Hi @fizzl - I'm so sorry about your dog! That's so devastating, and to have it happen now when you are trying to work out your new lives is awful. I think you know when it's time though so I'm sure you made the right choice. I know how much it hurts though.
Sorry to hear you have been back in hospital and having trouble feeding too - we had loads of trouble at the start and I was readmitted for a few days because he had an infection and refused to feed. He then didn't put on weight for many weeks, it was incredibly infuriating and a really traumatising month for us. He is now an absolutely greedy pig though so unimaginable now!!
Cluster feeding - it is unfortunately normal, and it's so tiring. It does pass though and it does go in phases, so it won't always be like this. I think some of it is important to help supply but not to the point where you are exhausted and she is just using you for comfort! We didn't use a dummy because we were so obsessed with getting his weight up so I just kept feeding him, but the other girls have given good advice. I think if she has good latch already then I cant see introducing it will impact that. I would just give it to her when you want to, try not to worry about sids too much (I know this is a ridiculous thing to say!) But just because dummies and breastfeeding might reduce the sids risk doesn't mean that nobody should formula feed or not use a dummy. If that makes sense. The biggest thing is sleeping on their back from what I read (I got a bit obsessed with looking into it!).
Sleep/combi feeding - the lack of sleep is absolute torture but it does get better. My son was such a noisy sleeper that I struggled to sleep even when he was sleeping!! 😂 one thing that helped us was a bottle - I expressed for a few months, and I would go to bed at about 8pm and DS would stay with my husband and he would give him a bottle if he needed a feed. He would then bring him upstairs at about 1 or 2am and hand him over to me, then sleep in the spare room. It meant we both got a guaranteed chunk of good sleep, and even if he was awful on our "shift" we knew it would end! It means no evenings together as a while but it does end. I then changed to formula as expressing is hard work, and like @TerribleImagination I've gradually reduced the breastfeeding down. I do one breastfeed a day, 3 bottles and two meals and he is 7 months. Its worked really well for us too, and has given me more freedom. Ds just gets too distracted to breastfeed unless in a quiet dark room any more which was a big reason for us increasing the bottles. I will drop the last breastfeed at some point.
Waking to feed - we had to do this too, we stopped once he was back above birth weight and gaining properly. We got such conflicting (and awful!) Advice on this. I would say 2 hours is too short, we tried that and it nearly killed all 3 of us - we spent so long trying to wake him up! Plus sleep is where they do their growing so it's important! 3 worked well, then pushed back to 4. Eventually he fed more often than that in the day and less at night which obviously worked well for us.
I've babbled on for ages and not said much different to the other girls, but I know how stressful the first few weeks of feeding can be and it helped me to hear people who had come out the other side!
We are always here if you need to talk more! I think a mother's instunct is really strong too so if you feel what you are doing with anything for dummy/combi/timings is wrong then you are probably right. It's hard not to second guess yourself though and it all seems such hard work in the beginning. It will get easier!