Part 5: 'Don't begrudge him his little drink of milk'

I ask a visiting midwife about the pumping blisters I’m getting, but she doesn’t know why this should be happening.  I ask what I can do to get more from the pump and she can’t tell me, though she does manage to reduce me to tears by helpfully letting me know that some women never get their babies back to the breast, and end up pumping exclusively to feed their babies.  Aside from the fact that I’m only getting drops, I really don’t want to be an exclusive pumper.  I hate pumping with a passion, stuck in my chair on my own, chained to my breastpump while someone else enjoys cuddling and comforting my baby.  This isn’t, for me, about providing breastmilk for my son; it’s about breastfeeding, and if I thought that after all this I wouldn’t be able to get my son back to my breast I’d stop right now.  My three states during all this time are: feeding, pumping, and sleeping. For the hours on end I spend attached to the pump I come to hate the rhythmic sound of the sucking action.  I think I sound like Darth Vader, and shudder at the thought of my son coming to associate this noise with his mother.  ‘But you won’t have to pump all the time’, my husband reassures me.  ‘The difference between you and those other women is that you’re determined. If you want to breastfeed you’ll breastfeed.’ 

I later discover that a different flange size might have sorted the pumping blisters at least, and may even have helped with the amount I could pump.  I also find out that using compressions when pumping, and hand expressing at the end of each pumping session, can make a big difference to the amount of milk removed, and can thus increase supply more than pumping alone.  I kick myself, when I look back, for not getting hold of a pumping bra so that I could at least do it hands free and have some semblance of freedom when I was pumping, but as it is I am pinned to whatever chair I’ve landed in, holding the pump to my breast and staring at the results as the drips make their way into the bottle.  In my ignorance, then, I just smother myself in Lansinoh cream and try my best to feed, feed, feed, and pump, pump, pump, through the pain.  For some feeds, alas, I simply have to skip my worst, right breast, and just feed from the left – it’s the only way I can face latching at all, and even then I’m dreading the moment my son wakes up.  On occasions, I even resort to the dreaded nipple shields – I know I shouldn’t, but with the blisters and chewed nipples it’s sometimes the only way I can manage a latch. 

During this period it feels like one step forward, two steps back: one feed I’m happy because when my son is finished there are signs of some milk in the nipple shield; another I have to stop in pain after a few seconds, only to find the nipple shield completely filled with blood.  On Thursday evening (day 10) I’m delighted to feel some changes in my breasts, the first time since giving birth that I’ve really noticed any sensation in them at all (apart from pain).  But there it is, as I sit pumping and watching a DVD, a momentary flicker of something happening under the surface, as though they may be finally starting to fill.  But continued pumping sessions still fail to produce more than about 15mls, and they soon go back to feeling like empty sacks. 

During this whole time I am convinced that it is Tommy’s tongue-tie that is the problem, and that his inefficient sucking has meant my breasts haven’t been stimulated enough to produce milk, so I assume that the feelings of filling up on Thursday are the result of all the pumping, and this makes me determined to pump even more. (Looking back, though, I wonder if those feelings were my milk finally coming in – I now know that, despite what the breastfeeding counsellor told me, this can take up to ten days to happen.  If I had stopped the top ups and pumping then, would my supply have become established, I wonder?)

In fact, on day 11 (Friday) I did try giving up the formula top ups.  The breastfeeding counsellor visited that morning and noted that Tommy had been putting on weight and was now getting wet and dirty nappies (his first soiled nappy since Saturday morning had come on the Wednesday, the day after his first top up bottles), and that he appeared to be latched well and contented.  So why not ditch the formula?  (I did point out that I’d been told at the feeding clinic to keep on with the formula until I could get 30mls through expressing, but she dismissed that idea, to my delight, so for the next couple of feeds I just breastfed and pumped.)  While the feeding counsellor was with me, one of the community midwives visited too and they chatted amongst themselves about all the feeding problems they’d experienced. ‘I could write a book, given all the things I’ve seen’, the feeding counsellor announces, though what she’d say in it I still don’t know.  ‘Just the other day I attended a terrible case.  The baby had stopped having soiled nappies and was passing urates – I sent the husband out myself to buy formula.’  Passing over the fact that this was exactly the situation I had been in just a few days before, when I’d been told by the hospital that ‘That’s normal in breastfed babies’, I just smile and say, ‘Tell her it does get better.’  After all, I’d just been told I could ditch the formula – we’d passed the danger zone and could get back to breastfeeding normality.  I was delighted.

The trouble was, though, that later that day Tommy was weighed again he had actually lost weight since Wednesday’s weigh-in.  My husband begged me to go back to formula top-ups, just until we could get Tommy’s tongue-tie sorted out – he’d gone from the 40^th centile to below the 9^th; we knew that the tongue-tie could be stopping him from getting milk; and to be honest neither of us had that much confidence in the breastfeeding counsellor by this point anyway – she said he was latched well and appeared contented on her previous visit too, but in fact he was becoming dehydrated and losing serious amounts of weight, so why should we think that anything had improved this time? My mum took me aside: ‘Don’t begrudge him his little drink of milk.’ How could I? At any rate, our appointment had come in to have Tommy’s tongue tie assessed the following Wednesday (day 16), and so I clung to that as the target I had to aim for, and agreed to stick to the triple-feeding (breastfeeding/pumping/top-up) regime until then.