Part 7: 'I thought breastfeeding was meant to be a natural thing'

We get home on Wednesday afternoon and I start pumping.   Although I’d never actually stopped breastfeeding since my baby was born, I’m basically on a relactation schedule – trying to stimulate my supply as if from scratch, as though I’d never nursed at all.  My husband does Tommy’s bottle feeds so that I can stay at the pump.  By Friday morning, after sticking to my strict 2 hourly pumping schedule around the clock, I have a single bottle with about 55mls of blood, sweat, tears, and Lansinoh cream mixed in with my expressed breastmilk. The Health Visitor comes to see me for the first time, and I tell her what we’ve been doing to build up my supply.  I proudly let her know that I’ve almost got a full feed’s worth, and that after my next pumping session I should have enough to give Tommy breastmilk rather than formula at his next feed.  ‘I’m sorry, but you really can’t do that – some of that milk has been in the fridge for longer than 24 hours – it isn’t safe.’  Then she helpfully informs me that if I find I have too much milk I can freeze it and it’ll keep for longer (WTF!).  She leaves, and the product of approximately 16 hours of pumping over a 32 hour period is poured (needlessly, I later discover) down the drain.

So I keep going, but never keep my fridge bottle for more than 24 hours.  I never see such a full bottle again – a 24 hour period can get me 30-40mls on a good day, so Tommy gets that at one feed a day, followed by a formula top up.  My nipples improve, and I’m eager to get Tommy back on the breast, but when I try this he’s not playing ball – he screams and thumps and pulls away, or he’ll latch for a few seconds and then pull away in distress.  I keep notes of every feed: what time, how long fed for, how much pumped, how much top up drank.  More and more often it reads ‘Feed: refused; Pumped: trace; Top up: 90mls’.  How am I ever going to catch up with all that formula? I try to get him to latch at every feed, wrapping him in a muslin straightjacket the way that the first breastfeeding counsellor showed me, so that he cannot punch or pull away.  The muslin I use for this is covered in blue stars, and wrapped around him he looks like a little superhero.  We try and we try and it breaks my heart.

Tuesday comes around again, day 22, and I return to the hospital feeding clinic.  Tommy’s barely latching for more than a few minutes if at all, and my 2 hourly pumping is still unproductive (if I’m lucky, I can produce around 5-15mls in a session; sometimes I can barely cover the bottom of a Medela bottle).  We try to get Tommy to latch while we’re there, but he’s having none of it.  The feeding support midwife feels my breasts and tells me, ‘Yes they do feel pretty empty, don’t they?’  I ask if they can prescribe me any drugs to increase my supply – I’ve looked online and heard that there are some things available, such as domperidone, but she tells me no, that they don’t prescribe anything, that all they can suggest is plenty of skin to skin and a babymoon (‘cancel everything’ - as if I was otherwise keeping up a hectic social schedule – ‘go to bed with your baby and just feed and feed and feed’).  But if that doesn’t work, she says, there’s really nothing left you can do – he won’t latch on and feed himself, you can’t get anywhere near enough to feed him by expressing, so what can you do except throw in the towel?  ‘11 out of 10 for effort’, she tells me, ‘but for some reason it just hasn’t worked for you’.

I disagree – I’d done a bit of research online and had ordered myself a Supplemental Nursing System (SNS) from Medela.  This is basically a feeding bottle on a string that you hang around your neck, with two lengths of tubing that you stick to each breast with scotch tape.  It’s meant to enable you to feed formula without causing nipple confusion, and while still stimulating your breasts to produce milk.  Surely this would work?  The SNS was initially invented for the use of adoptive parents who wanted to breastfeed, to enable them to get enough of the right kind of stimulation to build up a milk supply despite having never even given birth.  I had the advantage of having some supply already – if others could get to a full supply from nothing using the SNS, surely I’d be able to build up my partial supply this way?

The SNS arrived the next day, and excitedly I fiddled about with it, taped myself up, and put Tommy to my breast.  Success!  With the milk coming down the feeding tube he stayed latched for a full feed, taking his top up milk from the SNS, but also (I presume) taking breastmilk alongside it.  Over the next couple of days I use the SNS at each feed, four-hourly, and keep up with pumping at 2 hourly intervals. My sterilizer goes into overdrive with all the new bits to sterilize, to the extent that I break the microwave with overuse and have to send my husband out in a panicked search for a new one.  I’m so pleased with the success of the SNS (the fact that my son will stay latched on for a feed at all), but it’s not always easy to get him to latch, and it’s an incredibly fiddly business – we both get quite covered in formula in the process of latching him on.  My husband is quite freaked out by the sight of me feeding my son with tubes strapped to my breast (‘I thought breastfeeding was meant to be a natural thing.’)  I’m also, as he kindly points out, behaving rather like a rather desperate breastfeeding addict – bags under my eyes, surrounded by milk paraphernalia, and always fretting about where the next feed is coming from.  I’m keen to move on from the SNS as soon as possible.