Breastfeeding exhaustion, please help!

[WillyMilly]

Hello,

This is my first post here so please be kind I'm at my wits end after trying everything so thought I'd turn to the collective wisdom of Mumsnet! I'm a new mum and really struggling to breastfeed my 6 week old DS and everyday is an such ordeal, I'm emotionally exhausted and tempted to throw in the towel but wondering if there's something out there I haven't tried.

A bit of background... After bringing DS home 2 days after an uneventful ELCS, he was very sleepy and barely waking up to feed and as a result when my milk came in I became very engorged. I realised that he wasn't taking milk off my breast and due to engorgement and blocked ducts I had to express and gave it to him with a bottle. He absolutely wolfed it down which made me realise that he mustn't have been able to latch properly and must have been so hungry after a couple of days. I continued to try and breastfeed, seeking advice from HVs, MWs and even a specialist whilst continuing to bottle feed him over night and am still struggling so much 6 weeks later. I felt I needed to bottle feed over night as we both needed the break and energy to continue to try on the breast the next day.
Some tries he seems to get it absolutely perfectly but 9/10 it goes t*ts up!! Most of the time he'll latch, pull off and cry and then continue to cry/scream every time I bring him to the breast. He pulls, strains and arches his back as he's feeding. I'll comfort him and he'll start rooting, I offer the breast and he'll head butt my nipple or mouth at my nipple and start screaming again without ever latching on. I think I might have a fast flow, perhaps due to the pumping- and he might have bad wind. I burp him all the time, tried all sorts of positions and leaning back but can't seem to find the answer. He often cries a lot with the bottle as well as he gulps down lots of air and I'm forever burping him and using infacol which helps a little but not a lot. What should be a comfort is turning out to be traumatising for us both and I just don't know how or if I should even bother carrying on and just bottle feed him expressed?! Sorry for the epic essay
TIA

6 weeks is such a difficult time. It’s cluster feeding central and your still exhausted from the birth and your baby still isn’t doing anything interesting or really giving anything back. I would drop the bottle for this week and just focus on getting you as much sleep as possible. Honestly it’s lockdown so you can’t go any where, assuming those is your only child I would aim on showering/bathing once a day, easiest to do in the morning when your partners home, brush your teeth twice a day, eating and drinking them your job is to feed your baby watch tv and sleep and obviously change baby’s nappy as needed.

What’s his poo like?

You need to make sure he is fed - whether he breast feeds, feeds from a bottle of expressed milk or has formula.
So long as he is feeding he will sleep well and be more relaxed.
Try not to overthink it. In 5 years time nobody will ask how you fed your newborn.

Was he checked for a tongue tie in hospital? X

Agree with PP, it sounds like tongue tie.

Thank you all so much for your responses! I had a private breastfeeding consultant check for tongue tie when she came to help me a few weeks ago and she didn't spot anything odd. I don't know much about it but he can stick his tongue out and it's a normal shape.

Hi selfsettling3- thanks for your advice, I would love to be able to push through and crack it but I tried that one day and he screamed bloody murder for hours through the night and I feel I couldn't handle that again. Surely letting him scream like that can't be doing him any good?

Sorry I miss understood. I thought you were giving him one bottle a night to get some rest. Are you just giving him expressed milk? That sounds really hard work.

Yes I have been expressing and giving him bottles twice through the night to get some sleep because when I tried to EBF for a whole day and through the night he just screamed at the top of his lungs and got all sweaty... absolutely heartbreaking. The crazy thing is is that he CAN do it happily. I just don't know what causes him not to 90% of the time and causes him so much upset..

I found 6 weeks a particularly difficult time too! They have a growth spurt around this age which makes everything harder.

I found my baby sometimes cried and arched his back because he couldn't get the milk let-down to happen fast enough (and he was hungry!) then when it finally happened he got squirted in the face with a jet of milk which obviously made him unhappy too!!

My solution was to feed often, before he got too hungry to prevent the frustration, then whenever I got fast let down I de-latched him and expressed a bit into a towel until the flow calmed down and he could latch comfortably again. I spent lots of time with him on my chest getting skin to skin contact and I think that helped us too.

Hope this helps! xx

Also, are you using a paced feeding technique for the bottles? Getting milk from a bottle is far easier for babies because the milk just flows into their mouths, breastfeeding takes much more muscle action. Paced feeding will help prevent bottle preference xx

kellymom.com/bf/pumpingmoms/feeding-tools/bottle-feeding/

Link to paced feeding technique from kellymom 🙂

OP, when my baby was 6 weeks old we experienced exactly the same problems that you are having. A family member who is a health visitor watched us struggling with a feed and instantly recognised the problem as silent reflux (have a look online and see if the symptoms sound familiar to you). Silent reflux can be tricky to diagnose as, unlike 'normal' reflux, no milk is brought up. We started baby on medication for it straightaway and this solved the problem. There are a few different treatment options for silent reflux, but it was Omeprazole that eventually did the trick for us (although it did take a good 3 weeks to see results). Baby is now a year old, he was exclusively breastfed for 6 months and is still bf now. While we were waiting for the medication to kick in, a dummy popped in the mouth straight after a feed seemed to soothe him a bit, and we were also advised to prop the head of his crib up at a slight angle. Hope this helps.