Well…almost.  My back was still causing me a huge amount of pain.  I was seeing a physiotherapist for an unrelated hip problem, and she was trying to work on my back as well, but instead of getting better it got worse, to the point where I could not pick up or carry Sophie any more.  That was heartbreakingly difficult for me as a mother!  (Fortunately my husband is home full-time, so he did all the lifting and carrying, including getting up with me to get her out of the cot for middle-of-the-night feeds.)  My doctor, when I mentioned the pain to him, said it was normal, but I knew something was wrong.  The physiotherapist suggested a CT scan be ordered.  When we got the results, it showed two fractured vertebrae in my thoracic spine (between my shoulder blades), and a third vertebra that was obviously weakening but not yet actually fractured.  I had injured my back about 2.5 years previously, but hadn’t experienced any pain from that since then.  My doctor put me on painkillers (with instructions to stop taking them immediately if I noticed them having any effect on Sophie through my milk), and ordered another scan, this time to test my bone density.  It came back showing severe osteoporosis.  Funny how my doctor suddenly believed that my pain was not normal!  

So the next question was, why did a perfectly healthy 26 year old get osteoporosis?  I had grown up on a goat dairy drinking fresh goats milk by the gallon.  I’ve always had a good calcium intake.  The next step was to try to get me in to see a specialist at the hospital.  I asked my doctor if it was OK for me to still be breastfeeding, and he said it should be fine.  At this stage, it was about September.  I was supposed to be going back to work early October.  After a lot of chasing, the hospital finally told us that my appointment was set for Christmas Eve at 8.30am.  I wasn’t very impressed.  All the while I was still on painkillers, and they helped a bit, but some mornings I could hardly get out of bed.  One morning, it took me over 3 hours to do so…I ended up feeding Sophie in bed, playing with her in bed until she was ready for a nap, then I napped with her, and finally after that I was able, with my husband’s help (after taking painkillers and using a heatpack) to crawl out of bed.  I ended up needing to use a walking frame just to get up in the mornings and get around the house.  I didn’t see how I could wait until Christmas Eve to even see a specialist, let alone start some sort of treatment.  And if we upped the painkillers I was taking, I would have to stop breastfeeding because it just would not be safe for Sophie.  

Thankfully, a lady at church spoke to a female doctor at church, who agreed to see me and try to pull some strings within the hospital.  I went and saw her, and the hospital phoned me the next morning asking me if I could come in straight away. So we jumped in the car and went.  The specialist took my height, and I had lost about 3 inches since I was in high school!  My back has quite a pronounced curve in it, which I hate, but I’m going to have to live with.  The diagnosis was a rare condition, called pregnancy & lactation associated osteoporosis, or PLO.  They don’t really know what causes it or why women get it.  The drugs currently used to treat age-associated osteoporosis (which breastfeeding reduces one’s chance of getting, oddly enough) are excreted through breastmilk and would interfere with Sophie’s bone development.  They are also stored in the body for a long time, and if I took them I probably wouldn’t be able to have any more children because the drugs would pass through the placenta and affect a baby’s bone development as well.

This was all well and fine, I had already researched these drugs and decided I would not take them even if they were prescribed.   But the specialist didn’t even suggest them.  Instead, he told me I must wean.  I burst into tears right there in his office, in front of the registrar and a student doctor.  He was very gentle (his daughter is an ABA counsellor, so he has some idea about the importance of breastfeeding), but insistent.  I cried all the way home, and most of the rest of the day.  I was truly devastated.  I hadn’t had the labour/birth I’d wanted (ended up with an emergency caesar), I couldn’t do most of the looking-after of my baby, and now they wanted to take from me the one thing I could do for her!  It just seemed unbearable.

Sophie had other ideas.  It was a week before I could bring myself to say, “OK, let’s try some formula.”  And then Sophie didn’t want to touch it – she was 15 weeks old and obviously had developed a taste for boobyjuice, and nothing else would do.  We tried everything – even (shamefully) trying to starve her into drinking it.  We lasted 3 hours – and all three of us were in tears.  She just refused to have it.  And then she started refusing to take expressed milk from a bottle, which she had previously done quite happily.  It got to the point where she panicked when my husband handed me a teat (just the teat!) while she was in my arms.  It was a horrendous few weeks, those weeks that we were trying to wean her.

But at the same time, I started seriously researching what was known (what little there is) about PLO.  And I discovered that while most of the studies have involved women weaning as soon as they are diagnosed (and the trend is that 6 months after weaning, the PLO has completely reversed), nowhere did it say that those who didn’t wean got worse.  And in one study, the women continued to breastfeed, and they all still got better.  I started to wonder what would have happened to all those women if they had not weaned?  There was no way to know…but for me, there was only one way to find out.  So we made the decision to take the risk, and continue breastfeeding.  In a way, it was an easy decision, because I had never wanted to wean in the first place, but it was also hard because I was putting my body on the line, quite literally.  Some women, old and young, have applauded my decision, and others have expressed scepticism and concern over my apparent complete disregard for medical advice.

I don’t know what will happen into the future.  I will have another bone density scan soon, and will be very curious to see what that shows.  Sophie has been a “boobiful” girl for 7.5 months now, and I’d love to get to at least 2 years.  For now, we’re trooping on with breastfeeding, and loving it.  I haven’t had any more fractures, and am finally getting to the stage where I can pick her up and carry her, and generally be involved in her care, a lot more.  We’re just getting on with life, with loving our precious girlie, and with being a family.

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.