Brooklyn Decker Got Severe Mastitis with a 104 Fever from an Underwire Bra Worn on Set

The actress opens up about her "horribly painful" experience with mastitis on a new episode of PEOPLE's podcast Me Becoming Mom

Brooklyn Decker is opening up about her bout with severe mastitis.

In this week's episode of PEOPLE's podcast Me Becoming Mom, the actress recalls her experience with mastitis and how wearing an underwire bra may have caused the inflammation.

"What I didn't realize until I had mastitis — eight months postpartum with a 104 fever, it was horrible — what I didn't realize which I should've known is that underwire bras can cause mastitis and can affect milk production and all that," says the 34-year-old, who is mom to son Hank, 6, and daughter Stevie, 4, with husband Andy Roddick.

Decker, who has teamed up with Bodily, a resource for all things women's bodies and maternal health, says that at the time, she was shooting and "in production so [she] was wearing proper undergarments under costumes and they were like this late in the game that causes mastitis."

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"You have underwire sitting on a duct and it can turn badly," she tells host Zoë Ruderman, Head of Digital at PEOPLE. "It was horribly painful. It was almost as if I was in a fever dream."

Elsewhere in the episode, Decker speaks candidly about her difficult postpartum recovery, which included bleeding nipples and blood clots.

"I remember when Hank was feeding once, and this was in the first week of being home with him, he pulled off my breast, and it was after a feeding, and he had blood dripping down his lip. I burst into tears because I'm like, 'What have I done? What did I do to him? He's gonna get sick,' " she tells Ruderman.

"So I called his pediatrician and she's like, 'Honey, that's totally normal, that's totally fine. Your body's learning how to do this,' " she recalls. "But again it's one of those things wherein the moment, it is so painful you're crying through it. And your baby comes off and there's blood on their face because you're bleeding onto them. And you think you're causing all this harm and it's a totally normal experience."

The 12-episode weekly Me Becoming Mom podcast explores the various roads to motherhood through different interviews with both celebrity guests and experts in the field. Topics on the show include IVF, adoption, surrogacy, single parenthood, same-sex couples, home births, pregnancy loss, unexpected and surprising birth stories, among other subjects.

Guests on the show include Allyson Felix, Hoda Kotb, Jillian Michaels, Shawn Johnson East and more.