Breastfeeding woes

In the last few years of wanting to have children I read enough horror breastfeeding stories to spend a lot of time during my pregnancy worrying about not getting it right. I started having breastfeeding dreams (usually pleasant ones) in the early months of pregnancy and they continued to hunt me for the rest of it.

My breastfeeding frustrations started straight away in the hospital. Catherine kept on falling asleep at the breast after few minutes and hospital staff kept on telling me that she should be feeding for at least 5, 10, 15 minutes (depending on the advising person). I tried tickling her feet, taking her clothes off, rubbing her body, etc to keep her awake; but she was much more interested in sleeping. Once I was at home community midwife advised that I should be feeding her for at least 30 minutes, which nearly made me laugh hysterically.

My breasts got horribly engorged when the milk came in on the fourth day, so I quickly had to learn how to express milk to relieve the pain. Catherine still spent lots of time sleeping and not much time eating and I was worried about her not getting enough milk, but the 10 day weight check showed that she actually gained 250 grams. There were plenty of other signs of having enough milk. I kept on leaking milk between and during feeds and had to change my bra pads, bras and tops few times a day. During feeds the milk was coming out so fast that Catherine sometimes couldn’t cope and would starts chocking. Then she would pull away and milk would spray out in an impressive fountain.

My everything-is-well-with-breastfeeding happiness didn’t last as Cat got thrush (yeast infection in her mouth) during her second week and became very difficult to feed. Luckily anti-thrush medication worked wonders in about 2 days.

But are there any first time mothers who don’t worry about something during first weeks? Being very typical first time mother I started worrying about how much she sleeps and her frequent greenish bowel movements. Health visitor explained the green poo as overfeeding and sleepiness as “You should be happy to have content baby”. But my baby was slowly changing from content one to windy fussy one, her poo was getting greener, she was spitting up a lots of milk and even threw up few times. The symptoms sounded a lot like food allergy, so I tried cutting out some foods and keeping food journal. Her fussiness didn’t seem to have any correlation to the foods I was eating. So I debated about seeing a doctor and kept on searching the web until I stumbled on wonderful Australian Breastfeeding Association article on Lactose intolerance that mentioned lactose overload. The symptoms described in this and Too Much Milk articles seemed to be spot on. So now I’m trying out few things to make sure she gets enough hind milk and Cat seems to be getting better *knocks on wood*. Wish me luck! Hopefully the cause of the problem is too much milk and not food allergy as it is much easier to fix.