Janna - an Introduction

I always knew that I would breastfeed my children. It was the one thing that I was absolutely certain about motherhood. However, my certainty faltered when my daughter was born in February of 2011.

In order to maximize my chances for breastfeeding success, I chose to deliver naturally at a birth center. I took a breastfeeding class, read breastfeeding books, and watched breastfeeding videos. My daughter was immediately placed on my chest after she was born and put to my breast. We were able to snuggle without interruption for her first hour of life, but after the first hour she still had not latched. Unfortunately, I suffered a third degree tear during childbirth that required medical attention. At only two hours old, we packed my daughter up in the car and drove to the hospital. When we were finally able to attempt breastfeeding again, my daughter was too sleepy to rouse. We opted to go home the morning that she was born. In retrospect, we should have stayed at the hospital and maybe we could have benefited from some lactation support, but at the time I didn’t know that anything was wrong.

No amount of reading could have prepared me for the challenges we were about to face over the next several weeks. After we arrived home from the hospital we continued to attempt to breastfeed without success. I immediately called a lactation consultant to come to our home to assist us. She was able to get our daughter to latch, but not well. Each time the lactation consultant tried to get her to latch, she would force my daughter onto my breast. We continued to attempt breastfeeding with little to no success. I was able to hand express some colostrom to feed her while we continued to work on breastfeeding. On my daughters 3^rd day of life, we knew that things were going terribly wrong. She had been screaming all night because she was hungry and unable to latch to my breast. We had tried every hour throughout the night and in the morning she was so upset there was no way that we were going to be able to get her to latch. She was jaundiced and had stopped having stools. Her urine frequency had decreased and there were uric acid crystals in her diaper. We were scared. My husband was minutes away from running out the door to buy formula. I called the lactation support services at the hospital and they sent me a Madela Symphony pump out that afternoon. We also called the lactation consultant we had been working with so that she could come to our house to help our daughter latch and show me how to use the pump.

Having no success with latching that afternoon, I started pumping and feeding my daughter expressed milk. At first we tried using the SNS with a nipple shield, but it was way too cumbersome to keep up long term; we only used the SNS for about a week. Additionally, she wasn’t latching all that well to the nipple shield, just to the tip, so we didn’t feel this system was getting us any closer to breastfeeding. We tried finger feeding for a while, but there is only so long you can keep up with the circus of breastfeeding devices before giving up and switching to a bottle. By this point, with all the interventions we had tried, my daughter had developed a severe breast aversion. At one point I couldn’t even take my top off around her because if she saw my breast she would start screaming. Any time I would put her near my breast she would scream. I was heartbroken. I felt like a failure. All I wanted to do was to feed my baby in the most natural way possible and I felt like she was rejecting me. It was really hard not to take the breast refusal personally. I spent a lot of time crying while pumping.

Over the course of our breastfeeding struggles, we saw a total of 4 lactation consultants and a physical therapist (for craniosacral therapy). Even though we had a lot of professional assistance and personal determination we were unable to get breastfeeding to work. I decided that in order to provide my daughter with the best nutrition possible I needed to focus on pumping. When I gave up on nursing, I actually started making more milk. At first I was really ashamed and embarrassed. I was very self conscious about bottle feeding my daughter in public. I also felt very isolated because I would pump alone in the nursery. I felt very disconnected; I was spending 4-5 hours per day pumping away from my daughter. I felt like I was missing out on a lot of opportunities to bond with her. I was lucky to have a huge amount of support from my husband and family. Without their encouragement I don’t think that I could have continued.