The Twinkies

I would like to smack everyone who told me breastfeeding would be easy. Let’s throw in some basic throttling for all the miserable information out there about how if you DON’T breastfeed you might as well be abusing your baby.

Don’t get me wrong, we remain committed to making this work, but it is NOT “easy”.

Thus far:

1. J. and his bad latch have chewed me up something terrible. Before I left the hospital the nurse/lactation consultant told me we needed to treat my nipples as “open wounds” and prescribed a topical antibiotic to prevent infection.

2. Because of the massive doses of antibiotics I received, I (probably) started to develop thrush. I’m now on an oral antifungal.

3. The nursing supplementer system seems like a great idea until you are finger feeding two babies ’round the clock.

4. Telling a family with twins not to use bottles to avoid “nipple confusion” is downright cruel. When someone else can feed the babies, I can sleep. If I am dead from exhaustion I can’t even pump.

5. The hospital nurses were well intentioned, but over-worked and busy. Having many different women tell me many different things over our hospital stay didn’t really help.

6. Based on pumping, my volume of milk is going up daily. Tuesday I struggled to get out 7cc at a time. Today I sucked out 60.

7. That pump is loud.

So…things are getting better. But it remains very frustrating that we got such incomplete information ahead of time. The class we took was mostly useless and there is very little useful (as in, reasonable and not designed to invoke guilt if you stray from the approved path) information on how to do this with twins.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Breastfeeding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.