The length of this may give you some idea why women don't go into detail. They'd be there all year.
My baby was born with a tongue-tie, and the hospital aren't keeping NICE guidelines - they said they'd take another look in 6 weeks. This despite a midwife noting I wasn't able to latch him at all. I was discharged with a handful of syringes and told to keep trying. By day 3 my milk came in and I realised he would starve, so I googled, realised it was NICE guidelines to cut and my son was classic (and becoming jaundiced) and found a private lactation consultant who would. She came day 4, diagnosed 100% tie, cut, said he was now latching and all was well. My godmother (LLL counsellor) came and agreed. But on day 5 he was weighed and he'd dropped from 8.4 to 6.11 lb. He was not hungry at all; slept until woken to feed. She agreed to let me keep trying, waking every 2 hours, so as to avoid hospital, and formula supplementation, and I ordered a pump as backup. Lucky I did, as I realised on day 7 (Sunday, 8 pm) that he wasn't latched at all. He'd been licking the nipple and my milk was rapidly going. He now had a dry mouth, and orange crystals in his urine. That night he had formula, and for the next 2 days, then 2 more mixed, then just the expressed breastmilk, all via bottle. Cups didn't work. Ff didn't suit him at all - he vomited up whole feeds. The plus side was that the bottle taught him to pull the nipple back - yeah, I know people say that's impossible, but there's a study cited in the LLL Book of Breastfeeding Answers stating that this is the case with tongue-tied babies. (I wish I'd had that study when everyone said I was wrong.) Anyway, he macerated the nipple completely - felt like it was jammed in a door, shaped and crimped and with a white stripe blanched across the top. The tongue never came forward at all - he would clamp just behind the nipple with his gums and chew, with his tongue slamming the nipple against the hard palate behind. So I asked the lactation consultant to come back, who said I was 90% there and to keep trying. So I was pumping 5 hours a day, trying to feed, resorting to bottle "top-ups", so sterilising... all on a 2 hour schedule. Then I took him to my GP, who said he was still tied. A thin, "diaphanous" tie had been cut, but a thick bar at the back remained - he wasn't able to use his tongue. He was 5 weeks old. So I rang Mervyn Griffiths in Southanpton, who is the guy who did the studies proving cutting works, and is the sweetest man alive and fitted him in the next day, with an NHS referral from my GP. Voila, he was finally cut successfully, and could bring his tongue forward - but successful latching was still not happening. Another lactation consultant I tried then told me I had to avoid the bottle at all costs or he'd breast refuse (he adores the boob) so I was taking prescription pain meds just to try to breastfeed exclusively. When he began to sleep all hours and barely suckle 4 days in, as an incorrectly latched baby can't get enough milk, I decided her advice was bollocks, and better a healthy bottle-fed baby than a starving boob-fed. So the expressing marathon restarted. Finally, after 5 midwives, 2 lactation consultants, 2 health visitors, and a paediatrician all failed to latch him, and none of the books and DVDs helped, I emailed Dr Jack Newman to ask WTF I did now. He told me to take my baby to the clinic at the John Radcliffe in Oxford - who latched him in 3 minutes.
I'm now driving over twice a week with him which is a 3 hour trip, as I am having to learn how to feed him from scratch as well as unlearn the rubbish I was taught before; that's how fricking useless the help I've had locally has been. I can't replicate a successful latch alone yet, but it's getting better and better. He's now 10 weeks old, and I hope that by 12 or 13 weeks, I should be feeding him just by breast. But at the moment, I'm still pumping. So I too may find it definitively "doesn't work out" for me and he goes on formula. I just can't take much more. My mother has moved in, and my husband is supportive, and he's my first so I have no other babies to worry about. If I had another child, DS would have been on formula within a month, because you could not do this with any other responsibilities.
I'm an intelligent adult. I asked for help, bought books, kept trying. I know breastmilk has as many living white blood cells as blood, that it has cells that fight infections and cancer and that FF babies have a third higher chance of childhood cancers, that it has laxatives, growth hormones, analgesics, and proteins the human body is uniquely placed to digest, whereas formula is pretty indigestible. I know good gut flora results from BM, and that serious digestive ailments are far more likely in FF babies. I know eyesight, orthodontics, weight and intelligence are all adversely affected by ff. I know the most recent studies control for class, parental involvement, and siblings, and still ff babies have a statistically significant decrease in IQ. I know that formula is a dead, hit-and-miss approximation of what is needed to keep a baby in okay health; bm is the living, natural, perfect infusion. I'd hardly go through all this if I didn't know all that.
I imagine women don't go into detail because they, like me, would be there for hours, and because people would find fault no matter what the decision, anyway. I get endless comments when people know the extent of trouble I'm going to - on the one side, people saying I am mad, why not just formula feed, what am I trying to prove, and on the other sanctimonious "good, because most people give up too soon." Yes, that's right, agonising pain, frustration and the need to have 60 hours in a day is a slight hassle women are just unwilling to handle. And even if it's just a choice - what is "just" about it? Whose boobs are they, anyway?