Amber's story: dealing with low milk supply
After successfully breastfeeding my 2 older children for a combined total of about 3 years, I was surprised to have some breastfeeding problems with my third baby, Maia.
The first problem was she wouldn't latch on for very long, maybe 30 seconds, from birth she was this way. Eventually I got her to latch on by literally forcing her to the breast and keeping her there. It worked though and within a couple of days she was successfully breastfeeding, and gaining weight again.
All went fine until she was about 6 weeks old when she started loosing weight and was unsettled. She was diagnosed with thrush and given a treatment. However she continued being unsettled and screaming and was admitted to the children's hospital. For 2 weeks, doctors and nurses kept putting pressure on me to put her on formula. It was extremely stressful, I was breastfeeding, expressing breast milk and then we supplemented her with a bottle at first. It quickly became clear that she much preferred the bottle to breast so I stopped and they put down a naso gastric tube. So after every feed we topped her up with expressed breast milk and then formula if there wasn't enough expressed breast milk. Towards the end I was very encouraged because she needed hardly any formula and she was beginning to be sick with the top ups (meaning her tummy was too full).
When we left and we went back to exclusively breastfeeding, she began to be quite upset again, and I really felt at my wits end. I couldn't imagine how we could continue breastfeeding, I was convinced I would end up having to bottle feed her exclusively because I just couldn't imagine that we could ever overcome yet another hurdle.
I stayed up late one night researching online and came to the conclusion that I suffered from low milk supply. Since expressing breast milk hadn't had enough of an effect on my milk supply I decided my last resort was to take medication. I went to the GP the next day and asked for him to prescribe it for me, taking with me a printout of the benefits. Luckily he was supportive and prescribed it straight away.
Within 24hrs I could feel an effect and within a week Maia was a different baby! Knock on wood, we've never looked back, and she is a very enthusiastic breastfeeder now. My only theory is that the extreme stress I was under with the lack of any kind of support in the hospital, permanently compromised my milk supply. Since things had been fine before that, and fine with my other 2 children, that's the only conclusion I can come to. All I can say is thank God for the internet, because without it, I would have seen no other option but to give up. I will have to take medication until I stop breastfeeding, it's not something to be taken lightly, but I'm so glad I found out about it.
Created: November 19, 2009
