty I had in “establishing a proper latch,” or getting the baby to get a good mouthful of my breast.