The bathroom door clicked shut behind me. I leaned my back against the wood and let out a long, shaky breath. It didn’t help. Breathing deeply just made my chest expand, and right now, expanding my chest was the last thing I wanted to do.

It felt like I had two bags of cement strapped to my chest. No, that wasn’t right. Cement was cold and dry. These were hot. They were heavy, throbbing, and radiated a feverish heat that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.

I reached up and touched the underside of my left breast through my blouse. The fabric was damp. Again.

“Dammit,” I whispered to the empty room.

I was forty-five years old. I was supposed to be worrying about 401ks and hosting dinner parties. I was supposed to be dealing with the slow, quiet fade into middle age. Instead I was dealing with this.

It started three weeks ago. The hot flashes had been keeping me up at night, soaking the sheets and making me miserable. My doctor suggested a new herbal supplement. “Meno-Balance,” she had called it. She said it was gentle. She said it would regulate my hormones naturally. She said it would help me feel like myself again.

She didn’t tell me it would turn me into a prize dairy cow.

I pushed off the door and walked to the mirror. I hated this mirror lately. It used to be a friend. I had maintained myself well. At five-foot-four and one hundred and fifty pounds, I had curves, but I kept them tight. I did yoga. I watched my carbs. I was proud of the way I looked.

Now I looked at the reflection and felt like a stranger was staring back.

I started unbuttoning my blouse. My fingers felt clumsy. I was rushing because the pressure was building again. It was a physical ache, a sharp, stinging tightness deep inside the tissue.

I shrugged the blouse off my shoulders and let it fall to the tile floor.

I was wearing a heavy-duty sports bra I had bought three days ago. It was the biggest one I could find at the sporting goods store, an XL designed for high-impact running. It was already too small. The straps were digging trenches into my shoulders. The elastic band around my ribs was so tight it left angry red welts on my skin.

I reached behind me and unhooked the clasp.

The relief was instantaneous, but it was followed immediately by a wave of heavy, dragging pain. As the fabric loosened, my breasts spilled out. They didn’t just drop. They fell heavy and wet against my stomach.

I winced and grabbed the edge of the granite counter to steady myself.

“Jesus,” I hissed.

I straightened up and looked in the mirror. Time for the damage check.

I used to be a manageable 36C. They were nice. Perky enough for my age, handfuls that fit perfectly in my husband’s palms on the rare occasions we had sex these days. They were normal.

These things were monsters.

In three weeks the supplements had blown me up to a 38H. I looked at the tag on the bra on the floor to confirm. H cup. I didn’t even know they made H cups until I had to special order a real bra online yesterday.

It wasn’t just fat. They were rock hard. The skin was stretched so tight it looked shiny, almost translucent. I could see everything. Thick blue veins mapped their way across the pale skin like a road map of a city I didn’t want to visit. They pulsed visibly.

But it was the nipples that scared me the most.

I stepped closer to the glass. I stared at my chest.

My areolas used to be pink. They were small, modest little things, maybe the size of a quarter. Cute.

Now they were dinner plates.

That was the only way to describe them. They had darkened to a deep, bruised brown color. They were wide and puffy, stretching out to cover almost the entire bottom half of the massive mounds. The skin of the areola was bumpy and swollen. In the center, the nipples themselves were no longer small buttons. They were long, thick erasers, projecting out a good inch from the breast, hard and weeping.

They looked obscene. They looked like something out of a porno magazine that I would never admit to looking at.

I watched as a bead of white fluid gathered at the tip of the left nipple. It swelled there for a second, a perfect white pearl, before gravity took over. It dripped down, rolling over the bumpy, dark terrain of my areola, sliding over the blue veins of the underside of my breast, and landing cold and sticky on my stomach.

Then another one. Then the right one started.

I grabbed a hand towel from the rack and pressed it against them. The fabric was rough against my sensitive nipples. I gasped at the friction. Everything was hypersensitive. Even the air from the vent overhead felt like sandpaper against the skin.

I was leaking. I was forty-five years old and I was leaking milk like a nursing mother.

The doctor called it galactorrhea. A rare side effect. I needed to stop the supplements immediately, she said. I stopped four days ago. The swelling hadn’t gone down. The milk hadn’t stopped. If anything, the pressure was getting worse. It felt like my body was trying to produce enough to feed an army, but there was nowhere for it to go.

I looked at the clock on the counter. 8:30 PM.

I couldn’t sleep like this. I couldn’t even sit down comfortably like this. The pressure was a constant dull roar in my ears. I felt full. Like I was about to burst.

I opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a plastic container. Inside was the breast pump I had panic-bought at the pharmacy two days ago. It was a manual one. The electric ones were too expensive and I kept telling myself this would go away in a day or two.

I set the contraption on the counter. It looked like a torture device. Clear plastic horn, a rubber bulb, a collection bottle.

I picked it up. My hands were shaking a little. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to curl up in bed and pretend this wasn’t happening. I wanted to wake up back in my normal body, with my normal C cups and my normal, dry life.

But the throb in my chest gave me no choice.

I removed the towel. The nipples were angry red now, chafed from the constant moisture and the friction of my clothes.

I lifted the plastic horn to my left breast.

It didn’t fit. That was the first problem. The flange was designed for a normal woman. My areola was so huge and swollen that the plastic rim cut right across the middle of the dark, sensitive skin instead of cupping the breast tissue properly.

I tried to jam it on. I winced as the plastic dug into the engorged flesh.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Just get it over with.”

I squeezed the handle.

The suction engaged. It pulled at the nipple.

“Ah!” I cried out, dropping the pump.

It wasn’t a relief. It was agony. The suction pulled on the already stretched skin violently. It felt like someone was pinching me with a pair of pliers.

I grabbed the counter, breathing hard. The pain radiated from the nipple all the way back into my armpit. It was a sharp, burning line of fire.

“Come on,” I told myself. “You have to.”

I picked it up again. I tried to be gentler this time. I moved the horn, trying to find a spot that wasn’t bruised or raw. There wasn’t one. The entire areola was one giant bruise.

I squeezed the handle halfway.

The suction grabbed me. I watched through the clear plastic. My nipple was pulled into the tube. It looked huge, distorted. A spray of milk shot out, hitting the collection bottle with a ping.

The relief was microscopic. The pain was overwhelming.

I squeezed again.

Ping. Ping.

Another spray. But the mechanical action was too harsh. Every time the suction released, the blood rushed back into the sensitive tissue with a throb that made my knees weak.

I squeezed a third time.

This time, the plastic rim slipped on the wet skin. It slid sideways, scraping across the raw tip of my nipple.

Tears pricked my eyes. It hurt so bad I wanted to scream. I threw the pump into the sink. It clattered loudly against the porcelain.

“Fuck!” I yelled.

I stood there, naked from the waist up, chest heaving. The motion of my heavy breathing made my breasts bounce, and even that movement sent shockwaves of pain through me.

I looked down at myself. I looked ridiculous. I barely recognized the torso in the mirror. My waist looked so small underneath these massive, hanging globes. I looked like a fertility idol carved by a madman.

I was so full. I could feel the milk sitting in the ducts. It was hard and lumpy. I pressed my fingers into the side of my right breast. The tissue didn’t give. It was rock hard.

I needed to get it out. If I didn’t get it out, I was going to explode.

I picked up the towel again and tried to hand express. I’d read about it online. You were supposed to massage the tissue and squeeze behind the areola.

I cupped my right breast with both hands. It was so heavy it filled both palms and overflowed. My fingers looked tiny sinking into the pale, veined flesh.

I squeezed.

A jet of white milk shot across the room and hit the mirror. It ran down the glass in a long, white streak.

“Oh god,” I moaned.

It worked, kind of. But my hands weren’t strong enough. And the angle was wrong. I couldn’t get the leverage I needed to really empty them. I squeezed again, and another jet sprayed out, soaking the counter. It was messy. It was sticky. The smell of warm, sweet milk filled the small bathroom.

It swamped me with shame. I smelled like a nursery. I looked like a porn star. And I felt like a medical experiment gone wrong.

My hands started to cramp. I had barely made a dent in the pressure. The right breast still felt like a stone wrapped in silk.

I gave up. I dropped my hands to my sides. Milk dripped from both nipples, running down my stomach and soaking into the waistband of my yoga pants.

I couldn’t do this. The pump hurt too much. My hands were useless.

I needed ice. Maybe if I numb them, the swelling will go down. Maybe the ice will stop the production. I knew it wouldn’t empty them, but maybe it would stop the pain long enough for me to sleep.

I grabbed a clean hand towel and wiped the milk off my stomach. It left a sticky residue. I wet the washcloth and wiped myself down, shivering as the cool water touched the hot skin of my chest.

I couldn’t put the sports bra back on. The thought of that tight elastic band constricting me again made me nauseous.

I looked around for something to wear. My blouse was on the floor, but it was silk and fussy. I grabbed my husbands oversized grey t-shirt hanging on the back of the door. It was soft, worn cotton.

I pulled it over my head.

Without a bra, my breasts hung low and heavy. The nipples poked aggressively against the thin grey fabric. You could see the outline of the huge, puffy areolas clearly through the shirt. They looked like two dark targets painted on my chest.

I looked in the mirror one last time. The shirt tented out from my body, draping over the massive shelf of my chest. I looked heavy. I looked matronly and obscene at the same time.

“Just get the ice,” I muttered. “Get the ice, numb them, and go to bed.”

I opened the bathroom door. The hallway was dark.

My husband was out of town on business for the week. Thank god. I didn’t know how I would explain this to him. I mean, he’d noticed I was getting bigger before he left, but the explosion in size over the last three days was unnatural. He would look at me like I was a freak. Or worse, he wouldn’t stop looking.

My son was home, though.

I remembered hearing the TV on downstairs earlier. He was probably watching the game.

I hesitated at the top of the stairs. I felt a fresh trickle of milk release into the loose fabric of the t-shirt. It was warm and wet.

I crossed my arms over my chest. It served two purposes: it supported the painful weight of the H-cups, and it hid the nipples that were currently trying to drill through the cotton.