I’m well into my third trimester and have been reminiscing about the birth of my first daughter. She shows no signs of weaning despite the pregnancy, and I may be heading into tandem nursing. I really don’t know what my first two weeks of nursing will be like with this new baby, but I hope it will be very different from the first time around. I cherish our labor and delivery (and wrote about our birth story here) but the first two weeks of breastfeeding were unexpectedly difficult.
I had felt well prepared for breastfeeding after taking a class with my husband and reading a few good books, including Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers. I delivered in a Baby Friendly Hospital and was allowed to nurse, skin to skin, right after delivery. My baby immediately latched on with a “good latch,” which was confirmed by the lactation consultant at the hospital. So I left the hospital thinking everything hard was done and done. Little did I know…
Perhaps it was the IV? I’ve since learned that receiving fluids intravenously can plump up a baby so that she appears to weigh more than she would naturally. The extra water weight is then lost, increasing the amount of weight she would’ve otherwise lost. (It makes me think of those Foster Farm Chicken commercials where the competitor’s chickens are plumped up with saline.) In my case, my water broke after a lot of acupuncture and moxa. In triage, I was only 1/2 cm to 1 cm dilated, so they started an IV right away for fluids and Pitocin to augment labor, which was then followed by an epidural.
I NEVER felt that engorged feeling my sister had warned me about. In hindsight, I think that my milk didn’t fully come in until day 8. At our four-day-old check in, she had lost 11% of her weight. The pediatrician threatened supplementation if she didn’t start gaining weight, and some family members started hinting that formula wasn’t the end of the world. I knew starting formula that early could sabotage my struggling milk supply. My husband was more than supportive of my desire to exclusively breastfeed and did not want her to have formula, either. But he wasn’t sure if going out in public to a support group would be as helpful as an individual consult. We did end up going to the Sharp Mary Birch gift shop where I got a second opinion from the lactation educators there. We did “weigh feed weighs,” weighing baby before and after a feeding, and learned she wasn’t getting as much milk as she needed. I got the advice to start pumping and supplement with the pumped breast milk. We did a strict schedule every two hours, day and night: nurse 30 minutes, then I pumped for 20 minutes and her papa gave her the pumped milk. At first he dropped it in to her mouth, drop by drop, from his pinky, then with an eye dropper, and finally with a slow-flow bottle. By the time of our two week appointment she was back up to birth weight but it was a grueling, exhausting, emotional, wonderful, magical, tearful time.
After that I started attending breastfeeding support groups at least once a week. I can’t tell you how many times I heard similar stories from other women in the darkest hours of the first two weeks. I told many of them what I want all of you to know: it gets better! In the thick of sleep deprivation, hormones, and conflicting opinions, it is frightening and disheartening to question your ability to care for your newborn in the most basic of ways. It is hard to “be stubborn” when your child’s very survival is in question. But trust your instincts. get second opinions, and above all, get support!
What were the first two weeks like for you? How did you overcome any unexpected setbacks in breastfeeding?
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