Feeling burnt out from 8-week old's crying

[esgill]

I feel really burnt out. I had a hard pregnancy: 20 weeks of terrible sickness where I constantly felt like I was sea sick and hip pain and leg cramps all the way through which kept waking me up every 20 mins or so at night.

My birth was hard too: one week labour (obstructed), followed by an induction and then an emergency c-section due to fetal distress and me getting an infection and fever. I lost 1.3 litres of blood.

The first month of having baby was exhausting. She wasn't sleeping much at night and she was cluster feeding day and night. I was still seeping more than in pregnancy.

She is now sleeping a bit better but has been extremely fussy since week 5. She went from crying in the evening to crying pretty much all day. The thing that's upsetting me the most is that she went from cluster feeding to randomly, at different times of day (seldom at night), having a nursing strike. She goes absolutely insane at the boob and only feeds again after being coaxed to sleep. I just feel so exhausted as before it was a guaranteed way of pacifying her. I'm not sure whether she's distracted by the world around her or has digestive issues/reflux. She does like being upright/in the sling more than she likes lying down during the day. She is gaining lots of weight so that's not an issue. I've seen the GP and HV several times and tried infacol, gaviscon, gripe water on their suggestion to no avail.

People said it would get easier after 6 weeks. I feel it just keeps getting harder and she's screaming more and more. I'm wondering if the 1st round of vaccines intensified things or whether I'm just more exhausted now. Every time she cries I feel extremely triggered. i have intense brain fog and can't do anything else with my day.

We get brief little moments of smiling and cute cooing sounds (about 10-30 mins of a wake window) and then she's upset again the entire time.

Last night she woke up screaming at 2.30 am (she usually wakes up for feeding but calmly). I don't feel I've slept properly since January, before I was pregnant and I'm so so exhausted I just feel my husband and I need help. We don't have family around and it feels too much to ask friends to help, particularly as the problem is the screaming and I'm exclusively breastfeeding..

Thanks for reading my venting. Any advice/reassurance on when it might get better is welcome. I'm so exhausted and not sure how much more I can cope with this level of screaming and upset.

Lots of good advice re possible allergies. Have you tried a dummy? Hang in there. It's rough.

My baby was similar and had silent reflux which has to be managed with omeprazole, took the acid pain away. First he cluster fed ( expressed breast milk in bottle so we knew he was getting alot) which turned out to be comfort feeding as he took waaay too nyxh fir his size some days. Then a etsion to feeding because he associated it with pain. Not saying yours has this, I only want to share my experience which sounds similar in case it is that as its uncomfortable for baby and exhausting for parents.

To add a better hv then realised his reflux was due to CMPI and hes a different baby now on hydrolysed formula.

Just wanted to give a virtual hug and say it does get easier. It doesn't improve quickly, but bit by bit it does get easier.

Reading your post it doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong. You're just having a tough time and you're still getting to know your baby 💐

This rings a lot of bells for me from my first baby (who is now 12) - he had silent reflux and because he was gaining weight the doctors/HVs/etc were pretty uninterested in the fact that he was clearly miserable and in pain.

What helped for us was a good BF consultant who helped us through quite a few issues, particularly with BF positions that were better for reflux (laid back nursing, feeding with him basically sitting up) baby massage to relieve gas.

It was still tough and for us, it was about 13 weeks that it got loads easier and he was much better. But it wasn't until I had my second who didn't have any of those issues that I realised that there was very little that happened with my first that I had any control over and that there wasn't much we could have done differently for him.

Those early weeks feel endless, I know. You sound like you're working so hard to give him what he needs and it's totally reasonable to feel burned out.

Formula won't make a difference.

The roots and screaming was exactly like my daughter it was a combination of food allergies and reflux. I needed to go on a dairy and soya free diet and high dose omperazole to get it under control and we went on to find further allergies. The fussing with feeding was an early sign of a new feed allergy

My daughter has always had beautiful weight gain even when stop breastfeeding completely and fed a minute or two a day!

@JassyRadlett thank you for sharing your experience, 13 weeks isn't tooo far away so I hope things get easier for us soon, too. I've tried the laid-back position too and didn't have much luck :( she panics a lot in that position.

@UnravellingTheWorld thanks so much, it's so reassuring to come on here and remind myself I'm not alone. Sometimes it feels like only our way is acting like this... Our baby was crying in the bus earlier today and a woman said "it happens to us all" and recalled her son crying an entire long car ride when he was a baby.

@calishire yes unfortunately she rejects the dummy :(

@Imisscoffee2021 I'm pretty sure our baby has reflux. She spits up a lot of milk, sounds raspy, coughs a bit, and seems to find some feeding painful. I wondered about omeprazole. Did your baby have any negative side effects? Did the medicine help quickly? We've been prescribed gaviscon and it's such a faff to prepare and she just spits it out as we have to administer it with a spoon rather than a syringe. I believe liquid omeprazole comes with a dropper/syringe?

@Lammveg @oobladay I'm not sure re let down but I think it's fast as it's often spraying when she releases her latch. When I put the haakaa on I get sometimes 70-80 ml in 5 minutes.

@wtftodo thank you, this is massively reassuring. Was it a gradual improvement or did it happen nearer the tail end of the fourth trimester? I'd love to start seeing some improvement as 12 weeks draws closer. I'm at 8 1/2 weeks almost so supposedly past the peak but things haven't improved.

The midwife and GP said no tongue tie but I hear they can get it wrong. Wish we had an easy solution like that.