Hi everyone, baby is just 10 days old and we've had a difficult start. She has ABO compatibility jaundice (due to us having different blood types) and the onset of this is typically at birth so it affected feeding straight away. She was reluctant to latch from day one but luckily I had expressed enough colostrum to get us through the first 24 hours. It was then that we found out about the jaundice, and because of it being too early for my milk to come in we had to supplement formula to flush the bilirubin out of her system.
When my milk came in we were able to work more on latching and drop a lot of the formula. She needed treatment under the lamp and we were not discharged home until 5 days pp. Her latch was poor and my nipples were bleeding, I suggested she could have a tongue tie (heart shaped tongue tip, high palate, painful latch) and she was assessed for this today - it's only 50% but they said they think it will help and are snipping it tomorrow. I've had support from the LC at the hospital and she is amazing. We introduced a nipple shield and she fed a lot better, my milk was spraying her in the face and she was leaking like she couldn't keep up with the amount . She wasn't refusing feeds but she was very sleepy because of the jaundice. Even so things started to improve so I started dropping some pumps a couple of days ago and really leaning into cluster feeding. Her nappies were fine and midwives happy with her weight gain.
All of a sudden though yesterday afternoon, my breasts started to feel very very empty. Unfortunately baby has been extremely fussy at the boob, sometimes refusing to latch all together. I've moved straight into pumping after every feed and instead of top ups she's been having full feeds from a bottle because most of the time she's refused anything from me. The LC has been out to see me today and she thinks that this is just a temporary blip and things will turn around if I keep latching and pumping.
This is my second baby, it's bringing up a lot of trauma from my first (similar situation and we triple fed for 3 months before moving to exclusively pumping before she finally managed to feed from the breast at 5 months, she's 2.4 now and still feeds for bed time). I've done a lot of crying thinking that this could be the end of our journey, it's hard not to panic though I understand it's bad for my supply.
I'm a trained breastfeeding peer supporter so I do know my stuff but I feel out of my depth at this very sudden change. I've got some fenugreek and I'm going to start it tonight. I'm just absolutely exhausted already with the triple feeding and just wondered if others managed to turn things around and if so how quickly?
Please be kind, I'm really struggling here.