My gorgeous wee man was born at 37 weeks exactly. His suck was excellent despite being early and we tried to feed straight away. During the first few days I had a lot of difficulty latching him and blisters and sores started appearing on my nipples. I was sure this wasn’t right and asked for some help, but everyone said I was doing fine and to continue.

We went home from hospital to have him taking up to 30 minutes to latch at most feeds, him screaming, me with tears running down my face. The pain became more and more at each feed. On about the 7th day I rang my midwife because I just couldn’t do it anymore. She advised me to express to give my nipples a break, so we began expressing all feeds and bottle feeding EBM.

By the next morning (I think) I was shaking all over and nearly collapsed on the floor. Beginning of mastitis bout, number one. This was horrid. I couldn’t do anything apart from sit up in bed to express and eat and drink a bit. Thanks to my mum and husband who were there to bottle feed the expressed milk. I got better, but my nipples were still red raw and there was no way I could latch. So I expressed day and night for another week then began to try relatching him.

This was excruciating! Eventually I managed to get him latched with nipple shields. We both gradually managed to get into a rhythm with feeds and make some progress. He took over an hour to feed each time and it felt like I was doing nothing else!

Now, the pain was still excruciating over this whole time! At every feed it felt like needles and glass were cutting my whole breast throughout the feed. After the feed it felt like acid had been poured on my nipples and I would have severe shooting pains through my breast for hours. Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep! The pain was so bad I couldn’t wear clothing! So I was essentially at home the whole time. I think I bought every single breastfeeding product I could find (shells, shields, creams, pumps etc).

I then managed to get another 2 episodes of mastitis. More pain, more antibiotics. We were still using the nipple shields. But at least I was still feeding!

It took weeks to convince people this pain was not normal. I had been told to just get on with it and it couldn’t possibly hurt that much. FINALLY a lactation consultant suggested I may have thrush.  The thrush took over 6 weeks to cure. I had creams, then weeks of nystatin tablets, nothing worked. I finally got prescribed fluconazole tablets and my pain started to subside.

I finally got all the infections sorted enough to brave weaning from the nipple shields. It took another few weeks of gentle coaxing, tricking, encouraging, along with screaming and tears to teach my baby what that nipple felt like again!

By 12 weeks we were finally managing to feed without nipple shields and with much less pain!!

Then came the saga of an unhappy baby with blood in his poo!! It eventuated he was intolerant to cows milk and I then had to go onto a dairy-free diet. That lasted until he was over one! By about 14 months I could eat small amounts of dairy but he could still only tolerate breast milk. Thank goodness I had managed to feed him!

Anyway, here we are now, coming up to 21 months old. We are still breastfeeding.  My wee guy loves his “milkas” and this mummy feels like she has managed one of the best, but hardest accomplishments in her life!! I love the moments we have together feeding and the wee smiles and giggles looking back up at me! Oh yeah, and we have been pain free for more than a year.

I was having ultrasounds twice weekly because the doctors were very worried about twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a dangerous complication that happens sometimes with identical twins.  I drove to one of my Thursday ultrasounds, thinking that it would be more of the same: they are still different in size and very small, so you should lay around and do nothing all day.  Instead, they took a very long time to do the ultrasound, and when the doctor came in afterwards to give me the report, the first thing he said was, “So we have you scheduled for a c-section at 7:30 tomorrow morning.”  I was shocked!  I was only 35 weeks pregnant, and not feeling ready for the twins to be born.  But they had measured the blood flow from the placenta, and felt that Baby B, the smaller twin, was not getting enough oxygen and nutrients.  So it was time for them to come out.  Both babies were breech, and the doctors refused to allow me to even attempt a vaginal birth.  They told me that at 35 weeks, the babies should be healthy enough to come  home within a few days, and that “they might have to spend a day or two in the NICU, but it’s no big deal.”  I can’t believe they told me that!  And I can’t believe I bought it!

So the next morning, Jonah and Owen were born by C-section at 8:17 and 8:18 in the morning.  They were not breathing very well, so the nurses whisked them off to the NICU with nothing more than a quick wave to me.  My husband went off with them, and I was sent up to recovery.  It was so strange to be in the labor and delivery ward of the hospital with no babies.  I could hear babies crying in neighboring rooms, and I ached to be holding my two little ones.  When I went to see them in the NICU, they had their faces covered (for minimal stimulation), and were positively covered in wires and tubes and monitors.  We were not allowed to touch them or even talk to them above a whisper that first day, and the news just kept getting worse and worse.  I will never forget the moment when the doctor said to me about Owen, “Well, we don’t have many more tricks up our sleeve.  If he doesn’t respond to the Nitric, we’re going to have to call Boston.”  Both babies had severe respiratory distress syndrome, and they didn’t respond to hardly any of the treatments for the first 24 hours.

Meanwhile, I was pumping and trying to build my supply so that I could nurse them when they were strong enough.  At first, we were adamant that they not have pacifiers or bottles, but when the nurses said that bottle-fed babies go home sooner, I gave in.  It was two days before they even were able to have the first drops of colostrum swabbed on their gums.  Slowly, they started to be able to take little bits of my milk from a bottle nipple, once they were off the ventilators.  It was five days before we got to hold Jonah, the stronger of the two.  I kept asking when I could nurse them, but the nurses told me that it would make their oxygen levels drop, and they had to be on a certain type of ventilator, and all kinds of other excuses. 

I had plenty of milk, and I was pumping every 3 hours around the clock to build a supply for my little guys.  The hospital finally told me to store it at home in our freezer because theirs was full! 

But we still weren’t nursing.  Jonah was in the hospital for 2 weeks, and I nursed him 3 times before he came home.  Owen was in for 3 weeks, and I only nursed him once while he was there.   Once Jonah came home, we worked really hard to get him latched on and nursing.  He was getting stronger every day, but it was so hard to nurse him (he would nurse for an hour every feeding), then offer him a bottle of milk so that we could be sure he was getting enough, then pump so we would have milk to offer.  And I tried to go to the hospital every day to visit Owen, who was still there.  It was insanity! 

And it only got crazier when Owen finally came home.  We nursed every single feeding because I was so determined to get them on the breast.  And it was the same routine: nurse, bottle, pump.  All day and all night.  Owen had to have some special high-calorie formula that we mixed with breastmilk instead of water, because he wasn’t gaining weight very well. 

And when Owen came home, I started having excruciating nipple pain.  It felt like broken glass was coming out of my breasts at every feeding.  My husband would come home and find me nursing the boys and sobbing.  I started taking painkillers just to be able to feed them, because I refused to switch to formula.  Our doula told us that it was almost definitely thrush, so I went and got checked out by my doctor.  She told me that the boys’ latch looked good, and it probably was thrush, but she wouldn’t treat me unless their pediatrician also treated them.  Their pediatrician then told me that he wouldn’t treat them unless I was also being treated.  It took me three days to finally convince them that someone had to write the prescription first.  And so we all took nystatin, which did nothing for two weeks.   Then, my doctor switched me to Diflucan, and we used gentian violet along with it.  And, even though everything in our house was purple for a week from the gentian violet, it worked! 

We had four glorious, pain-free days of nursing before the pain returned.  And so I went nuts.  I read everything I could get my hands on about yeast.  I became the Hygiene Nazi, treating everything that touched breastmilk as though it were toxic waste.  We put vinegar on everything, and used grapefruit seed extract and gentian violet, and many courses of Diflucan.  Nothing worked. 

So I was in immense pain all the time, but we finally did get the boys solely on the breast, with no bottles at all.  What a triumph!  I wish I remembered more of it, but I spent so much time in a haze of pain that it all seems like such a blur to me.

Finally, six weeks after the pain returned, a lactation consultant at the support group I was going to said, “maybe it’s not yeast.”  The thought had never occurred to me (or, apparently, to my doctor).  So I went to the doctor and insisted that she culture my breastmilk, although she didn’t think it was necessary.  It’s a good thing we did, because it turned out that I didn’t have yeast at all; instead, I had a raging staph infection in my nipples. 

She put me on dicloxacillin, which didn’t make me feel better and gave me an allergic reaction.  When I told the doctor that I was still having pain, she told me she was just going to prescribe another course of Diflucan, because it was probably just yeast from the antibiotics.  I would not take any more meds without being cultured, so I insisted that they wait and do another culture.  And it’s a good thing, because it turned out that the staph was MRSA, a medicine-resistant form of staph. 

The doctor put me on Levaquin, another antibiotic that the culture indicated would work, but told me that I couldn’t nurse while I was on it.  And then told me that I could.  I asked our pediatrician who told me it was fine, and then another doctor in his practice said it was absolutely not.  I kept asking doctors, and kept getting conflicting answers.  Finally, I decided that I wouldn’t risk the health of my two boys who had already been so sick, and I decided that I would formula feed them for the fourteen days while I was medicated, and just pump.  I had to go stay with my parents so that they could help with the logistics of managing and feeding two babies and pumping.  After 24 hours of having the boys reject the bottles and then, finally, gulp down the formula and spit it all back up, I decided that I couldn’t do it.  I did a lot more research, and found some information saying that it was probably all right for me to nurse while I was on the Levaquin.  I still was wary of it, so I decided to nurse every other feeding, so at least they would still get the benefits of breastmilk, and any harmful effects from the medicine would be limited.  It was a disaster.  They had a lot of trouble keeping the formula down, and my supply dropped because the pump was not getting as much as the babies normally did. 

But the medicine was working!  By the end of the fourteen-day course, I was pain-free again.  And once I was done with it, I started nursing the boys for every feeding again, and trying desperately to build my milk supply back up. 

Unfortunately, the pain came back after only four days.  I had another two cultures done, because I wanted to make sure we were treating the right problem.  I was afraid that we had yeast again from the antibiotics.  But both cultures came back negative.  I was at my wits’ end.  I couldn’t understand why I was still in so much pain.  I went to my doctor, who told me that she just couldn’t understand it either.  She said that our latch looked good, so I probably just needed some time to heal up.  She told me to pump and bottle feed the boys for a week to let myself heal.  “No nursing for at least a week!”, she told me.  This didn’t sound quite right to me, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried it.  Again, it was a disaster.  My breasts no longer would let down for the pump.  I would pump for 20 minutes and get only an ounce of milk.  Needless to say, my supply plummeted.  We had to supplement the boys with formula, which they again had trouble keeping down.  I went against my doctor’s advice and nursed them once a day, in the evening, just to make sure they would go back to the breast after a week. 

After 4 days, they rejected the breast completely.  Every time I tried to nurse them, they would scream as if they were being terribly hurt.  It was horrible.  They had decided that the bottle was much easier, and they didn’t want to nurse anymore.  I stopped all bottles immediately, and we cup-fed them to make sure they were getting enough to eat.  They still refused the breast, and cried all day and all night.

I was completely at the end of my rope.  Friends and family were telling me to just give up and switch to formula, but I felt like I didn’t know how to be a mom without nursing.  It was so important to me, and I felt like Jonah and Owen really needed it, that I refused to quit.  I cried and cried and spent hours and hours researching on the internet.  Finally, even though we didn’t have the money, I bit the bullet and paid for a private lactation consultant to come out to the house and consult with us. 

She will forever be an angel in my mind.  In the space of about 15 minutes, she had diagnosed and then fixed our latch problem.  I felt so foolish that I had been ‘doing it wrong’ for four months!  As for the nipple confusion, she said to just keep doing what we were doing, and that now that they had a better latch, it would be easier for them to get milk from the breast.  Within a few days, my supply was back up, the boys were nursing like pros, and I was pain-free!  I can’t believe it was so easy after all that pain.  I had been told by two other lactation consultants, my doctor, and the boys’ pediatrician that our latch was very good. 

It was beautiful to nurse without having it make my toes curl in pain!  I was thrilled, but the boys were not happy babies.  They were covered in rashes, and spitting up constantly, and too uncomfortable to sleep, ever.  We were all exhausted, and I did more research.  Although my doctor told me that what I ate wouldn’t affect the boys, I thought that something I ate might be bothering them.  I cut dairy out of my diet for two weeks, and they got much better, and then worse again.  I decided to do the Dr. Sears total elimination diet.

So for two weeks, I ate nothing but rice, millet, summer squash, turkey, sweet potatoes, and pears.  I was ridiculously hungry and lost a twenty pounds, but it helped a lot.  The boys’ rashes disappeared, they stopped spitting up entirely, and they started sleeping longer stretches at night.  They seemed much happier. 

After a couple of months, we figured out that they were reacting to dairy and soy in my diet, which explains why they always had so much trouble with the cows’ milk formula. So now I eat anything but dairy and soy. Now that the boys are a year old, I am able to eat a little bit of cheese once in a while.

One day, when the boys were 7 months old, I noticed that my nipples were getting sore again.  We had started nursing in some new positions, so I just monitored their latches closely, hoping it would go away.  It didn’t, and one day I woke up to find that one of my breasts was red and hot.  I had had this for months before, and I figured it would go away, but later that day I started to feel hot and really tired.  Before long, I had chills and was in really bad shape.  I figured out that I had mastitis, and was put on antibiotics.  Within a day, I was feeling better and I thought that was the end of it.  Unfortunately, I had it again as soon as the antibiotics ran out.  The same thing happened twice more, and I ended up with three courses of antibiotics within 8 weeks.  I was sick from the antibiotics and worried about taking to many meds, especially because I was also on Diflucan so that I wouldn’t get thrush from all of the antibiotics.  The fourth time that I woke up with a red breast, I decided to give it 24 hours and see what happened, as long as I didn’t get a fever.  I kept a heat pad on my breast all day and after every feeding I swabbed my nipple with grapefruit seed extract, let it dry, and applied Bactrim and a clean nursing pad.  After 24 hours, the inflammation was gone!  

Still, five months later, this happens about once a week, but it always goes away with heat and super hygiene.  I had given up on it until recently, when a friend sent me a video about something called inflammatory breast cancer.  I was scared into getting some answers, and will be seeing a breast health specialist this month and getting a mammogram and an ultrasound.  So far, no one has been able to give me any answers, but I’m hopeful that we will figure this out.

Our nursing relationship has been worth every bit of trouble.  It has been amazing to watch my boys grow from two tiny, sick, skinny babies into happy, healthy, chubby mama’s boys.  They will be a year old this month, and they are complete milk monsters.  Their first baby sign was the sign for milk.  They don’t even know what to do with a bottle.  Aside from the disastrous (and, thankfully, occasional) formula, they were exclusively breastfed for 7 months, when they started solid foods. 

I think we have made it this far on sheer determination, but I hope the next year will be easier; my initial goal was a year of nursing, but now I think we’ll do two!

A was a much anticipated first bebe and it didn’t ever occur to me that things would be anything but natural and enjoyable.  Of course, not necessarily easy, but if we followed our intuition then all would work out.  I suppose, in pregnancy bliss, one can’t even contemplate the difficulties of a baby screaming constantly with acid reflux, severe allergies and even being tongue tied!  What a combination, especially when one is living in a foreign country where you can’t speak the language and away from normal support structures.

Almost from when A was born, he cried.  Our poor little mouse.  The first attempts to breastfeed were painful and difficult, he didn’t latch on properly and I can remember what seemed like an endless stream of midwifes thrusting by engorged breasts into his tiny red screaming mouth.  Even when I got the hang of the positioning, his sucking felt like broken glass piercing the most sensitive part of my body.  In desperation I started taking pain killers in order to feed him.

I have a strong memory of mother, a committed breast feeder of my younger sister (after suffering two first bebes, my brother and I, in humidity cribs that couldn’t feed) pleading with me to stop trying.  She and I were crying hysterically and the pain that I felt seemed to be an endless cycle between short bursts of sleep. Yet I persisted.

In addition to the constant crying, A pooed constantly with acidic green slime emerging from his cloth nappies.  His tummy was constantly swollen and he barely slept.

I searched for help online and found it in the form of Mary and a wonderful lactation consultant in Brisbane who despite being on a different time zone (we lived in Europe) spent hours on the phone with me making me feel ‘less crazy’.  Following a photo that I sent through to her of A, she casually remarked that he was tongue tied!  I couldn’t believe that hours one on one with lactation nurses in Europe had failed to notice that small fact!  Somehow the explanation for the pain in feeding made me feel justified and not totally insane.

A also had allergies, as it turned out to egg, diary, nuts, seafood and wheat.  I forced myself to eat meat (having been a vegetarian for 15 years) and survived on quinoa, celery, lamb, chicken and garlic so that I could keep breastfeeding A.  It helped marginally, but he even reacted to brown rice. Not surprisingly I ended up in hospital having lost so much weight and weighed down with considerable stress, and to be honest guilt, that everything that I consumed could be hurting my red faced screaming little fellow.

Of course, over time things improved.  I was forced to eat a wider range of foods.  A did not consume solids for 10 months and I breastfed him for 2 years, despite starting a highly demanding job when he was 10 months old.  I have to laugh remembering how I used to run into the bathroom to express and then treated the breast milk as pure gold, not the usual run of things in a large law firm!

When I look back, I am not sure that I could have done any of this without the strong sense of love and commitment that I felt to my little A and the support that I got from my amazing husband and from gorgeous Mary, herself going through so much with little C.  Interestingly though when I think back to a very challenging first year with A, the highlight is the closeness that I achieved with him through breastfeeding.

As I rub my growing belly, I can only pray that my next little one does not have to face the same early challenges.  Breastfeeding is an amazing gift, but at the same time, I would never judge anybody that doesn’t because I know that it’s not always easy.

By the time Cyrus came along I had realised that my eldest son had suffered miserably from undiagnosed reflux. He hadn’t been a happy baby and he’d vomited constantly for the first year of his life but reflux wasn’t something I’d heard of back then, much less the link between reflux and allergies. With Cyrus I was better prepared, so I thought. I knew about the link between food allergies/intolerances and atopic disease in infants, so was all set to cut foods out of my diet if he developed reflux like his poor big brother had.

When Cyrus was around three weeks old he developed gastro-oesophageal reflux and began to experience what was later described as “intestinal hurry”. He was exclusively breastfed but didn’t have normal breastfed baby bowel movements. I won’t go into gory detail, but they were odd. He’d also developed an angry rash on his face. I know some babies get a hormonal rash around that time and it goes away after a few weeks, but this was different. It didn’t go away but continued to worsen, and eventualy spread over his entire body.

When I realised little Cyrus had been dealt an atopic constitution I started to limit my diet. I cut out egg, wheat, dairy and nuts but he didn’t seem consistently better. I eliminated so many foods from my diet in the hope of finding the one, or ones that were the trigger for his symptoms to the point where I ended up living on chicken, rice and water.  I lost about 30kg (66 pounds) and we were both miserable. Realising that this approach wasn’t working I tried to reintroduce foods into my diet but cutting them out seemed to have made me super-sensitive so that the reintroduced foods made me sick and Cyrus worse. Aaargh!

When Cyrus was five months old an allergy clinic managed to squeeze us in for an appointment. After a three hour drive and a five and a half hour appointment they sent us home with two tins of elemental (protein-free) formula and a gloomy prognosis about his ability to tolerate solid foods in the future. I had told the allergy clinic people repeatedly that I wanted to breastfeed Cyrus and I would do whatever it took, but I don’t think they believed me. They told me that breastfeeding was tiring me out, that sometimes breastmilk is simply not best, that breastfeeding an allergic/intolerant baby is too hard, and that my baby would only get better on the elemental formula. I was feeling very low by the time we got out of there.

My confidence was dashed and I weaned Cyrus onto the elemental formula. A day later I unweaned him.  I couldn’t believe that after all my breastfeeding counsellor training and experience I’d allowed the allergy clinic people to convince me that my milk was so bad for him. After all, Cyrus was a good size and weight for his age and was developmentally normal.

In order to stop myself from losing any more weight I drank the formula myself a few times a day. It tasted revolting and for the first week I had to suppress the urge to vomit every time I tasted or even smelled it. I continued to drink it for a few months until my weight had stabilised and I was eating enough to sustain it.

I continued to give Cyrus one small bottle of the formula every day or two so that he would be used to the taste if he did ever need to drink it in the future (e.g. if he was unable tolerate any/much solid food). I’d been scared by stories of older babies and children with major food tolerance problems who had understandably refused to drink the stuff because it tasted so horrid, and ended up with NGTs (nasogastric tubes) because they hadn’t been conditioned to drink elemental formula orally at an early age. It really tasted that bad.

At around seven months a naturopath recommended some treatments which helped Cyrus’s reflux and gut somewhat but did nothing for his painful eczema. He started eating solid food at around ten months. I was too worried about possible adverse reactions to food to start earlier than that and I knew that the formula (which I viewed more as a vitamin supplement than a food) would provide him with any extra nutrients that for some reason may not have been available in my breastmilk. We started very slowly with Cyrus’s food, mainly stewed (or tinned) fruit and oat and rice-based dishes. He appeared to react strongly to dairy (although didn’t show a positive skin test) and a few other things.

By eighteen months he was eating a decent amount of food, although not much variety. Just corn, oats, rice, beef, lamb, chicken, sweet potato, apple and pear. I took him for a follow-up allergy test and the immunologist told me I needed to wean him off the elemental formula and breastmilk onto cow milk, despite the fact that it made Cyrus’s eczema flare up. The immunologist tried to convince me that there was no benefit to breastfeeding Cyrus beyond 6 months and that cows’ milk would be better. What?? I still don’t understand why milk designed for baby cattle would be more beneficial to my child than human breastmilk.

Breastfeeding Cyrus was really hard work. I suffered as much as he did in those early stages of his life, but I am so glad that I didn’t give up. Sure, there are things I could have done differently to make our lives easier but I don’t regret for one second breastfeeding him against medical advice. I believe that continuing to breastfeed Cyrus benefited his immune system in the long term, to the point where now at age three he can eat almost anything and appears (touch wood) to have recovered from his highly allergy-prone state.