Dear Editor
I always knew I would breast feed when I had a baby, but no one
ever told me it could be difficult. "Difficult" was
putting it mildly. When Cameron was born I immediately put him
to the breast thinking it would be a natural thing for him to
latch right on and start nursing. Looking back I laugh at how
naive this thinking was. Cameron just would not nurse. He would
latch and seem to want to suck, but only momentarily. He would
then pull off, turning his head to the side and cry forcefully.
The nurses kept reassuring me that some babies just have a harder
time with nursing and that my little guy just had a bad temper.
At one point the night-time nurse was shaking him gently in the
air by his shoulders trying to calm him before handing him back
to me to try nurse again. It was agonizing to see my baby cry
so hard - I was torn. I felt very defensive about anyone touching
him yet at the same time I felt helpless because he wasn't feeding.
When I left the hospital on day three, feeding still hadn't been
established. My little guy had gone down to six pounds, four ounces
from six pounds, fourteen ounces and I was worried sick. On day
four, my milk came in and I woke my husband up in the middle of
a sleep (he was sleeping through the day for he was on nights)
to rush out and buy me a breast pump. After pumping, I sobbed
as I gave my son a bottle. He gulped back six ounces, the poor
little guy must have been starving. It felt like the end for me,
I wondered whether I would ever be able to nurse any of the children
we planned to have. After introducing the bottle I didn't give
up. I got help from everywhere I could think of. A public heath
nurse came to our house several times with tons of suggestions.
Unfortunately all of her suggestions I had already tried (different
nursing positions, soothing techniques for baby, pinching my nipple
out for a easier latch, rubbing ice on my nipple, getting my milk
to let down first, putting some milk on baby's lips first, skin-to-skin
contact with baby, nipple shells etc. etc.). I went to clinics
at the hospital on breast feeding and starting seeing a breast
feeding consultant there three times a week. I read several books
on breast feeding. I was becoming an expert on how to breast feed,
but I couldn't breast feed my baby - it was baffling. While I
was getting all this help and information on my own this was how
my schedule went: I would always try to nurse Cameron first -
this would take about 20 minutes (sometimes he would latch for
a second or two, but most of the time he would just cry and pull
his head to the side, I'd calm him and try again, and he'd cry
again and so on). After this I would warm up a bottle of previously
pumped breast milk and give it to him. After the bottle I would
then rub the upper palette
of his mouth in hopes of keeping him used to the style of sucking
he would need to do to nurse. After that I would lay my darling
down to sleep and I'd pump milk for the next feeding. It was very
time-consuming and looking back I wonder how I did it. The whole
procedure would take about an hour and a half. During that first
two weeks he was feeding every two hours so I over pumped during
the day in order to skip pumping once during the night to get
more sleep. I always tried to pump what he took so my breasts
were producing just like they would be if he was nursing. I wanted
it to be an easy transition on my milk flow when he did start
to nurse. I pumped milk and kept trying to teach Cameon to nurse
for five weeks -approximately three hundred feeds! Things slowly
got better day after day. If only for my moral, I kept a chart
on how nursing was progressing. One
week he might stay on for three minutes the next maybe for six.
At four weeks we had a scare, that partially explained things.
One morning my husband brought to my attention a hard lump the
size of a chestnut on the side of Cameron's neck. I freaked! This
wasn't there when he was born. It
had either progressively been growing and we hadn't noticed it
or it appeared overnight. Either way we were petrified at what
it could be and rushed to the hospital that morning. The lump
turned out to be a condition called torticollus. This is when
your sternoleidomastoid muscle on the side of your neck has been
stretched and heals leaving scar tissue that causes the muscle
to become tight - similarly to a knot in your calf. They believe
this happens during birth. I was sure this was why he would cry
when I tried to nurse him, it seemed obvious. He must have been
in pain every time I would try to put him on his side, or in a
football hold (the two positions I tried most often). We started
physio on him, which was an awful procedure to do, but necessary
to stretch out the muscle. Slowly nursing started coming around.
I'll always remember that one day (at almost the five week mark),
every feed he nursed for over ten minutes with a huge burp at
the end. Well, no easing him into nursing exclusively. After that
day I tossed the bottles. A couple days later we had an appointment
at sick kids hospital in Toronto to have a ultra sound on the
muscle lump (just to be 100% sure it was muscular - it was) and
to see someone in the physiotherapy department. After examining
Cameron the first thing the physiotherapist said was "oh,
he had a broken collar bone" I think I almost threw my neck
out, snapping it to at look at her and practically shouting "what!".
My poor little darling had had a knotted muscle on the one side
of his neck and on the other side his collar bone had been broken!
The broken bone was
later confirmed by a doctor. I still, to this day, can not believe
that from the time Cameron was born, he had seen four different
pediatricians and three physiotherapists, and everyone seemed
to fail to notice his collar bone was broken.
If only I had known how delicately he should have been handled.
No one who gave me help about breast feeding or in any books I
read, mentioned the possibility that a baby would not nurse because
of an injury or discomfort from the birth. I'd bet my life that
if I had laid him on his back on a
feather bed and dropped my breast down to his mouth that he would
have nursed fine, he always did latch, he was just in to much
pain to stay on.
I'm so thankful I stuck with it and I'm very happy to say that
Cameron is now in his thirteenth month and still nursing!
Vanessa W.
Whitby, Ontario