Giving insights, tips and ideas to new moms as well as experienced moms who are new to breastfeeding. The guide and advices in this book are all based on personal experiences and they are not from a medical point of view.
Breastfeeding is something that is very closed to my heart and I am glad to have experienced different sides of the journey. I started off with no knowledge at all and failed terribly when I had my eldest child.
She was born prematurely, at 26 weeks gestation. I had no idea how I was going to produce milk for her but some of the nurses in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) had told me to massage my breasts and express every three hours. And since my baby was all attached to tubes and wires for life support, I was not allowed to carry her to allow for a direct feeding. Again I did not know what else I could do except to pump. The problem was, I did not have any breasts pump yet.
A friend of mine offered to lend me her pump so I could get my baby some milk. Everyone was telling me that breast milk was very important for premature babies since it contained a lot of antibodies for the preemies to help build up their immune system. It was hard to pump because I did not know how to do it.
Nobody helped me and I was not seen by a lactation consultant while in the NICU, but pumped I did. Since I was still staying at the hospital, I was wheeled into the breastfeeding room where they had a hospital grade electric Medela pump. I sat there pumping for thirty minutes and all I ever got was a few drops of milk. A nurse came in to check and helped me to massage my still soft breasts. She told me to do this every time before I started pumping and she took the bottle of colostrum drops and labelled it.
"I will bring this to the NICU and the nurses there will feed your baby with it ok?" she said. So I learned that this would be mixed with a little bit of formula until I had enough milk to feed my baby fully. Just listening to that I got a little bit motivated to keep pumping.
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Everyday I would visit my baby with a cooler bag, filled with bottles of breast milk. From only two bottles of colostrum drops each day to five bottles of 20ml breast milk. That was quite enough to make me eager to give more. And I got to see how they feed my tiny little preemie.
So at every feed, they would only use 5ml of my milk that that had extracted out into little syringes. I sat there and watched how my baby consumed her power food. The milk went down the syringe, into the tube and into her tiny stomach ever so slowly, like the pace of a snail.
I kept going, pumping every three hours at home and set my alarm to wake up at night to pump. Doing this for more than a month and still not producing much milk. The most I could yield out was 40ml. Friends were telling me the famous motto: demand equals supply. I hated it because how was my body going to know that it needed to supply more when my baby was not with me to demand the milk.
The only milk booster I was told to take was fenugreek. It sounded alien to me and I did not know where to get them and also someone told me not to eat it because you would end up with a body odour. So I did not pursue the matter. I just kept on eating and drinking like usual, but more milk and calcium intake, and of course continued with pumping.
