Did anyone's milk take days and days to come in?

[RockinSockBunnies]

I was prompted to start this thread after reading the one about witholding colostrum.

When DD was born (almost 8 years ago), my milk took days and days to come in. I had no milk until Day 5 (she was born on a Thursday early afternoon and I had no milk until the following Tuesday morning). At the time I was absolutely frantic - this was a situation I'd never heard of, had never read about and I had no idea what to do. I put DD to the breast all the time; in fact, she was latched on almost 24/7 and was clearly very hungry. She lost around 1lb in weight (she was 8lb 4oz when born). I spoke to breastfeeding counsellers, midwives and friends, none of whom could advise me on what to do. In the end, I gave DD some sips of water from a cup on about Day 4. Thankfully, milk came in on Day 5 and after that, things were plain sailing.

But that whole episode still scares me. I still wonder what would have happened if my milk had taken even longer to come in. How long can a newborn last on tiny amounts of colostrum alone? Would DD have become dehydrated? Would she have died? These are things I still wonder about even now and I worry if I ever have more DCs, what will happen then? Should I ask a bf-ing friend for milk for the freezer to tide me over if my milk takes ages to come in again? Would water on its own be sufficient?

Has anything like this happened to anyone else and if so, what did you do? If you have more than one DC, did your milk take ages to come in second time around?

What's the official advice for people like me? How long is too long to go without food for a newborn?

Thank you!

My milk took a good 4 days to come in but DS1 didn't latch on properly til day 3!

By day 4 or 5 I had the traditional rock-hard boobs.

I have no idea when it came in for DS2, he was constantly feeding from early on, I noticed the milk gradually change consistency over a few days but never had time to get full and sore.

All babies lose weight initially - up to 10% is normal I believe although I think DS1 probably lost more than that.

With my first, a similar scenario. Had him Friday, no milk till the following Tuesday. He was over 10lbs at birth, and down to 8lb 10oz by the Tuesday. The MW looked ominous and muttered something about formula if he didn't gain overnight. He gained 3oz overnight and it was fine (with the obvious pain/mastitis etc.) from then on. With No 2 things were marginally better, I think the milk came in about 3 days after the birth and the engorgement was less painful (relatively speaking) and didn't last quite as long.

A mate told me recently that her hospital
(supposedly a breast-feeding friendly establishment) took her DC1 away on day one and gave him formula "to tide him over till the milk came in". I was really shocked by this. I though one of the points of exclusive breastfeeding was to maintain the natural pH and balance of flora in the newborn's intestines. Pretty poor of a hospital to undermine a new mother's attempts to breastfeed too I thought.

If the baby is being put to the breast regularly, s/he is not "going without food". Even though the amount of colostrum you produce looks minute, their tummies are tiny when they are brand new, and your breast is designed to keep them going. After all, human beings were on the planet for centuries before bottles and powdered milk were thought of...

i didn't get ds latched on till day 5, one bottle of formula and a few tiny cups. milk came in around then. i then had lots of trouble with latch and the whole thing really affected my supply and he was thin.

it was ok in the end but completely needless, if only i'd had decent support from the outset...

PS Best bit of advice I had at the time was to use a pump to extract 20ml of milk in order to get the nipple into a better shape for the baby to latch onto. Hope this helps anyone reading this thread who's going through this currently.

PPS You can then use a teaspoon or oral syringe to get that milk into the baby (if you're lucky!)

My milk didn't come in till day 5. DD seemed to do fine till then. It didn't come in with a bang, either, and I never really got the polaris missile effect going (which I never minded - they were an F pre-pregnancy...)

I think new borns are designed to feed very little and very often - as long as they're having wet and dirty nappies they're getting enough.

My milk also seemed to come in gradually. But the midwives and b/f counsellor seemed worried that I had no milk. A suggestion was made of using some device whereby tubes run down to your nipples and formula/someone else's breastmilk is poured into a bag at the top, so that the baby gets nourishment from the mini-tube, whilst feeding at the breast. I can't remember off the top of my head what this contraption was called.

How many days do you think midwives/others would let you go without milk coming in before having to resort to formula? Is there some kind of deadline? I know everyone thought that my situation was unusual, since most people's milk comes in around day 3....

Good post RSB, it's something I've often wondered myself.

I had nothing, not even colostrum, until day 6 to 7, despite being stuck to a breast pump and it took ages to produce anything decent. I never established successful bf and did a lot of expressing in the following months. My mw just said I was "unusual" but had no further explanation as to why. I did have a traumatic delivery & I suffered from shock, combined with infection and poor postnatal care, and I wonder if that was connected and why my body did not react as it ought to?

With dc2 I had a slightly damp nipples and milk came in day 4, much more reassuringly normal.

Everyone I spoke to whilst I was pregnant reassured me my milk would come in around day 3-4 but my boobs clearly weren't listening because my milk supply didn't get going until day 7.

I don't know why it took so long but it only got going after I'd been prescribed Motillium. I was also given similar advice to smellen, to pump 20ml to give after each breastfeed but I was only getting about 5ml (I've never been able to express much, even now) so the remainder of the 20ml top up was formula.

I don't regret giving formula as I was worried sick about the amount of weight DD lost in that first week and it put my mind at ease. Also luckily it didn't stop me from going back to exclusively breast feeding but in hindsight it might have slowed things down a bit so I'm certainly not recommending this course of action to anyone!

I've no idea whether it would happen again if I had another baby but I think I'd be prepared for it this time if it did. Not sure what I could do about it apart from have some Motillium to hand just in case and know that the milk will turn up in the end, it's just that my breasts appear to be slow learners...

Yep, my milk took about four or five days to really arrive (and boy did I know when it did). DD was feeding about twelve times a day at first and continued to do so up until about three or four months old.

I was told by an NCT breastfeeding person that very new babies have a different physiological setup from adults so they lose fluid more slowly at first and that there is no need to worry about your milk coming in. They will not become dehydrated in the first four or five days as long as they're getting that tiny bit of colostrum. I have no idea if this is really true but it certainly stopped me from worrying!

I wonder if shock does have something to do with it, Heated? I felt traumatised after I'd had DD. I was fairly young (19), single mother and had had a 37 hour labour. I was a virtual zombie in the days following DD's birth and kept reliving the labour over and over again in my mind.

What's strange is that my milk came in at the point that I was telling a friend about the birth in great detail. I don't know if that element of unburdening made something in my body 'click' into place and start the milk production?

Sorry, but the idea of slow-learning breasts has me laughing a lot. In a nice way, I promise.

What is Motillium? Does it work magic for unresponsive breasts ?

"How long is too long to go without food for a newborn?"

My dd1 was still losing weight at day 12. She was then admitted and they had to force me to give her formula. She wasn't actually too dehydrated - so she had been getting something. I think the thresholds for hpc saying the weight loss is too much or has been going on too long have increased with all the increase in pressure to support breastfeeding. She took until weeks to regain her birth weight after that and has been fine since then.

Am sure a traumatic birth doesn't help getting milk started. Also have read that if you do use FF, after a few weeks the flora in the gut returns to its "virgin" state, so wouldn't beat yourself up over it if you had to use it, but was surprised at a hospital giving it on the 1st night of a baby's life.

Would be great though if you could have access to the human milk bank or other supply of breastmilk if your own milk is really slow to come in - after all I think the WHO guidelines say the mother's breastmilk is the best, followed by another mother's milks (screen for communicable diseases of course), then FF.

That said, your baby's sucking is what stimulates your own supply, so if you interfered too much with that it could delay milk production even further. Just musings, not an expert.

Found some information on Motilium on Kellymom website here

It's a brand name for Domperidone, which is actually for people with slow digestion (I think) but a side effect is that it increases your milk supply.

Along with baby's sucking it really did help get my milk supply going. The only problem I had was that the GP knew nothing about this "side effect" and wouldn't prescribe it until the MW rang him up and explained it to him.

yes with ds it came in on day 8. by this point he had been readmitted to hospital and put on a drip as dehydrated. very distressing as was screaming his head off for days before readdmission and we kept saying he was ill but no one believed us. it didnt help that we were in the middle of a heatwave (june 06). had crap support from hospital maternity unit which discharged me even though i told then he hadn't wet a nappy. They didn't encourage you to breastfeed - it is criminal that they have baby friendly breastfeeding status or whatever its called. everyone said attachment adn positioning was just fine.

at day 8 i became teary and my boobs started to hurt and it all became clear. my milk was just arriving.

i never had much milk supply with DS and although born at 50th percentile he dropped to 0.2nd but i kept bf for 14 or 15 months. weaned a bit early onto food (not formula) at 5 months, but it didn't help much.
he is fine now though.

still don't know why this happened. I bled a lot (maybe as much as 10 times as much volume of blood than withDD - like a torrent tmi) so maybe body thought still in labour. told midwives i thought no milk and that i was bleeding a lot but they just said it was normal to do this - no one asked how much blood etc.

no such problems with DD - milk arrived day 4 what a relief
sorry if i appear angry about the whole thing,and the lack of support i got, but i am.

should have added not the easiest birth. was induced. labour was very quick in the end which can be linked to bf problems. i lost a lot of blood during labour and DS needed ressusitcating (apgar score 4). He was jaundiced from the day of birth too, which i think is a worry but again hospital didn't notice (it's clear on photos).

so bunnies, it can be fine second time around, it was for me. But if it happened to me again i wouldn't be afraid to use a top of water off a sterilised spoon or even formula horror, provided the baby kept sucking away too.

Mine was 5 days too. And I had twins, so it was pretty difficult to satisfy two on colostrom!!!

I think the more you latch the baby on, the quicker your milk comes in?!?!? Mine had a lot of top-ups in hospital and I alweays put my late milk down to that, ie they weren't on the breast often enough!

Yeah, i was gutted that I was forced to bottle feed by circumstances... It took about 5 - 6 days for my milk to come in and it was literally impossible to get my DD to latch on. I had help from a breastfeeding specialist in hospital as I was in for 5 days due to traumatic birth, but even the expert couldn't help me. She just wouldn't latch. Would scream and refuse to open her mouth when she saw my breast and on the occasions I did manage to get her to take it, she wouldnt open her mouth wide enough which meant my nipples were very very sore even on day 1. She started to show signs of dehydration and after that I was forced to bottle feed. After that she wouldn't even take my breast so even though by the time I got home I think I must have had loads of milk I had to just watch it dissappear and feed her formula as it just wasn't happening. I was so angry and sad. Nothing I could have done though, as I didn't have a pump and no one to get one for me, I was so unwell after giving birth I couldn't go online to order one! Seems silly now, but I had trouble even standing up let alone engaging my brain to go onto Amazon. It just wasn't meant to be. Its very encouraging to see so many other women had problems too... Next time, if there is one, I won't put so much pressure on myself and at least I'll know what I'm dealing with. I hope and pray I can do it next time.
I think if your baby is showing signs of dehydration then it's best to switch to a bottle, I got a bit of a telling off by the nurses on the ward as if it was my fault she was dehydrated but it was the fact I had been told I had to breastfeed that led to that. It wasn't hapoand she literally had no fluid, no even colostrum for hours and then she started to show urates in her nappy which is a bad sign of dehydration so I was forced to admit defeat and go on a bottle just to save her life.

And after that, literally impossible (it had been extremely difficult before) but after a few days of bottle feeding she would turn her head away and cry every time I offered her my breast. I would have pumped but I was too unwell to contemplate buying one. It was a horrible time.

I had this with DC1: milk didn't come in until day 5, by which time she'd lost 11% of her body weight and was jaundiced. Like you, I was frantic with worry.

DC2 my milk came in on day 3 and all was well.

DC3 it was day 2 and she only lost 4% of her body weight. I'm sorting design her now at 8 weeks :)

I think what I'm trying to say is just because it happened once it won't necessarily happen again!