Midwives Are Boob Nazis
I wanted to breastfeed. Never had any intention of letting Kielle even look at a bottle of formula, unless it was absolutely necessary.
It was.
Kielle has a tongue-tie. I had to look this up - according to Wikipedia, it is: Ankyloglossia, commonly known as tongue tie, is a congenital oral anomaly which may decrease mobility of the tongue tip and is caused by an unusually short, thick lingual frenulum, a membrane connecting the underside of the tongue to the floor of the mouth. Ankyloglossia varies in degree of severity from mild cases characterized by mucous membrane bands to complete ankyloglossia whereby the tongue is tethered to the floor of the mouth.
Hers is mild. Her speech probably won't be impaired - well, there's a chance she'll sound a bit like Elmer Fudd just at first, but she should grow out of it. But it does give her trouble with breastfeeding. She doesn't latch on very well, and tends to push away with her tongue rather than pulling in.
And the midwives just kept putting her back on. I told them it was painful, I pointed out the problems, but they just kept telling me to check more carefully that she was latching on properly and keep trying.
So I did.
For nearly four days.
Finally I got hold of a proper lactation consultant, who agreed that I should not be feeding Kielle blood along with colostrum/milk, and that a nearly-four-day-old baby should not need to feed for over an hour at a time, every time, and up to three hours out of four. She checked, and found that Kielle wasn't sucking very well, and watched and identified the problem I'd been telling the midwives about for two days... although she can latch on okay, she then jerks her head back at random intervals so that she only has the nipple in her mouth, not the areola. Having to reattach the baby 5-10 times in a half-hour feed is *not* normal, especially when she had attached perfectly the first time.
And the midwives were still telling me to keep trying, even though I have a crack the size of the Katherine Gorge in one side and blood dripping from both if they're handled even slightly.
The other thing the lactation consultant confirmed - after having me express - was that there just wasn't enough. Having spent most of the first day in the ICU, away from Kielle, I hadn't had nearly enough early stimulus and was a day or two at least behind her needs in terms of production. So she was losing weight (more than she should have), crying constantly, and I kept telling the midwives that it wasn't working and they wouldn't *listen*. When a baby has actually SCREAMED HERSELF HOARSE, literally, so that even hours later her voice is failing when she cries, something is wrong. Even an amateur like me knows that.
She's been on formula for about 24 hours now. For the first time since day one, she's sleeping for more than an hour at a time, and can sleep without being held and rocked constantly. She's putting on weight again. She doesn't cry constantly because she's hungry and windy and frustrated.
I am going to keep trying to breastfeed. I have a pump, which will put much less strain on my nipples than the sucking, and when the nipples have had a little longer to heal, I'll start putting her on again for a few minutes at a time. She misses it, I can tell - she'll take the formula, but she prefers even sucking on my finger to the horrible rubber thing, unless she's really hungry. Even if I have to keep supplementing with formula, if I can squeeze out at least a few millilitres of milk, that'll give her a boost.
But if I can't do it - or she can't, as the endless reattaching suggests she may not be able to - I refuse to feel guilty about it. I know breast-milk is best, but given the choice between half-starving my baby or giving her milk out of a tin, I know what I'm going to do.
Bloody hospital midwives. If they'd listened when I told them there was a problem the first time, maybe I'd still have enough functioning nipple to keep letting her try. And Kielle wouldn't have spent two days screaming because she was hungry.