Unlike most aspects of parenting, the benefits of breastfeeding is something you can be 100% sure about. It’s guaranteed to make your kid run faster, jump higher, and get into the Ivy League school of your choice (or something like that). With those kind of results, I was determined to give my little girl the good stuff right out of the gate.
Life has a tendency to override my best-laid plans, however. For instance, it’s hard to breastfeed a baby that’s kept in a hermetically sealed incubator and fed through a tube, then bottle-fed by strangers. So instead nursing, I spent my first 24 hours of mommyhood feeling like an unmilked Guernsey and leaking everywhere. It wasn’t until day three that Anya and I were able to attempt breastfeeding. It was something of a fiasco. Because she'd gotten used to a bottle, she wouldn’t latch and when she finally did, she suckled for 30 seconds and then started to whimper and head-butt me in the chest. She got frustrated. I got frustrated. And worst of all, the nurses got frustrated.
I suppose that when you have 30 crying newborns to weigh, feed, change, and dress, it’s hard to have patience with one crazy mother attempting to breastfeed. Especially since breastfeeding here isn’t popular. In fact, when I told the nurses I wanted to try it, they gave me some rather puzzled looks. When they realized I was determined, however, they tried to help me out, sometimes whether I wanted their assistance or not.
After one rather unsuccessful attempt, a nearby nurse suggested that perhaps my milk hadn’t come in yet. I glanced down significantly at my hospital gown, which was soaked in milk from my nipples to my knees. Her eyes widened. “Or it could be something else,” she muttered.
During the next few days, I tried everything I could think of or that the nurses suggested: different holds, different postures, a pillow, even some crazy plastic nipple extenders. Nothing seemed to work.
My mom weighed in on the subject via email, encouraging me to find some quiet, comfortable place with plenty of privacy so Anya and I could work on it in a low-stress environment. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was stuck in a too-tall plastic chair directly in front of the nurses’ station with the fathers of all the other babies in the ward looking on. Nor did I mention that Anya was tethered to an O2 monitor that bonged like Big Ben every few minutes, making me feel like I was killing her instead of feeding her. Private, comfortable, or low-stress did not feature largely in my reality.
We eventually discovered that Anya is tongue-tied. Because the tissue connecting her tongue to her mouth - a part called the frenulum - is unusually short, she has a hard time sucking on a real breast. Bottle-feeding, on the other hand, is no problem.
It was during my last few days at the hospital that I became good friends with the breast pump. The neonatal wing had several industrial strength ones and let me come in at all hours to unload, as it were. The first thing I did after I got out of the hospital was to buy myself a cheaper, but still serviceable model.
Still, it wasn’t a perfect solution. It took twice as long to feed Anya since I had to first pump the milk and then give it to her. Also, I was stuck hand-washing bottles and the breast pump several times a day, resulting in most of the epidermis on my hands peeling off. So after two tubs of hand lotion and a wicked case of mastitis (agonizing pain + puking + high fever + splitting headache = fleeting wish for double mastectomy), I decided to give the natural method another go. It took some practice and lots of patience, but it seems to be going okay.
When all is said and done, breast really is best. Especially if you have a pair of perforated plastic pasties (aka “nipple protectors”). Then it’s not bad at all.
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