I was reading a lot about breastfeeding when I was preparing for the baby to come into our life. I was familiar with all the problem situations, yet I was very determined to fight them and I was hoping to feed my baby until he was at least 2 years old. In the birthing room the midwife helped put the baby to my breast and it seemed like everything would work out.
The beginning already seemed harder than I thought but I thought it’s up to practice. When going to the check up the second day we raised the issue that the baby had cried all night. The nurse immediately made me show her my breasts, squeezed them and said “there’s nowt there”. The baby was given formula on the spot and I was given the instructions to put the baby on each breast for 15 minutes before giving the formula.
Returning to the room, I felt like the worst mother in the world who can’t give the baby what he really needs. My husband was very supportive and said that it will work out, we will get home, find a lactation consultant and it will all be fine.
At home we immediately found a lactation consultant who we met the very next day. We were given a self made SNS (support nursing system), he showed us positions and gave instructions to feed the baby every 3 hours and not make longer pauses in the night; after each feed, express milk. This is how we struggled for a little bit over a week.
The baby found it hard to get anything out of the SNS system, perhaps due to the damaged face nerve which got affected during the birth. Each feed lasted 40m-1h where my husband would “squeeze” 60ml of formula in his mouth as I was holding the baby to my breast. The baby would regularly fall asleep during the feeds. After this procedure my husband would try to put the baby to sleep which normally took about 30 minutes. During that time I was trying to express milk.
After a struggle lasting over a week all three of us were exhausted. My milk hadn’t come in more than just a few drops, the baby had gained no weight since we left the hospital. Together with the lactation consultant we decided to start using the bottle, offering the breast right before, and trying to express any milk in between. I tried this for a few more weeks but the milk never came.
And so my dream of breastfeeding vanished in thin air. At first I felt very guilty, I thought that I’m the only one in the entire world like this and that my child will be sickly because of it, and I’m a bad mother. Now, 5 months later I have completely accepted this and appreciate the benefits that come with formula feeding.
Interestingly, I wanted to make the baby as soon as possible since I had read many stories about difficulties getting pregnant and since I have PCOS which correlates with difficulties getting pregnant, I was very anxious it might not work for us. The baby came to us the first month of starting to think about it.
What does it have to do with feeding? The internet, at least in my world, is full of stories about infertility and I had accepted it as a norm but nowhere could I find information about mums who really tried to breastfeed but it didn’t work out. I even read somewhere that if you can get pregnant, you can 100% feed, otherwise it is not possible. At the beginning I felt super lonely in this. I thought, if there’s a mum somewhere with this same problem, it’s because she didn’t try.
