I'm new here so please be gentle, apologies this is long but I want to include everything. My daughter will be 4 weeks this Thursday, she was born 8lb 8oz.
When at the hospital I spent time getting the midwives to check I was bf correctly and was told I had a good latch. On day 1 home the midwife came out and during a chat she said my daughter would have a growth spurt around day 3 and she advised to just feed on demand. Being a first time mum I took this at face value, i.e. feed every time she cried (rather than now I realise feed when she is hungry and making hunger type motions). Day 3 came and she screamed all night between 11pm - 8:30am, I fed her the whole time only stopping when she fell asleep. My milk still hadn't come in at this point so shattered and worried she was starving we dashed to the supermarket to get formula. We didn't use it until the next night when she had been up screaming again until 3am and I couldn't seem to satisfy her from my numerous attempts at feeding. So we gave her 3oz of formula and she gulped it down in 5 mins, stopped and spent the next hour quietly looking around, obviously content. Day 5 a different midwife came out and I discussed all of this with her, my daughter was weighed and dropped to 7lb 9oz and was told this was a serious loss and that she's lost too much weight, midwife deduced that my milk had still not come in properly and to try expressing with an electric pump to increase my supply, to try topping up with this and if I do not get enough then to top up with formula. We did this and it worked well, by day 12 our daughter was just above her birth weight.
Unfortunately although she is steadily gainly weight and now 9lb 7oz we are still stuck in this rut. Feeding is not going well. She feeds roughly every 3 hours and I will always offer breast first, we start on one breast and she always has a good latch, she's well and truely glued on, sometimes she'll suck well and if she comes off I put her back on until I'm sure it's 'run out' and she needs to move to breast 2. Other times she'll fall asleep after 10 mins, but if I move her she'll scream blue murder and make all sorts of movements which indicate she's still hungry, when I reattach she eats like she's never going to eat again....and then falls asleep after a couple of minutes. I have tried stripping her down to her nappy, using a cool wash cloth to keep her awake, blowing on her, tickling her, talking to her, basically everything I can think of, but even if I do get her to wake up this pattern will only repeat. Sometimes I think she's sucking for comfort rather than nourishment and have been advised giving her a dummy but we really don't want to do this. Usually I try to feed her for 40 mins and we do manage this on occasion but only from a lot of effort from me trying to keep her awake. More often than not she feeds for 25 mins, because I struggle to keep her awake I will then offer her expressed milk and if necessary formula and my lord does she guzzle it like it's going out of fashion, so I know she's hungry, sometimes she'll spit it out and so I do stop knowing she must be full. It's so hard to read the signals, I don't even think she knows what she wants, she must be confused sometimes!!
We really want to persist with breastfeeding but this is exhausting. The last week I've tried a breastfeeding bootcamp, everything set up ready in my room and each time she needs to eat we go up and just sit and concentrate on getting her fed, no distractions but I can find this takes up to two hours but after she is content. I find that all day long I'm feeding/expressing/sterilising non stop. I have been writing down every single feed she's had since she was a week old because this is what I was advised by a midwife and I find it helps to see patterns and see how much she is eating she day but everything is getting too much. I feel like giving up but 1) I don't want to and 2) it's not in my nature. I've asked for help from a midwife (who has since discharged us so that's to no avail) and my health visitor who says someone can come out but it might not be for a while....! Heard nothing since.
I'm at a total loss, I'm trying sooooo hard but this is shattering. I suffered from extreme pgp in pregnancy and was on crutches for most of it, I felt like I didn't get to enjoy my pregnancy because of this and now I feel like it's going to be like this forever, I know it won't but I can't see it changing because I don't know what's wrong. Any ideas?