Posterior tongue-tie

[roseswade]

Hi all,

FTM here with 3 week old baby. When she was born I started breastfeeding but was having a lot of trouble with her latch as it was so painful and I had bruised and bleeding nipple. DD was so unsettled and would scream for hours because she wasn’t getting enough food. We started topping up with formula and have ended up gradually moving fully to formula as I was finding it too stressful BF when she couldn’t latch.

We have now found out that she has a posterior tongue tie which has contributed to the issues with feeding. She has also been suffering from a lot of wind, hiccups, makes clicking sounds on the bottle and frequently sicks up or dribbles feeds. We were told it’s only a mild tongue tie so we’re in two minds as to whether to get a tongue tie division. If we do we’d probably go private due to the waiting list times at our local hospital and because I’ve had such a bad experience so far with the hospital.

We’re really unsure whether it’s worth getting it corrected…would it help with her sickness etc? I’m tempted to also try to go back to BF if we do get it done. But also I don’t know whether she’ll now just want the bottle. Really unsure what to do! I’m also worried about speech implications in the future.

Any advice?

Personally I'd get it corrected. DS' wasn't discovered until later and at the tike we felt he was too old.

I really wish we had though as we had awful problems with sleep, weaning and he had SLT on and off for years.

My baby had a posterior tongue tie. The (older) doctor told us that tongue tie is just a trendy thing for babies to be diagnosed with nowadays - years ago it wasn’t a thing, and she won’t do surgery because it’s an unnecessary fad. So we opted to not have surgery. DS is 3.5 and no issues.

Our DD was exactly the same OP, I’d get it sorted. Her latch was examined by about a million different midwives, HV, GP etc and all said it looked fine. After 8 excruciating weeks trying to bf I insisted the HV made a referral to the lactation clinic (it was over Christmas so no private consultants were available).

She took one look inside her mouth and said ‘yup, posterior tongue tie’. We had it divided and the windiness/ clicking went and she was a much more settled baby.

I’m fairly sure it’s not a ‘modern trendy’ condition. I read somewhere that midwives used so be much better trained at spotting it so it was often done shortly after birth (also read that some used to keep one nail long and sharp to snip it but not sure if that’s urban legend 😂)

I know this is a few months old but just reading up as my little dh's has just had his clipped and it's been so distressing for my dd I hope your little one is doing well @BunnyRuddington

This sounds like what we are going through with our nearly 3 week old. We have a tongue tie assessment on Tuesday. I am wishing the days away until Tuesday as I'm exhausted with breastfeeding and expressing and formula top ups.

CordyD. It will improve once its clipped don't let them fob you off