During my pregnancy I read as much as I could about breastfeeding. I was determined to exclusively breastfeed my daughter no matter what. At the hospital, the first time I attempted to feed my baby, they gave me a nipple shield and told me I need to try to get her on the breast without it. I thought things were going well, even stopped using the nipple shield, but her billirubin was slowly creeping up each time she was checked and she wasn't pooping often enough. On the day we were discharged, the LC came to visit and assured me things looked good. We were required to go back to the hospital the day after discharge to have her billirubin checked again. It went slightly down but at this point baby was not latching anymore. So while at the hospital I called the LC and met with her. While she may have had the best intentions, she caused more problems for me and my baby. She had me pump and fed the pumped milk from a bottle that had a very loose flowing nipple. Guess what...my baby no longer wanted to work for her food. She would rather take the bottle with that nipple than my breast. Thanks LC for creating another barrier for my breastfeeding journey. She also gave me a box of formula and advised me to go to the ER because baby girl hadn't pooped since well before we were discharged.
We go to the ER and wait a while. The ER dr would not do any testing or anything. He said as long as she is having wet diapers, the poop will come eventually. She is still trying to adjust to being in the world.
Fast forward a few days...
She is sleeping a lot and will become fussy 5 minutes after she is done bfing because she is still hungry. So we would feed her bottles of pumped milk and you could hear how empty her stomach was. So of course I start to worry and panic. And I still refuse to give her formula, although we did give it to her a total of 3 times to make sure the billirubin went down. Finally, someone on one of my FB groups mentioned using a nipple shield. I tried that and it worked. She was finally able to pull out enough milk to keep her satisfied. Now the issue was to wean her from the shield. By this time I had gone to my first LLL meeting. It was there that we determined I had partially inverted nipples. They would retract when baby tried to latch on. So we kept on with the shield and maybe once a week I would see if she would take the breast with no shield. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. So I just kept on with the shield. When she was 6 weeks, I had my next LLL meeting. Earlier that day I had washed the shield and it was drying on the bottle rack. Well I forgot to pack it for the meeting. I get to the meeting and after a little while she gets hungry. I go looking for the shield and realize I left it at home. This was the moment of truth...she was able to latch on and receive enough milk. Everyone at the meeting was so happy for us. It was a huge milestone for us. Things have been going well ever since, except right now we are battling with thrush :(
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