I’m trying to battle my way through a complicated dilemma and wondered if anyone could comment. If not, hopefully typing it all out will help me to process it.
My baby boy was born nearly six weeks ago by EMCS. He wasn’t breathing and was taken straight to neonatal. It turned out we both had an E. coli infection, which I knew nothing about. Obviously it came from me.
He had a chest infection and spent four days on neonatal, but thankfully recovered well. I was given a couple of courses of antibiotics because I developed a UTI and then my wound got infected.
Largely because of all of this, he started off being formula fed. I tried a few times in hospital to get him to latch on but he wouldn’t. So I started to express in the hope that I could get him on the breast once we were home. Sure enough, a private Lactation consultant introduced me to nipple shields, and that seemed to work.
However, I then found out that I still had a UTI and a wound infection, and both were tested and showed positive for E. coli. I was already worried that I might somehow reinfect my son with it, and when I heard this, I got really worried that maybe he could get it from my breast milk. Before I left hospital I had asked the doctors about the risk of giving it back to him, and they had said that as long as I practiced good hand hygiene, it should be fine. However, one doctor said to me ‘if you had it in your blood, you might give it to him through breastfeeding. But if you had it in your blood, you’d know about it.’
Therefore when I found out the E. coli was in my section wound, I thought perhaps this did mean I had a systemic infection (i.e. it was in my blood). So I spoke a breastfeeding midwife at the hospital who told me that from seven days postpartum, the breast tissue would not permit E. coli to pass through it, but there could be a risk that it could be on my breasts and nipples, therefore she recommended that I do breastfeed but wash my hands and breasts before doing so. She said she couldn’t 100% guarantee that this would be safe but she could offer odds of 99%.
This is where my OCD kicks in. I’m thinking if there is even a 1% chance of giving my son E. coli, why risk it? The midwife said that the benefits of breastfeeding would outweigh the risk. But my OCD still couldn’t deal that, given that my son seemed to be doing fine on formula, so for the duration of time that I was taking my course of antibiotics, I pumped and dumped.
I subsequently started giving him mixed formula and expressed milk, only to find out that I was still infected (or reinfected) in my wound, and had another (or a persistent) UTI. This is where I am now. I am on my third or fourth course of antibiotics. All the medical professionals I have spoken to say that breastfeeding should be fine, and would actually give him antibodies that would protect him. But I still can’t deal with the risk (perceived or actual) that i could make my baby sick again. So I’m back to pumping and dumping.
This obviously isn’t a sustainable situation. My milk will dry up soon - especially as I only seem to have the time to pump four times a day at most. And I’m totally torn between giving up on breastfeeding, resuming breastfeeding (or at least giving him expressed milk), or continuing to pump and dump until such a time as I feel that it is safe. And I might never get there, because even if the wound heals and the UTI goes, how can I be sure that the E. coli has gone?
This is all made more complex by my OCD, my feelings of guilt over him getting the infection in the first place (I assume this was down to me not properly wiping after a bowel movement...), guilt over the idea that I could breastfeed him and would be giving up too easily, and a lack of understanding of E. coli. People keep saying things like ‘it lives on most people’s skin’ but clearly I must have some sort of quite resistant strain in my body? Then there’s the concern that I’m actually putting him at more risk by not breastfeeding because he’s not getting any antibodies...
Anyway that was really long, so I’m very grateful to anyone still reading.
Any thoughts?