Increase milk supply

[premiumma]

Has anyone got any tips on how to increase my milk supply?
1st time mummy to a premmie who is now 2
Months old, started breastfeeding straight after birth and thought I was doing well however at our 1st appointment the baby had lost 8% of his birth weight. The midwife freaked out and made an appointment for the day after where she wanted him to put weight on so I panicked and gave formula. The day after he had gained but was jaundice so she suggested I top him up with formula... anyway we've been doing this since then as I lost all of my confidence in being able to feed him properly
ideally I'd love to either breastfeed OR formula feed as doing both is exhausting but would love to give full time breastfeeding a try .. however I'm not producing enough ( I'm aware because of the formula top ups ) he's never content after a feed even if he's in the breast for an hour ... I try to express but can't get more than 50 ml per session 🙈 am I a lost cause? TIA x

I think that as he was born prematurely I'd give one of the BFing Helplines a call to see if you can get some advice.

It's absolutely fine to stop but it does sound as if you want to give EBF a try and a BFC should be able to support you with this.

Have you got the Helpline numbers @premiumma?

Are you getting help from your local infant feeding team? If you want to try EBF, they can provide more targeted advice than the midwife service.

My baby was in NICU / SCBU for two weeks with sepsis. The stress of that, plus my PCOS absolutely knackered my supply.

Our plan from the infant feeding team was:

• breastfeeding for 30- 45mins (20mins on one breast, 10mins on the other then do the opposite next time)
• formula top up of 30-45ml
• express after every feed (but especially never missing a 3am pump). I never got more than 50ml but feeding team said volumes didn't matter as it was more the act of expressing that would stimulate the supply.

I also tried lactation cookies and fenugreek capsules but my baby was VERY fussy when i was eating these so stopped 🤣

DD was born on the 9th centile and ended up dropping to below the 0.4th centile. Around 6 weeks, we upped the top ups to 70ml (basically one of the little ready made bottles) and i ditched my home pump and hired a hospital grade pump. The hospital pump made a big difference! Her weight started to stabilise and as she got stronger her suck got better. Then i slowly reduced the number of expressing sessions to one a day at 3am. I dropped those at 3.5months on the advice of HV so we could both started sleeping longer through the night and so far things are holding steady. The infant feeding team advised me that the only other thing to try would be domperidone but it doesnt work for everyone.

I was happy to carry on mixed feeding by then so didn't move to EBF and i intend to keep mixed feeding until we wean (DD now 4.5months). So there are definitely things to try.