Normal for a Moment
This morning I woke up with the baby and held her to my chest, as she was waking up but not fussing with hunger yet. My shirt was wet on the right side. My right boob was leaking through my shirt! I moved the baby and checked the boob, and it was even kind of hard and felt a little full! and less squishy! For a moment, I felt like a normal nursing mama with actual milk to feed my baby. (At least on one side. The left side is dead.)
And then it hit me that I hadn't nursed the baby since 12:30am. That was an eight hour break. It took EIGHT HOURS for me to have enough milk to dribble a couple of drops.
I hate having broken boobs.
posted by Jude @ 3:42 PM
4 Comments:
I totally know how you feel. I have had two kids and low milk supply with both. I tried the extra pumping, fenugreek, Mother's Milk tea, and finally went to using Domperidone(if you want to know more about this, let me know). I ended up having to supplement with some formula, which broke my heart. I wanted so badly to be able to feed my kids. But it got to a point where their well-being was more important than me being the sole food source. Anyway, don't mean to ramble on, just wanted you to know I know how you feel, and yes, it does totally suck. BTW, I nursed my first son 11 months and am just starting to wean my almost 14 month old son.
I am using domperidone also. It has helped a little bit - now when I nurse my daughter I can actually see some milk on her face sometimes. It is definitely worth it. I went from about 20 drops in 20 minutes (pumped) to 1/4 to 1/2 ounce. Big difference, even though we're talking little bits of milk.
What have you tried already to increase your supply? Check out fourfriends.com/abrw if you haven't already. They have a lot of good information.
Fenugreek and Domperidone have worked really well, for me, but I was inducing lactation, so it's slightly different.
I dont' use the Fenugreek anymore, because my supply got too much for comfort...but you don't want to hear about that!
We still have almost a gallon of stored milk in our freezer that we can't use, if you want it. You can email me at fostermoms atsign g mail if you want to talk to me more about it.
So far to try to increase my supply, I have tried:
1. fenugreek and blessed thistle
2. pumping after every feeding
3. pumping between feedings
4. lactation vacation
5. supplementing on the breast, first with a syringe and catheter, and then with an SNS
6. domperidone
7. just added metformin today
My midwife believes I have hypoplastic breasts (due to no breast changes during pregnancy) and that no amount of herb or tincture or pumping schedule is going to build my supply because I simply don't have enough viable breast tissue. She told me to stop sweating it and just nurse what I can, even though it's only a little.
If you want to donate breastmilk, we would totally be interested... if you could somehow reassure us that it would be safe.
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