WARNING very long, boring and just getting it out of my system: what BF was like for me

[jetjets]

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omg, you've had a time of it, as so many of us do. Big hugs, seriously!
I agree that BFing is hard - i think this is the key message campaigners must get across as it seems to throw so many women, did me first time round. I "failed" iME to feed ds1 and felt so bad about this. However, 2nd time round, no problem so I hope, if you wish it, that it works out better for you bfing next time round. At least you'll feel prepared anyway.

wow, jet jets

thanks so much for sharing that

i hope it writing it down has made you feel better

i can see you and your DH were strong and determined, but like you say, you were railroaded

you did amazingly to get to the point you did

don;t beat yourself up x

Good God! What an awful time you had! Thank you for sharing your story.

on your behalf. But I don;t understand why you say you blame yourself for what came after. it seems to me that you did everything humanly possible, and imvho, the way you feel now might be as much about expectations and pressure as about a rational approach to the benefits of bfeeding. Your ds has a loving family and has had the best start in life that you could have given him - even in really difficult circumstances you managed to give him breast milk - feel proud of yourself. try to move on and think about lots of happy tomorrows, your ds growing up in a loving and happy environment - in the scheme of things b-feeding is a small part of what you give to your dcs. I hope it was cathartic to write it all down.

jetjets, thank you for sharing that. it made me really to think of what you went through.
i too had a really tough time with bfing at the start, although nothing like your experience. i had been to a bf course run at the hospital whilst i was pregnant and the woman running it was very fervent and almost militant in her delivery of the course and she maintained that everyone can bf, you shouldnt get sore nipples and babies shouldnt need to ever cry if youre bfing and fully in tune with them, wtf!! looking back now, i can see she was a bit a of a loon, but when i was attempting to bf at the beginning, i had all this running through my head.
and you're right, it was totally not your fault and i'm glad that you have been able to share your experience, on mn and in real life, because i know that it will really benefit others

oh god, tibsy, I had a woman like that too on my NCT course and even though I knew, rationally, that she was a bit extreme, I still had her chattering on in my head about how "it should never hurt" when I had bleeding nipples, tricky baby and was sobbing my heart out! It is so wrong!

You did have a tough time, but you have nothing to beat yourself up about at all.

I too had every intention of bf my first, and he was 3 wks late so I had plenty of time to prepare. After a long difficult birth though he too was very sleepy and I had difficulty getting him to latch on. I remember being sat on the ward at 5am with a grumpy midwife who kept saying just try him again when all me and him wanted to do was sleep.

I found bf painful and not in the least rewarding. I had inverted nipples, bleeding nipples, mastitis,and unfeasably large boobs, and once he got the hang of it he wanted to feed every two hours and was on there for an hour. I used to dread him waking up and I started to think this is not what I had a baby for, I wanted to enjoy him.

After a lot of soul searching and pressure to carry on from hv and midwives I made the best decision for me and bottle fed him. I felt terribly guilty for a long time, and my way of making up for it was to never feed him commercial baby food, it sounds daft but it made me feel a bit better!

When I was having my second I made the decision that I would not bf, mainly to avoid the Dolly Parton effect when my milk came in! This meant I approached the whole thing with a lot more confidence and enjoyed having the tiny baby around so much more.

A small part of me still feels bad that I didnt feed, but I know it was the right thing for me. I now have three strapping boys, and those problems seem very far away. My eldest is 11 and my worries now are high school and girlfriends, you never stop worrying it just changes.

I hope you do send your post to the hospital JetJets. It's so eloquently writtewn and should be seen and used to ensure other women have better care than you did .

Jetjets, what an incredible post, you sound like an amazing mother and determined to do the best for your son in difficult circumstances. Your post really moved me and reminded me of the first few days in hospital with DS.

He was a very sleepy baby and wouldn't latch at all. For the first 24 hours he took absolutely nothing, I was getting more and more worried and if a midwife had told me I had to give him formula I would have probably done it out of desperation. In fact they were very supportive and DS just seemed to wake up on day 2 and suddenly got it.

Please do send your story to the hospital - all women deserve to get the right advice and maybe your account could help them do better next time.

jets - send your story to them. They need to know the feelings behind the 'breastfeeding problems'. You were badly let down and you deserve a massive medal for your determination and courage.

36-weekers are notorious for not quite being able to co-ordinate sucking and swallowing (it's to do with the way the reflexes develop in utero - at 36 weeks they're not quite there) and they need a lot of skin to skin care and gentle, sensitive handling to enable them to bf...and so do their mums

You said 'sometimes you do everything right and the baby doesn't want to play'....well, that can be true, but in your case, you were trying to do everything right but the hospital staff didn't want to play. Nothing in your story is your fault at all.

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jetjets, I am an NCT bfc, so it's likely I would say the same as the one you spoke to (it may even have been me, you never know )

OK - skin to skin supports all the baby's instincts to be close to mum and to feed for food and comfort. It's a lovely thing to do, and has an excellent scientific base to do with hormones, temperature regulation and early non-verbal communication. The science and the love bit of it, too, are here: biological nurturing website

The power of touch with pre-term babies is well-documented, even for teeny tiny ones, and again you can find the science and love of it on the web here: at the kangaroo care site

In hospital you could have held your baby in this way, and this would have encouraged early feeding and boosted your confidence, too. You did the right thing, expressing, when the baby wasn't getting the milk very effectively. Your baby was a good weight, so there may have been less need to treat him like a pre-term baby - pre-terms, even good weight ones, are at a higher risk of low blood sugar, but this can be tested for, and colostrum can be given, anyway. It may have been necessary to give formula - maybe his blood sugars were low - but the weight loss does not seem to have been an issue.

The midwives should not have shoved you about or pressured him or you - leaving you tucked in together would have been better

None of this would have been a guarentee of smooth bf - as I say, 36 weekers can be a challenge. But from what you say, they made the challenge greater rather than smaller.

Talking it all over with a bfc on the bf line might help you. Getting it all out, and then putting it all behind you, might be a good feeling. You know, in your heart, that you gave, and continue to give, the most important thing to your baby which is the unconditional love he is growing up with. Don't disparage your wish to breastfeed - to you, breastfeeding was part of what you wanted for your little boy, and for reasons outside your control, you were unable to give this for as long as you planned. It was a good plan! Like lots of plans, it didn't work out....and that is sad, but you are moving on, and you are having other plans that will work out

that blummin hatrick. she always gets the credit. mumble mumble

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Hi Jetjets.
Read your heartfelt post with tears in my eyes. I'm really glad that you took the time to write it al ldown and yes,please use it as a basis for a formal complaint.

XXXX

You poor thing. It can become a bit like post traumatic stress disorder when people have bad birth or after birth experiences. I heard a lady on the radio talking about the birth she had in 1970 which was dreadful and her daughter and grandmother described theirs which were okay but this lady 30 years on was still upset as to how it went.

All babies lose weight at first. It's disgusting what they said to you.

What I think you need to try to do is not worry about it, try not make it feel so important. It's only feeding.

My sisters twins were about 6 weeks early. I remember going into the hospital to see them. She was having trouble latching on (avert your gaze now if you don't approve of this... but I latched on me - my twins were 2 but there was still a little bit of milk) which helped her to see how it's done and she did manage to feed premature twins herself but they didn't special care.

By the way yes discharge yourself when you liked. I had our first three on the basis I could have a 6 hour transfer that day which was agreed. I had one of the twins at home. You have so much more power and control in your own environment.

By the way my sister in law who had to give up feeding her first hired a breastfeeding expert for the second and the feeding went brilliantly,

Brilliant idea to show her how it was done Xenia.
My sister once took my screaming colicky baby one night to let me have some rest and kept her happy with some sucking action!

My first was born at 36 weeks and I too was rail-roaded into ff although, just like you I had no intention of doing so. I still feel guilty about it, but more than that I feel angry that the so-called bf expert told me after one glance that I was never going to bf and walked off. But you know what, it isn't us who should be feeling guilty, its them and if you do go ahead and complain, good luck.

What I found with my sister's twin baby was it could latch on which was interesting because that was her problem. It wouldn't latch on her but it would on me so it wasn't that it was incapable of latching on or may be he was but she didn't know what the feeling was like because she'd never done it before.

On discharge with the twins one was born at home so not in the hospital's care (he was a visitor age 1 day.... very funnny) but his twin was born in hospital. It got to about 10pm that day and we really needed to get home. We had 2 school age children there too. So in the end I said if they couldn't find someone to check him over we were just leaving. They quickly rustled up a doctor.

Wow jets that's so traumatic

I agree you deserve a medal

JetJets - what an incredibly sad story and how brave of you for telling it. You don't need to be told you did everything right (and you did) but I am in admiration of you for your determination to try every avenue, where so many mums would have just said 'it's one of those things' and given up at the first hurdle. Next time, I hope you have a better experience. There are so many things that in retrospect I'm angry at from the birth of my daughter, but mostly it's the railroading and assumption that mums know nothing. Thank you for proving this is not the case.

I'm sorry you've had a rough time

Jetjets, sorry to read your story. I had a very similar story.

It never occured to me not to bf but my daughter was also born 4.5 weeks early and she just slept and was very jaundiced and losing weight.

I actually didn't go onto formula top ups for 10 days by which time she had lost more than 10% of her body weight and although I was dubious about formula I could see that the bfing was not getting the jaundice flushed out quickly enough and was advised that apart from anything else she needed the extra fluid. She simply didn't have the energy to bf properly.

I ended up spending hundreds of pounds on a breastfeeding consultant at about 3 weeks (who was great and who incidentally suggested that I gave the baby a 20 ml formula "starter" before bf to give her the energy she needed to bf) - and we struggled with it for 6 weeks, with formula support all the way through, until we finally cracked it. But I spent those weeks expressing, drinking fennel tea and crying so it was bloody hard work.

I don't actually blame the formula - for us it kept the possibility of bf open until she was awake enough and I was skilled enough to do it properly.

But I think you were absolutely right to say what you said at ante natal. I think the bf campaigners do no one any favours when they emphasize the simplicity of bfing - I would have preferred to know that I might have to fight for bf. It's not just about whether you live in bf friendly society or not (I did). It can also be just bloody hard, especially with a prem baby.

Anyway, I seem to have hijacked your thread with my own moan...how unlike me

But please, be proud of what you managed. 3 months is brilliant. According to something I read on here recently, only 1% of women manage to bf exclusively for 6 months and I certainly wasn't one of them despite being a big advocate of bf. So three months is brilliant - remember that!

OMG JetJets - your post has brought tears to my eyes. I really hope it has helped you writing all that down and that you can move on. Like you, I long for the day when it won't seem to matter so much any more.