Someone Else’s Milk - Steph’s story

Posted on November 4, 2008
Filed under: Cross nursing, Donor milk, Failure to thrive, Low supply, Supplemental nursing system (SNS)

Many women who deal with breastfeeding challenges start having issues in the early days or weeks immediately following their child’s birth. This was not the case for me. Breastfeeding started out well and went smoothly for three months after my son was born. I thought I was in the clear.

At that point, we discovered that he had lost a little weight since his last appointment and we attributed the loss to my poor diet. We improved my diet and, two weeks later, he had gained weight. Two weeks following that, when my son was four months old, I ran into my midwife at a playgroup at our local birth center. She asked to weigh my son to see how he was growing. To our horror, he had lost all the weight he had gained and then some and qualified as Failure to Thrive. He weighed only 12oz more than on the day he was born.

In order to determine whether the problem was my milk or my son’s metabolism, my midwife asked another woman there at the playgroup if she would nurse my son. For the first time in weeks, he ate voraciously for over 30 minutes, which led us to conclude that the problem was my milk. While this was discouraging, it was a huge relief because metabolic disorders are scary ordeals. My midwife told me that we would have to supplement and I was in tears.

Fortunately, I had developed a strong support group during my pregnancy and in the weeks after birth. I had been attending La Leche League meetings and Birth Center gatherings since I was in my second trimester. I called my LLL leader and a couple of other friends and before I knew it a friend arrived with frozen breast milk from several people’s freezer stashes, along with a starter SNS (supplemental nursing system). She also nursed my son while she was there.

My son bounced back quickly on the donor milk. It was very challenging, like being in the newborn days all over again. I nursed him every 90 minutes, day and night. We had to get used to the supplementers, first the starter SNS, then the LactAid system. We had to thaw milk, fill bottles at all hours, wash bottles and supplementers, and carry a cooler with ice packs and extra bags of milk whenever we left the house. These were the kinds of things we thought we would be avoiding by breastfeeding and having me stay home with our son. There were also the confusing emotions and thoughts related to having someone else’s milk nourish my child instead of my own.

I was unable to pump efficiently and we lacked the financial means to purchase milk from a bank. I also was wary of pasteurized donor milk as the pasteurization process eliminates many of the aspects of breast milk that make it the perfect infant food. Gratefully, we were able to find a small numbers of generous local women who had surplus breast milk to donate. Due to their help, my son has never had formula, something I am eternally grateful for.

In the beginning, I wracked my brain trying to figure out what had happened to my milk supply and tried all kinds of herbs and supplements to get it back. However, I quickly stopped because it was a lot of stress, work, and money to try to boost my supply when we were going to keep him on the donor milk until he had doubled his birth weight regardless of my supply.

Three months after he was diagnosed as FTT, my son had an appointment where he weighed in at nearly double his birth weight. I was extremely proud and happy to reach that milestone and finally turned my attention to increasing my milk supply and weaning off of the Lact-Aid supplementer and donor milk.

I ended up taking 5,850 mg of Brewer’s Yeast and 1 tsp Motherlove’s More Milk Special Blend supplement daily. This boosted my milk supply nicely. I approached weaning off the donor milk the same way one would approach actual weaning, focusing on eliminating one feeding with the supplementer at a time until he was getting only my milk. I don’t recall exactly how long this process took, but it was about 3-4 weeks.

Something that had a huge influence on my ability to fully breastfeed my son again was his starting solid foods at around 7 months. We completely followed his lead when it came to starting solids and he was clearly telling us that he wanted them! We skipped pureed foods and he’s been self-feeding fruits, veggies, and meat from the beginning. Had he not started eating other foods when he did, I doubt I would have been able to supply all of his nutritional needs through my breast milk alone.

After it was all over, I was still curious about why this had happened to begin with. I never found a cut and dried answer, but I have my own suspicions. I believe that my poor diet caused my fertility to return prematurely (I got my first post-partum period 11 weeks after my son was born and have been having regular, ovulatory cycles every since). Looking back, the first low weight episode coincided with my first post-partum ovulation. Once my fertility was back, diet alone couldn’t correct the fact that my supply dips drastically at ovulation and during my period. Somewhere in the mix is my hypothyroidism, which I was aware of before becoming pregnant, but blood tests haven’t shown my levels as being abnormal since my son’s birth.

Next month, my son will turn one. As I think back on the past year, I can’t believe we did it. It would have been so easy to give up, and everyone would have understood. Instead, I have an active, mobile, happy near-toddler curled up in my lap to nurse a dozen times a day. I also have a strong motivation to try harder next time so the same thing doesn’t happen again with a future child.

Filed under: Cross nursing, Donor milk, Failure to thrive, Low supply, Supplemental nursing system (SNS)