Ok it is a topic that will provoke strong reactions in a lot of people. There are your breastfeeding nazis who seem to think that no pain no discomfort no problem should ever ever stop you from breastfeeding your baby. They will tell you the horrors that await "artificially" fed babies. A term that conjures up images of feeding a newborn baby the liquid equivalent of MacDonalds in an inhumane cold plastic bottle. They will tell you that you won't bond with your baby, that the baby will be less intelligent, have more health problems, more allergies and you will forever regret not being a "true" mother. Then on the other end you find some women, very few, who find breastfeeding is disgusting and should either only be done in total privacy (like the toilets, as if they would eat their lunch in there) or not done at all. I think this attitude says more about the women (and some men) who have it than anything else. After all women have breasts so they can feed their babies not for the enjoyment of men.
Then somewhere in the middle, often leaning towards one end or the other you find most women. This is where I sit. I was determined with the birth of my first child that I was going to breast feed. I didn't and don't judge any one that doesn't but I was going to. It was the one thing I was stuck on. The cloth nappies, I was flexible, where the baby slept, I was flexible, clothes toys everything else I was flexible. But I WAS going to breastfeed. Unfortunately it was not that easy. My eldest child lost a lot of weight before he was born because the placenta had started to break down. His birth was hard and I was lucky not to have ended up with an emergency cesarean. He was a low weight, and look liked an old man where all his skin was wrinkled up. On the second day the pediatrician saw him and said he was to have top up bottles of formula at least until my milk came in. The poor thing was too exhausted to feed properly but too hungry to sleep so I was already exhausted myself by this stage because he would attach to my boob, feed a little, fall asleep, I would go to take him off and he would wake up and cry. So he got top up feeds. Which didn't help my supply. I tried expressing as soon as my milk came in but that wasn't working either. When we eventually left hospital the midwives told me he was fine and I would not need to top up feed him at all. They were wrong. The same cycle that established itself in the early days of feed, sleep, detach, wake, scream, started again. And went on and on and on. He was colicky for up to 18 hours a day and although I didn't know it at the time also had bad reflux. It was a nightmare. I ended up sleep deprived and very depressed. I went to a lactation consultant, that told me he was putting on heaps of weight so we didn't need to give him the formula feeds and wouldn't listen to me when I told her that they were the only thing that would stop him from screaming. I felt a total and utter failure. I couldn't even do the most basic thing for my child, feed him. We took him to back to the pediatrician who told us it was probably an allergy to milk, something that runs in my family. So I cut all dairy out of my diet. When that didn't help I started cutting out other allergens until I was pretty much eating, lettuce, chicken and rice. Still nothing helped except to give him a bottle.
Why didn't I give up breastfeeding? I had the nurses and everyone telling me he was getting enough and he would be fine but they weren't there at 3am when one of us would take him for a drive out of desperation. Eventually I ended up at QEII, which is a level 3 hospital for mothers and babies with sleep or feeding problems. They were wonderful. They set me up with a supply line, I would put a bottle of warm formula in my bra and a very fine tube would be taped beside my nipple so that my son could attach to me but get formula. The idea was to increase my supply while giving him a feed so we would no longer need top up bottles. It started to work, although my little man being so smart started to refuse to take my boob if there was no supply line or attached bottle. I would try pinching off the line part way through the feed but he would pull off and give me a look that just said "I know what you have done!" I was just starting to despair of ever having my son, who was 4 months old by now, fully breastfed. Then my own health let me down. After months of sleep deprivation, restrictive diets and depression I ended up in hospital with pneumonia. I was very sick. The only reasons they didn't keep me in was because they didn't have the beds, I threatened to sign myself out and my husband (a school teacher) was home on school holidays to look after me and the baby. I was given a ton of different medications. With each one the doctor would tell me "this is safe for breastfeeding". After the fourth script I stopped him and asked, "you say each one is safe for breastfeeding but what about all of them together?" He didn't know. No one did. My husband had been bottle feeding my son while I was in hospital and between that and the doubt in my own mind about what all these different medications might do to my child I finally decided to give up the struggle to breast feed.
The change in my child was astonishing. By the time I was well enough to notice he was in a routine. He was sleeping through most nights. The colic stopped. He was on a prescription formula. It is specially processed so that the milk proteins that can cause allergic reactions were already broken down before hand. The pediatrician had also put him on medication for reflux. He was a happy healthy baby at last. I still felt like a failure and the occasional questions from other mothers, old and young, and health professionals about why he wasn't breastfed didn't help. We then went through three years of avoiding milk in all forms until he was given the all clear by an immunologist. In hindsight with what happened with my daughter later I suspect that milk was never his problem. But again this is a topic for another post. I will always wonder if my son's tendency to be sensitive and easily upset comes from spending his first four months of life in pain and not getting good sleep. I guess it is something I will never know. However he has grown into a very healthy and generally happy boy. :-)
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