Support? Pretty thin on the ground. I had to fight to get breastfeeding help in hospital in spite of the walls being plastered in 'Breast is Best' posters. And I was on a well-staffed private ward. My daughters were tube fed for the first five days as they were premature but I had to FIGHT in increasing and tearful desperation to get someone to show me how to express my milk. There was no initiative on the nurses' part to show me how to do it. They just stuck formula down the tubes. In the end an auxiliary nurse who came to take my blood pressure took pity on me when I cried "Will YOU help me feed my babies" and came back to show me how to express my colostrum. She spent an hour squeezing milk out of me and I've never forgotten her. But for her I think I'd have failed at it.
HOme was equally disastrous as my babies had a very weak suck reflex and so feeding was very hit and miss. One twin failed to latch on at all for the first two weeks (although I offered it to her at every feed). Once or twice she managed to latch on (instant celebrations all round when this happened as I foolishly thought 'That's it, I've cracked it!!') but fell off after 10 minutes because she was exhausted. So both twins got the ocasional breastfeed and a mixture of expressed milk and formula. My Midwife visits were pretty poor - I got visited three times in two weeks in spite of having premmie twins with feeding issues, caesarean complications (my scar opened at one end due to a haematoma and leaked blood for six weeks). This felt pretty crap given that I was a first-time mother with no clue of what I was doing, but I was told that the midwives were very busy. Friends with full term singleton babies in the next district got visited every day for ten days post birth so I guess it was just a question of postcode lottery, but it does make me quite angry. I felt very abandoned in those first few weeks post-birth and ended up having to take myself to my local A&E when my scar opened and bled as the midwives never called me back.
As for breastfeeding, I rang a local breastfeeding counsellor who was very nice and encouraging but couldn't help much. She turned up after a feed when the babies were asleep and although I talked her through what was happening she said that all I could do was perservere as it was a question of building up their strength. As she wasn't very local and the girls were feeding fairly on demand it wasn't possible to schedule a visit for a feed time, although I did call her again on the off-chance that she could come round for a feed but she wasn't available. So that was that.
In the end I reckon it was bloody-mindedness that got me through, along with my amazing maternity nurse who started after the first two weeks (I'd booked her from 38 weeks and my daugthers arrived at 35 weeks). The day she arrived I burst into tears and announced that I was giving up breastfeeding and she persuaded me to carry on expressing. She also encouraged me to give them the occasional 'top up' feed from the breast, which worked really well. It wasn't ideal as my milk did run out after 4 1/2 months as I know expressing isn't great for the supply, but I felt very happy with what I managed in the circumstances. In the end they got my milk, they got some formula, they put on lots of weight and they had lots of nice top-up feeds from me. And most fitting of all, the twin that had struggled so much with feeding in the start got my last feed. My milk was almost dried up and I figured I probably had a few more feeds in me and she and I lay on the sofa together and she drained me dry. And that felt like a fitting end. Not perfect and not what I imagined I'd achieve but when I look back I'm really proud of what I managed given my struggles and the lack of support.
I think breastfeeding twins is entirely possible and often a failure to breastfeed twins has nothing to do with a lack of milk but instead is down to a lack of support. And in my view it is the early days that this support is the most crucial. It's very hard to breastfeed twins, especially if they have poor suck reflex and/or low birthweight and often the mother gives up, not because she can't be bothered (I desperately wanted to breastfeed my daughters) but because she just can't see how or a way through it. It felt like such a battle, on top of everything else I was learning to cope with.
K