Tongue tie and mastitis

[Mapley]

My friend has a Gorgeous two week old who had a baby Tongue tie. Tongue tie was diagnosed after a week of painful feeding and she was advised to syringe feed and express milk.

The Tongue tie was cut a week ago, and the baby hasn't been able to latch on since operation, and is syringe feeding still. My friend has been advised to express every three hours. She has mastitis now, has had it for 2 days now and has antibiotics. Her milk supply is suffering and she's worried about not having enough to feed her baby.

Yesterday her health visitor advised her to start topping up with formula and using a dummy instead of a little finger to settle baby. Am I wrong in thinking that this is bad advice? And what kind of advice should I be giving her? how can she increase her milk supply? The breast feeding clinic isn't open again till after the weekend for proffessional advice.

My friend is amazing and trying so incredibly hard and really wants to bteastfeed, I want to support her in anyway I can. Any perspectives, advice or suggestions of where to ask for help?

Bump?

My DD (now 8 wks old) had tongue tie but wasn't diagnosed until she was 6 wks old. Before then it was extremely painful to feed and both nipples were very damaged. I thought the pain would never end and didn't know what was going on as she is my 2nd child and I knew how to bf.

She had the tie cut but unfortunately my supplied had dwindled by then. I had also had a bowt of mastitis. Unfortunately, once she had her tongue tie cut my supply was so low that, even though she could probably have fed a lot better, the milk wasn't there to enable her to try properly. I thought the tie hadn't been sorted properly.

I started taking Domperidone on prescription to increase my milk supply. I combined this with lots of expressing (hired a double pump from Medela to make life easier) and I used the expressed milk to top her up after each feed just to get her weight up and increase her energy levels in order for her to take more milk at feeding times. With the increased pumping and increased supply, she began to feed so much better, the pain stopped and now, at 8 wks she feeds like a dream. I had a week of hard work to get my supply back up and running and coax her into using her jaw muscles a bit better but I really think it was more due to the lack of milk flow at this point that she wasn't feeding properly. Once she had been "fixed", she needed more milk to practise properly.

Domperidone is recognised by all bf experts but unfortunately not by many doctors so it is hard to get on prescription. Fortunately, with the help of a LLL consultant I have managed to persuade my doctor to prescribe me some. However, in the absence of this she could take Fenugreek and Blessed Thistle together - she can get these from a health food shop. These, combined with frequent feeding and frequent expressing should get her supplies up again. I honestly think that if the supply is back up to better levels then the baby will be able to use his/her tongue better.

If the baby still has problems once the supply is better, she should probably get it re-looked at.

HTH!

Thanks, that is a great help. I was wondering about domperidine. I was prescribed it myself last year, so thought it may be helpful. What dosage were you on? Were you syringe feeding aswell? How dud you coax her to feed?