Hi everyone, I'm a FTM to a little girl who is 7 weeks tomorrow. She is my absolute world and I just want to do everything right. I have breast implants and never really thought I would be able to BF, but always said I would give it a go. Prior to giving birth I wasn't that bothered and thought if it happens, it happens. I expressed lots of colostrum prior to birth and this gave me hope that I might actually be able to BF. Well on the day LO was born, she fed straight away for a few short minutes and that was it, I was sold. She fed on and off for very short periods all day and we gave her some syringes of colostrum too. I had support from the feeding team to check latch and positioning.
Unfortunately on that evening in hospital, LO had trouble latching and we spent all night trying to get her to feed. Eventually one of the midwives bought over a bottle of formula as LO was crying a lot and I was completely exhausted. It was upsetting but at this point I was optimistic that this was a one-off and we would be fine tomorrow.
Tomorrow came and was much the same, a few short feeds but a lot of needing to top up with my colostrum as she wasn't feeding for long at all and still had issues latching. We were worried about her not having enough so we asked if we should get some formula to top her up with until she learns to latch, of course the answer was yes.
Once home my community midwife told me that my nipples were too flat to feed and suggested I get some shields to help. I did and this worked, and we fed this way for almost 4 glorious weeks, continuing to top up with formula where needed (if feeding for less than 20 mins but wouldn't not go back on breast or if still cuing). LO had jaundice so was often too sleepy to breast feed, so there were a lot of bottles at the beginning. We cut these right down to 1-2 by 3.5 weeks in. It felt that exclusive breast feeding was in sight.
At 4 weeks, suddenly LO started having really short feeds, falling asleep at the breast or staring in to space and not sucking. It's often impossible to get her to start feeding again but she was still hungry so the bottles started increasing. I would sit there for hours trying to get her to feed which was exhausting us both so we were told to not try for more than 20 minutes.
This is where we are now - 6-7 bottles a day (mix of formula and breast) plus offering the breast at every feed. I found that madam has a tongue tie which was cut last week - we had to go private as I've been pushing for her to be assessed from the start but our local NHS wouldn't as it wasn't obvious. My HV is the only one that said "Yes she could potentially have one, let's ask infant feeding to have a look", which they did and said she didn't. Naively I thought that the procedure would fix all our problems but this hasn't been the case.
After all that detailed information (that nobody probably wants to read but I found it therapeutic to write nonetheless), I want to find out if anyone has had a similar experience and managed to get BF back again? I've tried; pumping 8 x daily, seeing a cranial osteopath, drinking lots of waters, oats and oat milk, we continue to attempt BF every feed.
I'm grieving for what we used to have in terms of feeding and it's so sad.