Breastfeeding failure

[anamelikenoother]

I need help to dig myself out of dispair. When I had my first child I had a series of issues that (I thought) meant breastfeeding had gotten off on the wrong foot (start in NICU with formula, tongue tie, mastitis) meaning I had supply issues and he had very slow weight gain. I combi feed him till he was 6 month and breastfed him to age 2.5yrs. the first four months nearly broke me but in hindsight I think I got poor advice about combi feeding meaning the end of breastfeeding. My mental health really suffered.
Fast forward to now - I've just had my second and we got off to a good start. I thought I'd done everything to give us the best chance and everything seemed to be going well till our weigh in yesterday where she hadn't regained her birthweight at 10 days old (she's 5% under and only gained 40g in a week). I'm heartbroken. I really thought it would be different this time and all the other signs looked great but now I'm on this horrible routine of feeding pumping and giving tops ups but I just feel it's hopeless. I can't go through it all again. I know logically that giving formula is fine but emotionally I'm so broken by the the fact that my body can't seem to do it. I don't know what I'm asking really but I need to either hear some stories of women who have managed to build up a decent supply from a small one (I'm pumping around 40ml total from both breasts after feeding - which is more than I managed last time) or how to just reconcile the fact that my body can't do it. I'm just so so sad.
Thanks for reading if you got this far.

You’re doing great, stop worry so much about weight, it will come back on

What you are doing is amazing

Hey OP, there are some amazing BF specialists on here so hopefully they will be able to advise but I'll share my experience in the meantime.

When DD was born she struggled to latch well as I had flat nipples. She lost 12.5% of birth weight and we ended up back in hospital at day 3 for jaundice. I had infant feeding team support and was on a schedule of feed, pump, top up, feed and so on... I was knackered and it was hell, could hardly pump anything. Anyway I did it for 2/3 days and then thought f this I can't sustain. Instead I stayed home for a week or two and just fed every hour, sometimes every half an hour to build supply and work on her latch. It was hard, and I had really damaged nipples as she was breaking the bonds in them so they could stretch.

Eventually she gained the weight back and as she got to about 2 weeks was much better at feeding and gained her weight back and by 4/5 weeks I was healed and she was doing much better. She's always been a bad feeder though up to about 9/10 months. I had to feed every 60/90 mins until she was 5 months as she would refuse to stay on the breast for more than 5 mins at a time.
However she is still BF now at 14 months and is fine and healthy albeit still a silly eater!

Well done for hat you have done so far. I think it's fairly normal for birth weight to drop a bit. Just keep going if you can!

@anamelikenoother pleass be gentle with yourself, I am sorry you are feeling like this. I am breast feeding my baby, so I don't want to sound anti breast feeding, but the most important thing is that you feed your baby enough, so don't feel bad in any way about combi feeding or even exclusive bottle feeding (although it sounds like you would like to breast feed so I hope you can if you want to). I combi fed for the first 10 weeks with my baby due to supply issues. I tried to pump, bottle feed, formula feed. It was such hard work. Then a friend advised I just let our baby cluster feed whenever they wanted, have forumla at the end of the feeds if I needed to and only then pump (although to be quite honest I only managed to fit in pumping if my DH was able to feed our baby the forumla as I only have one pair of hands). This helped me, and by about 10 weeks he was EBF, but it might just have been luck and I didn't have an older baby to care for. Also if you have been advised by a medical or midwife team to give forumla in a specific way, you should obviously follow their plan for you. I am just saying what worked for me and we started supplementing our baby really early on, as I was struggling to BF so much, so he had no issues with weight.

We also had a late diagnosis of tongue tie. I was convinced there was a problem, but all of the midwives said it was fine, so I stopped asking for him to be checked for it. Finally we paid for a private assessment and once his tie was sorted he fed so much more easily and it didn't hurt me, so I was able to let him cluster feed.

Your situation will be different and you have already breast fed one baby, so you know more than me. What I would say is please don't beat yourself up about giving some formula. What is most important is that your baby is well fed and you are not too stressed by whatever feeding method you choose. Also, I would say please get some professional help with breast feedng if you want to from whoever you can access and feel comfortable with (midwives, health visitors, local infant feeding team, the NCT breast feeding line, peer support, lactation consultants). Our local council had a service we could access for free who were so much more helpful than the midwives (who were lovely but just told me the pain I was experiencing feeding was normal which was not the case). I would say if one service is not helpful try another. Unfortunately we do not always have consistently good breast feeding support in the UK..

I also found this global health video helped me with latch issues, but you have breastfed before and may already have very good attachment. Just sharing as I found it more useful then the clips of people demonstrating good attachment with knitted breasts!
globalhealthmedia.org/videos/attaching-your-baby-at-the-breast/

I did that feed pump top up routine, it was hell.

Don't despair, I think so long as you keep at least some of your supply going, you can increase the proportion at a later date. For now do whatever you need to do to get your baby's weight up.

I don't know if it helps, but I had a friend who had a similar scenario. With her second she ended up feeding formula but once or twice a day she'd latch on and not really worry about how much milk there was - she got the cosy bond with the baby and the baby got some breastmilk but they didn't have to worry about it being the be-all and end-all.

Look for support and make the most of it. It's really hard. [Flowers]

I have been there with feeding/pumping/top up and it’s really hard work, I feel for you! I had weight issues with both my babies mostly due to excessive sleepiness, my youngest in particular lost a lot of weight then regained it very slowly. In the end the thing that worked best for me was to stop worrying about the feeding aspect and just try and latch at every feed after a bottle, and ensure I have enough expressed milk that would be sufficient for baby to gain weight, so the breastmilk from me was a bonus and allowed baby to practice latching. Once we were back at birth weight we fed on demand and it got tonnes better as baby was properly hungry at feeds therefore took more. When you are pumping the things that worked best for me were:

1. Pump when baby is next to you
2. Pump at night - it’s rubbish but it is the best time to do it!
3. Cover the bottles so you can’t stress about what is/isn’t there
4. Drink a lot of water

Also look up power pumping which is a way to boost supply At the end of the day though, baby will thrive best with a happy mummy so if you choose to move to formula then you are still making a good decision to benefit baby

Thank you all for your kind and supportive messages. I really appreciate it.

For now I think (desperately hope) the situation is a little better than last time in that she appears to be latching ok (my nipples are huge so it's not quite as deep as it's like but in rugby hold she seems to be drinking and swallowing well, and I don't have much pain at all) and I'm expressing enough for the top ups were giving per day, just.

My fear is that I won't be able to increase my supply to keep up. I didn't manage to increase my supply through pumping last time (I tried everything but started late with a decent pump). My pumping yield is increasing per day, but only because I've increased the number of times I'm pumping - the output per session isn't going up. I've started taking domperidone on recommendation of my paediatrician and lactation consultant (I'm not in the UK) and lots of lactation cookies. I'm not holding my breath as I didn't really notice a difference last time but I feel like I need to throw everything at it.

I think my babies have sort high metabolisms and my body just can't keep up. Or maybe I just have rubbish boobs...

I'm my own worst enemy! I'm trying not to give myself a hard time but it just breaks my heart to think we might have a similar journey ahead to last time.

I personally found that by feeding and pumping it was almost like I didn't give my boobs enough time to refill and recover. So I stopped pumping and was much more successful. Obviously I am not specialist but that was my experience

You really are trying everything. Has your lactation consultant ever suggested insufficient glandular tissue? It’s chronic low supply and can’t be fixed. Obviously you have a supply of you wouldn’t have got this far but there are some women who just can’t make all the milk the baby needs and no amount of the usual solutions will work. Google it… it’s a difficult situation but the one advantage of a diagnosis is that you can stop feeling like you are not doing enough and go and and combine feed knowing it’s the best solution. Don’t forget every feed does good and the baby is still getting all the goodness of BM even if there is some formula in the mix

I just wanted to follow up in case any other new mums read this and ate struggling. We've had an intense few days of feeding, pumping and topping up. I've been pumping 4/5 times in 24hrs and my output has been steadily increasing. Maybe because of the medications, maybe because of the constant feeding/pumping, probably both. I never got this much with my first so I was feeling cautiously optimistic.
We had another weigh in and she's regained her birthweight! Going to continue like this and then slowly come off the meds asap and hopefully my supply won't decrease.
I was feeling so sad and hopeless last week that I couldn't let myself believe that this would happen but it has. I'm so relieved.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Good luck to any other mum struggling out there - it's so hard but with support it can be done