How many of you felt let down by the hospital staff when you wanted to bf your newborn baby?

[Cazee]

Reading Jetjets' story has made me really mad. I remember the hospital staff taking my baby away from me after my emergency cesarean, saying "we have to give him formula or his blood sugar will drop". I am still really sad about it. He was 10 days overdue, not even pre-term, so I really don't believe that it was necessary, but at the time I felt as if I had been run over by a truck, I was in real shock, and I didn't know how to fight the hospital staff. When we are at our weakest we need health professionals to give us support and accurate advice, but in too many cases it seems that we are let down

So sorry to hear your sad story. I still feel traumitised by the way I was treated by the midwives in hospital. One came at 6am and had a real go at me for not being able to breastfeed saying that I was doing it deliberately and my lo would end up in the children's ward on a drip if I did not buck my ideas up. I cried for the whole day. Anywasy my lo is 10months and is still bf - hooray!

me... dont really want to go into it right now, but shall explain later...

it is such a shame that people do not get enough support. i was very lucky and had a midwifery assistant sit with me practically all night helping my lo latch on. unfortunately, the follow up wasn't there so when things got hard at home i gave up - something i am still sad about. i am a big admirer of anyone who manages to breastfeed for more than a few weeks!

Most of the MW's in hospital were good and helped me with the latching problem me and Ds were having. One even came every 3 hours (regular as clockwork) during one of the nights to help me. They sent in a bf counsellor to help aswell.

Unfortunately after 2 days, it still wasn't working so I did give up - and the MW's didn't make me feel bad or try and 'bully' me into continuing.

So all in all, a good experience here - they did all they could.

I had wanted to breast feed DD

With DS i had decided to bottle feed from the start, as no-one i knew breastfed, i was not educated about BF, i wanted my body back , so i did not try..ended up with emergency c.,s anyway...DS taken away in the night and fed by midwives.

with DD , i wanted to breast feed and have a vaginal birth..all the way through pregnancy, i wanted to breastfeed, until about 6 weeks before, don;t know what happened, but i bought formula and bottles just in case

decided to keep an open mind, but when she was born ( vaginally) , and was given to me for skin to skin, i had no desire what so ever to feed her. So midwife gave her to DH who gave her a bottle feed.

Then when my milk came in 3 days later, i was desperate, beyond desperate to put her to the breast....i tried and tried..had her skin to skin with me, trying every position, DH on laptop looking for breastfeeding help, me with book on my lap, trying to get her to latch on, worried that my enormous nork would suffocate her

she did have a slurp ,but not a feed...

so when the midwife visited, i asked her what to do

she said that after 3 or 4 days on the bottle, she would be unsettled and hard to get on the breast, but i could try

no help with positioning

no helpline numbers

no encouragement

so after a few failed attempts, she was bottle fed.

I am really cross, knowing what i know now, that no-one even bothered to sit with me for 5 minutes to help me.

that the first reaction was, well, you can try, but it probably won;t work

it is my one regret as a mother, that i did not breastfeed either child and i will never know what it feels like to suckle my baby

also, i had gallons of milk, and a really good let down

what a blimmin waste

Me. Rubbish advice. V.v. little support. If it wasn't for MN and NCT b/f helpline I most definitely wouldn't still be b/f DD at nearly 6 months. Next time I'm doing it at home. Can't think of any way I benefited from being on the postnatal ward. Especially as we went straight back 2 days later due to too much weight loss. Grr.

mememeeee evil vile bitch midwife taunting "why's your baby crying then" because i couldn't get him to latch on. i hope she has nightmares.

hooray though! feeding ds as i type (2 yrs on). cheers for bf counsellor and mn.

Yes, I ahd to ring 3 times to get them to check my latch and although it was terrible she just said oh he'll be OK and then left

That's ds1 though

Different MW for ds3 but she was fab- we did our babyfriendly course together and she lent em all the La Leche league folders sghe had, really gave me confidence.

Mind you it was her and the other MW persuaded me to have ds3 LOL

Not enough support in hospital (not surprising either given the staffing issues).

And as for HV support - well I could start a whole other thread on that (and I used to be one). No support from my HV either but know from my training and experience that it's shockingly low down the list of priorities when studying for that Public Health degree. Should be a priority - major public health issue IMHO - but hey - what do I know.

Felt very let down.

I made sure that it was on my notes that I wished to bf all my children. They were all taken to SCBU after birth, where a tube was put in and they were given formula, until they were strong enough to bf. I was lucky that the SCBU nurses were very encouraging and I was expressing milk for days, so they got the breast milk down the tube first. I managed to BF DS for 6 months, dd1 for 2 months (she was very demanding) and dd2 for 8 months. I am glad that the SCBU nurses were so encouraging, it would have been easy to give up, while I was at home and the babies were in SCBU.

I bf dd1 for 13 months and am currently bf dd2 who is 12 weeks old, however, this is down to pure dumb luck. Both girls just latched on and got on with it. I got almost no help on the postnatal ward. With dd1 my nipples went scabby and when I asked for some help and enquired about bf councellors the MW sneered 'that's for people with real problems'. Admittedly the problem resolved itself with some Lansinoh but it wasn't what my teary, snotty, hormonal self needed to hear.

The support I was given was pretty rubbish in hospital but had a lovely midwife at home after I came out who helped me stick at it. In hospital they would come eventually when I buzzed, grab my boob, ram it into DS mouth then disappear only for him to come off a few minutes later. Instead of teaching me properly which I guess would have taken longer initially, they just would put him on and leave so that I felt bad buzzing them again so would struggle on my own and get really upset. I only sussed it out for myslef after I got home and read books/went on message boards etc and had a visit by NHS breastfeeding councellor. Why don't they offer a breastfeeding class type thing in hospital if they don't have time to teach people one to one, I'd have gone to be shown how to do it, or some kind of drop in where you could go and be shown?

I got pretty much no help at all with breastfeeding. Once up on the ward I found the midwives were too busy doing other stuff to help out. I really struggled as my milk didn't come in, and I'd just had a c section and it was really hard to lift DD let alone hold her in the right position. Might have succeeded more had I recieved more supprt at the hospital and in the first couple of week at home.

I wish I'd known about MN and the NCT when I had Dd1 .

I felt like no-one had time to help and they made a big deal out of helping me - including legging it the moment DD was latched on, at which point of course, she came off and I had no clue how to get her back on again

99% of the midwives at the hospital I gave birth at were very supportive of bf, they didn't always know as much as they thought they did but they meant well.

However the midwife who actually delivered me (who was a bit of a cow) was very old school and took DS off me almost as soon as I'd given birth. I had to ask twice if I could have him back as I wanted to breastfeed as soon as possible (this was written in my birthplan). When she eventually did give him back to me, all wrapped up, he was quite sleepy and would latch and it took another 24 hours before he woke up enough to feed, even though I'd had no drugs at all.

All's well that ends well, but it was a very stressful 24 hours waiting for him to latch on, with glucose pricks and me not allowed to go home until he fed, and I firmly believe if I'd got him to the breast quicker it could all have been avoided.

Oh and they had a very nice breastfeeding specialist midwife who was very knowledgeable... except that there was only one, and she only worked 9-5 on weekdays. So if, like me, you gave birth late on a Friday you were a bit shafted.

Nickytwotimes,in what was did things get hard at home and what do yuo mean by no follow up??

I didn't feel let down at the time because they seemed to be trying their best. In hindsight though I do.

I had a hideous time in hospital after DS was born. Normal term delivery, no issues apart from his inability to bf or suckle properly....probably hampered by the pain killers they gave me and definately almost irreperably damaged by the succession of differing advice.....things like "yes your nipples are rather large you probably wont manage to bf" & "well you dont need to do that" (said after the feeding advisor had just left written instriuctions on what we should be doing)....not to mention the horrible rough handling DS was given by loads of mws basically trying to shove him on my boobs ......by the time I escaped 5 days after he was born he was literally afriad of my boobs & refused to feed from them at all. It took a whole month of exclusively pumping & feeding ebm via bottle before he would take the boob with a shield & then a further 3 months before he would take both sides au natrel.....if I hadnt have been in contact with my local LLL group before he was born & the fabulous help they were I doubt we would have succeeded at all .

It will take a very large crow bar & a large crowd of very stong men to get me anywhere near that hospital again

Gosh Terramum,hats off to yuo for persevering in a very difficult situation.
(Did it strike you as odd at the time that they were ignoring the written advice? I can't believe that anyone could assume it is accurate or appropriate to comment on perceived inadequacies of women's bodies.Imagine a doctor sucking his teeth whilst examining a bloke's nether regions and saying something like 'With a cock like that you'll never manage to father a child.'!!

You know,the biggest shock to me was discovering that in general MWs and doctors know fuck all about breast feeding. Foolish little me thought this would be one of the most important topics covered in training.

The support I received from the midwives in hospital was enthusiastic but patchy and inconsistant.

They didn't have time to sit with me for long and although they promised to come when buzzed and urged me to buzz each time I tried to latch ds on, in practice they were too busy and the Health Care Assistants who answered the buzzer instead weren't so pro-bf and made me feel that I was wasting the midwives' valuable time. On the plus side, they were encouraging and did show me how to hand express colostrum and cup feed ds.

Luckily my community midwife was excellent and immediately twigged that the damage to my nipples was not normal nor sustainable. Dh said recently when we were talking about it that he was sure she was going to recommend bottles as she was so shocked at the sight of me, instead she taught me about wet healing, expressing with a pump and sat and showed me how to latch ds on the best she could (engorgement and flat nipples were exacerbating my problems). She also sent dh out with a shopping list for items as diverse as Lansinoh, ibubrofen and a savoy cabbage. She then referred me back to the bf counsellors at the hospital for the next day. I saw them every few days for the next few weeks and they were amazing.

The thing is, in terms of NHS resources it was so inefficient. I took up loads of staff time afterwards when a bit more knowledgeable support on day one could maybe have stopped things getting so bad in the first place.

I had an emergency c-section at 9pm. By the next day I had nipple shields and a hospital pump because I wouldn't get the stimulation. I knew this was going to completely mess things up so I worked on doing it right myself. Thankfully, my previously flat nipples (did the drugs so that cos I've never known my nipples to be so unresponsive to anything) perked up so that helped.

Then the "help". Apparently the "breastfeeding specialist" had only ever read about baby positioning and checking it's working because she had trouble with my immense breasts and then everytime she tried to check he came off. Then she just left me!!!

I will always be immensely grateful to the nurse assistant who came on in the evening, she was probably in her 50s and had an old style no-nonsense but supportive approach and she knew what she was doing! She told me other signs to check for that ds was feeding, showed me a better hold for my weight and breast size. I had a problem again and I rang and it wasn't her, just someone else who gave up, and then she re-appeared to find me in tears and I told her how everyone just gave up, and she apologised and got to helping me again. She was wonderful. I don't know what I would have done without her.

Then I heard her helping the person in the bed next to me who'd had a ventouse delivery. She'd seen me sitting next to the bed feeding ds and was trying it and the nurse assistant started teaching her to feed lying down given the pain she had from the delivery. I felt so sad for that woman though. She wanted to stay in longer to learn how to breastfeed properly but her husband persuaded her to give the child a bottle so they could go home sooner. Made me angry for her.

Anyway, I thought the nurse assistant should have given the midwife "breastfeeding specialist" (it said so on her badge!) some lessons.

Moondog,

In the back of my mind at the time I did know that they werent doing anything right. But I had a v long labour lasting several days & by the time I was on the ward just before midnight on a wednesday night I hadnt dozed for more than a couple of hours since monday evening. I didnt get any more sleep until the friday so wasnt really able to think straight or stand up for myself. It wasnt helped by the fact that neither me or DH (who was just as exhausted as I was) didnt think to bring any of the info we had at home that I had gathered from the NCT classes or my LLL group & it took several days to get a copy of the NHS bfing booklet from the mws . By then though the damage was done & I was simply too tired and fed up of not feeding my baby (they refused to let me cup feed any of my expressed milk)to try any harder. Things really came to a head in the early hours of the Friday morning when I literally couldnt take DSs crying anymore & really felt like throwing him at the wall . Lukily I recognised that & put him in the nursery. I woke 4 hours later very revived & feeling better only to find that the mw had given him twice as much forumla as I wouldve done & realised that if I didnt escape I would never bf at all. I didnt escape until the Sunday in the end as they wanted several satisfactory blood sugar tests....

Both times, once in england and once in spain. In england it was nurse physically shoving boob in dd's mouth. Luckily she was a natural and took to it like a duck to water.

In Spain, they didn't offer any help or advice but would whisk ds off stuff him full of sugar water and then formula and tell me after the event. They also told me I was starving my child as he was a big baby.

Having breastfed successfully for 17 months with dd you wouldn't think that it would have been a problem. Unfortunately noone told me that after a c section your milk can take a bit longer to come in. Also ds wasn't a natural. I am now successfully mixed feeding him, which isn't what I would have chosen but they knocked my confidence.