I elected to breastfeed and though I had read stories of women who struggled with the undertaking, I did not expect to have problems myself. Ouch! Yes, I am having problems. If you are not interested in my nursing experience or in the potential TMI of this post then don't read it.
At 3:45 this morning, I emailed some experienced friends for advice through tears while clutching an icepack to my chest. Sometime in the last 2 wks, baby and I lost the ability to nurse correctly. He seems content, but I nightly cannot fall back asleep for up to an hour after feeding due to post-nursing pain. I finally fell back asleep at 6am this morning then he woke again at 6:30 ready for another meal. I started crying and asked Chris to please feed him the pumped milk from the fridge. Chris is a sweetheart. He got up and handled everything so I got to sleep until 10:00am.
I responded this evening to my friends' helpful email responses: "I was so scared today that I just pumped and bottlefed, but just now I had a surge of stubborn confidence and nursed him. I feel like I dont have enough hands to follow all these pointers correctly, but I know that I don't have very many failed attempts left in me and I really really don't want to quit this. So I enlisted Chris' help and he acted as one hand while I focused on positioning his head and widening his mouth. It worked. We got him latched on properly on both sides. Now we are done and I am not facing a followup hour of pain. I'm very excited! I think for the next few days I am going to nurse during the day and pump at night. I am just not awake enough to focus at night and cant fall back asleep due to pain once I've done it wrong. Once Baby and I are both back on track, we'll return to nursing nights. :)" Hooray!
2 comments:
I hope it's going better for you. Nursing is a challenge, it really should come more naturally, but I don't think it does for most women. It can be so painful. I feel for you.
Thanks. Now I'm recovering from mastitis :(. While he has thrush. So I am fearful that the antibiotics will make me more likely to get a yeast infection from his thrush. Eek. The doc said that if this makes me want to quit nursing, dont feel bad but I have no choice but to nurse out the clog before I can quit. I said- Quit? Once I've conquered this, I will be more stubborn about continuing! haha.
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