Let me introduce everyone
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
This is Danica
Danica is all kinds of awesome
When I got pregnant in February of 2019 I knew I wanted to be able to do something with my life while I was I on maternity. After a few doors were closed in my face when I cm up with really cool ideas I started to become a little bummed out that I wasn’t going to accomplish much when I was on maternity leave.
Funny right? I wasn’t going to accomplish much. I am pretty sure that keeping a tiny human alive while not allowing my house to become a post Chernobyl ghost town and maintain even a tiny semblance of sanity while still being around to engage in conversation with my friends and family counts as accomplishing a lot.
However I really wanted to do more.
When my son was born my breast feeding journey started pretty rough.
He was extremely jaundiced and had some low blood sugar. The hospital pressured me for to top up with formula in a bottle even though I just wanted to nurse more.
This started an awful snowball of the effects of the bottle vs nipple war.
He realized that getting milk and formula from a bottle was nice and easy. It didn’t help the hospital was no well equipped with proper slow flow nipples and how to teach pace feeding properly. Within just a few days we went from him loving to nurse to straight out refusal to nurse and preference for the bottle.
The lactation consultants at the hospital were not particularly helpful. They didn’t guide me through positions or offer guided nursing sessions. They grabbed my breast for me and shoved it into his mouth while holding him into my breast. There was no mention of nursing aids, different positions etc.
I went home after 5 days in the hospital to a hungry crying baby and a hungry crying mommy.
I wanted to breast feed desperately. I wanted that close bond with my son. I wanted to see him face smiling at me while he pinched my nipple is his teeth. I wanted to fall asleep nursing my son and snuggling him through the night.
A nurse from the local healthy service came ot my house the next day to make sure I was doing ok. She also tried to help with nursing and wasn’t much help either.
Finally, around day 11 I caved. It was the middle of the night, and he would do was cry because he was hungry. My nipples hurt, I was exhausted, I wasn’t eating because I couldn’t take my focus off my son for more than 10 seconds. I wasn’t sleeping because I was watching hours upon hours of YouTube videos on how to nurse effectively while I walked around the house bouncing him and trying to get him to latch in a way that didn’t leave me in tears.
My SO saw my mental breakdown and decided to take matters into his own hands. He went to work the next day and reached out to his coworkers if they had tips or tricks for getting through this. One of his coworkers recommended this clinic on the other end of the city that had a couple of family physicians who ran breastfeeding clinics.
I was desperate and booked an appointment for the next day.
That appointment saved my entire breastfeeding relationship with my son. The doctor introduced me to nipple shields, we changed the brand of bottle and the type of nipple to make it really slow flow so it was more work to eat from the bottle than from the breast. We spent over two hours there the first time. We did a weighted feed, we went through every nursing position in the book, we tried different sizes of nipple shields, I got a prescription for some nipple cream to help with the pain. She wanted to see me back in two days.
I went home and in those two days I struggled with the nipple shield. They are finicky and hard to use. He got a lot of bottles in those days. When we went back and she went through nipples shields with me again while we did another weighted feeding.
She wanted to see me in another two days.
I went home braced with the confidence that I was going to figure this out. I figured out the nipple shield, we started to offer less bottles, and he started to be less cranky.
When I went back, we did another weighted feeding and he had almost doubled the amount of milk he was transferring since the last appointment. He was full and happy.
I saw her once a week for the first 8 weeks of his life. We watched in amazement as she guided me through weaning off the nipple shield and he doubled his weight by 8th week of life.
At the time of my writing this in his 15th week of life and he is sitting at a chubby healthy weight of 20 lbs and 4oz – up from his birth weight of 8lbs and 10 oz. We haven’t had single bottle since around week 4.
Pumping with Love 