Dehydrated 6 day old DD with 17% weight loss, please advise me, a clueless first timer

[ZeroMinusZero]

Ladies, I've been having quite a few problems with 6 day old DD (born by section if that makes any difference). She seemed to be doing OK in hospital and was a fat, happy baby at 8lbs 11oz so I came home on Wednesday.

Since then she's been a bit of a nightmare crying all the time. She's definitely dehydrated - sunken fontanella (spelling?), she did have a dry chapped mouth and was producing a lot of orange crystals in her nappies and hasn't had many dirty ones, and none of the famous dirty mustardy coloured ones yet.

Yesterday the mw doing the heel prick weighed her and she had 17% weight loss. MW realised that DD has a very poor latch and spent quite a lot of time showing me tips, but I still can't do anything to get her to open her mouth wide enough :(

On MW's advice we went out to get a hand pump and since yesterday have expressed a bit and DD has absolutely loved getting that. I don't get very much when I express yet though, so last night we resorted to giving DD about 3 or 4 ounces of formula.

Currently I'm hand pumping about 1oz in about 20-30 minutes. I'm pretty sure this isn't enough so we're thinking about getting an electric one today. Although I'm not 100% that my milk has fully come through yet as my boobs aren't very hard, although I think it is getting there as milk expressed this morning was yellow, whereas the day before it was much clearer.

So does anyone have any thoughts on all this? Things I am thinking about are:

1. Would an electric pump make much of a difference? I find the hand pump quite exhausting at the moment.

2. How much should she be eating, in mils or ounces? I am guessing that 1 ounce per feed is not enough

3. If DD hasn't established a good latch yet, what are the chances of her magically, suddenly getting one?

Any thoughts would be very, very gratefully recieved :)

Don't know what happened there. It should say "it felt ridiculously indulgent but it really helped"!

Thanks SweetApril, my DD is doing really well now, the only issue currently is that she will only feed from one side and still has the odd top up of formula, but hopefully these things will improve with time :)

Take her to see a cranial osteopath to check out her ability to latch on. If she cant open her mouth wide enough she may need some gentle treatment to help her with that.

I haven't read the whole thread so apologies if this has been mentioned before, but has the baby been checked for tongue tie?

remember they mentioned that at bfing class but I forgot about it so thanks for reminding me

icd yes but only at bfing class, not sure why the midwives at hospital or HV didn't have a quick look, but no she's not tongue tied thankfully

Our DS has 13% weight loss (born at 8lbs 6oz) and was admitted to hospital with severe dehydration and jaundice at 3 days old. Cried for hours at night and bf'ing was agonising painful for me that he was starving. He had to be given formula equivalent to 20mls per hour. So we had to feed him 60mls every 3 hours. Whilst in hospital I was expressing every 3 hours, day and night, so he got a lot of milk from me. Sadly he wouldn't feed from me but he was so ill and hungry. There is time to go back to breast feeding once the dehydration is sorted.

Sounds like your little one needs urgent help.

Hope it goes well x