Hello! Newbie here - previously I didn't have the courage to join Mumsnet as I thought you'd all eat me alive, but faint heart never f*ed a pig, as one of my old bosses used to say.
I so wish I'd seen this thread last year, when my DS was tiny. I consider myself a failed BFer, even though I made it to 4.5 months. Very briefly, here's what happened: DS was born by forceps after induced labour because I was suffering from pre-eclamptic liver failure (which had gone undiagnosed) at 38 weeks. He failed to feed properly and had a terrible latch, despite all the midwives telling me to persist, and developed dehydration and jaundice which meant he needed light therapy and bottle feeding. I started expressing then, which was a relief because feeding him had become so appallingly painful, I would be weeping every time I put him to the breast. Yet all the hospital staff told me that everything was fine, and ignored my pleas for help. I had to beg them to give him a cup feed one night as I knew things were wrong and was terrified he would become ill due to lack of food/fluids. Thinking back to that first week in hospital still upsets me badly, in fact I'm welling up as I type this.
As I'm a stubborn bugger, I decided to persist in expressing and finally - at 12 weeks - cracked BF. But then my milk supply failed at 18 weeks. (And before various folk tell me that "women think their milk's failed but it hasn't, etc", MINE DID - by that time I was under the care of a lactation consultant and she confirmed that despite fenugreek, domperidone, pumping round the clock and plenty of skin-to-skin etc, I was not producing enough. Probably as a result of erratic pumping/feeding in the early days.
The guilt I felt at giving my precious, darling son formula was horrendous. Even though I'm intelligent and can now look back with a measure of common sense, at the time I felt like a failure as a mother. I remember sitting in the mother and baby room at the hospital, feeding my baby from a bottle, looking at all the pictures of serene breastfeeding mums on the walls, and wanting to rip them down and trample on them. Cue hogwhimperingly nasty dose of PND, which didn't really go until 6 months post-partum.
I'm afraid I now blame the hospital staff for a lot of this. The support just wasn't there. I never saw the same midwife twice; there was no recognition of the severe health problems I'd gone through or the fact that the gigantic episiotomy made it really painful to feed sitting up (nobody showed me how to do it lying down until weeks later, when I got my wonderful LC). They all said his latch was fine when my shredded nipples were testimony to the fact it clearly wasn't. His dehydration was due to the fact he'd not been feeding well, yet nobody picked up on it until almost too late. When I left, there was no advice on how to cope when I got home. There was also no advice whatever on how to safely FF. Luckily my HV was wonderful - not judgmental at all, and very helpful on both the practicalities and the emotional side of things.
Anyway - and sorry for this turning into War & Peace! - my manifesto for helping mums like me is as follows:
- dedicated LC in maternity wards, so that mums having BF problems see the same person (and that the person they see is someone with specialist knowledge)
- hospital-grade pumps to hire and take home from the hospital. I mucked about with a single-sided Medela job for weeks, until I realised it wouldn't do and had to schlep 20 miles to hire a decent one.
- greater recognition by healthcare professionals of the possible dangers of breastfeeding when things aren't going well
- healthcare professionals actually listening to new mums' concerns, and not just dismissing them with an airy "everything's fine, just carry on"
- better information on how to safely FF. New parents shouldn't have to be hitting Google for this!
Thanks for listening to me rant ladies ;-)