ibreastfed.com

Expressing for twins – Linda’s story

Posted on July 24, 2008
Filed under: Caesarean/cesarean birth, Exclusive expressing, Expressing, Low supply, Twins

Everyone in my family had always breastfed their babies and so I assumed long before I fell pregnant that I would also feed for as long as possible. My husband and I went along to the Australian Breastfeeding Association introductory session and learnt a bit more about it, but I didn’t really need any convincing. I knew it was best for baby and most convenient for mum and dad. Even when I found out I was having twins, I wasn’t put off. My two cousins had each fully breastfed both their sets of twins too.

Although I was fit and healthy, being a 38 year old first time mum having twins, I had some difficulties in the pregnancy. I was nauseous for nearly five months, frequently had high blood pressure, put on 22kg and was the size of a house. But the babies were healthy and I would merrily have carried them to term until the doctor discovered that I had ‘placenta praevia’. This is where the placenta, or in my case, placentas, are so low that they are blocking the babies’ exit. If I had gone into labour naturally, we would all probably have ruptured and died so the doctor rightly decided I needed to have an early caesarean to avoid this, and I was booked in at 37 weeks.

Because of where the placenta was, he would also have to cut through it to get to the babies, in a very very fast procedure, so I had to have a general anaesthetic instead of a routine epidural. I also had the very bad luck of having a severe post-partum haemorrhage, losing over two litres of blood, and in quite a scary hospital room emergency scene, with ten doctors rushing into the room, being pumped full of several different drugs to stop the bleeding and eventually having to have an extremely painful ‘manual evacuation’ which involved the doctor brutally pushing on my newly stitched wound to try to empty the uterus of blood so that it could clamp down and stop the bleeding. This is apparently rare, happening to women only a few times in our city each year, and had I not been in a hospital, I would probably not be here today, so I still feel very lucky.

So instead of my blissful and effortless breastfeeding expectations, I was a weak wreck recovering from a major trauma with two premature tube-fed babies in the special care nursery, drowsy from the general anaesthetic they got.

My hospital days were a weary blur of expressing every three hours, resting, and trying to get my sleepy little girls to feed, with little success, but we still tried at every feed before filling their tummies with formula via the tube. I began expressing on my second day and was very proud of my few millilitres of colostrum that I got each time. But after a fortnight in the nursery, I was advised that I should teach the babies to drink from bottles so that I could take them home, and we did.

Our next three months was an unhappy quest to get the girls to breastfeed. My body was desperately trying to replace the blood I’d lost, because despite two blood transfusions I was still only at half my red blood cell count. So its priority was not to make milk. I was physically exhausted because of this, and also the regime of expressing every three hours, including through the night. Nearly every health professional I saw during this time gave me a brochure on post-natal depression, and I had to keep telling them that I wasn’t depressed, I was just exhausted and a little frustrated. Through all this, my little girls were happy, healthy, growing well and just adorable, and I loved them dearly.

It would have been easier to just give up but I knew that breastmilk was so important for their brain and immune development, and I hoped that by keeping up the expressing I would slowly build up my very tiny supply. I also knew that I needed to have milk if I was ever going to get them to take the breast, which we were still trying continuously. I was very proud of the 30 or 40 millilitres I could give each of them each feed, topped up straight afterward with formula, a small percentage compared with what most healthy women can express, and it took me fifteen minutes at the pump to get even that.

During this three months we tried umpteen lactation consultants, the community maternal health nurses and day stay sessions, lots of friends with breastfeeding experience, visits from Australian Breastfeeding Association counsellors, baths, supply lines, nipple shields, massage, fenugreek, waiting for their mouths to grow a bit bigger (I had large nipples according to one consultant), offering the breast before, during and after formula feeds, and heat packs. Sarah did suckle for a few minutes a few times but we could not get her to do it again. And Emma always cried and cried. Without the support of my husband and our parents, especially my mum who came and helped me every weekday afternoon for a few hours, I don’t think I would have been able to cope at all.

I kept hoping that if I could only get them to suckle, then they would stimulate me to make all the milk they needed and then we could get rid of all the work involved in feeding twins formula (that’s washing, filling, heating sixteen bottles each day, plus another ten or so with the precious expressed breastmilk), not to mention getting up three times a night to trudge to the kitchen and wait for the water to boil and then the bottles to heat up while a hungry bub screams in the background, rather than just attaching to the breast. So together with knowing the benefits for the babies, I was motivated to continue trying. Like all expressing women, I became best friends with my wheezy electric pump, and quite fond of early morning radio while expressing at 2 or 3am. Let me tell you, the shows are quite different at that time of day. It’s amazing who’s still awake then.

It was finally at a five day stay at our local breastfeeding stay-in centre, when the girls were three and a half months old, that I was advised to give up trying, give up the night expressing to get more rest, and just express lots during the day to get some breastmilk for the girls’ health. My brain was very much relieved but I was heartbroken.

Because I wasn’t expressing during the night anymore, my supply slowly dropped over the next few moths until I was extracting only a teaspoonful each time, but it was the most amazing creamy yellow milk, looking just like colostrum again. So what one of the lovely nurses at my five day stay had told me was right, that my body knew it was still providing milk for my babies, and although it couldn’t manage much volume of milk, it was packing all of the goodness, vitamins and brain chemicals into the small amount I was expressing.

I was sad again on the day I finally ran dry, when my twin girls were five and a half months old, and I gave them their last few drops of breastmilk, scraped out of the pump bottle with my finger and popped into their mouths. I still feel sad that I couldn’t feed normally, but nonetheless extremely proud that I got them both five months’ worth of breastmilk anyway.

Funnily enough, they’re now both cheerful three year olds who are obsessed with breastfeeding their teddies, copying the other nursing mums that we see each day. If only they’d been that interested in breasts when they were little.

Filed under: Caesarean/cesarean birth, Exclusive expressing, Expressing, Low supply, Twins

Comments

One Response to “Expressing for twins – Linda’s story”

TRISH on September 14th, 2009 10:00 pm

Linda
you did an amazing job to keep going for so long.
I was fortunate that I had one twin sucking and he allowed me to keep the supply for his twin.
I was a late night internet junkie.
I was 39 yrs and 358 days old when they were born. I know age make sit harder on new mums at the other end.
It was so hard sometimes to get the letdown.
His twin had suckled a few times at best then one day at 5months he started breastfeeding.
We had the same deal … after more fortnight in the nursery, “I was advised that I should teach the babies to drink from bottles so that I could take them home, and we did” …I still cannot believe the lack of support twin mums get to establish breastfeeding.

Leave a Comment