I had been sick for months and putting on weight. I had a thyroid problem, but it was getting worse and I had started to suspect that I had some kind of gut problem, so I went for an ultrasound.

“Oh, you’re pregnant,” said the technician.

“What?” I asked, leaning over to see the monitor, shocked and somehow expecting to see a jelly bean foetus in a blur of undefined body tissue.

“Here,” she said, turning the monitor towards me, “here’s your baby. Did you really not know you were pregnant?”

I couldn’t answer because there was a ribcage on the screen, and it wasn’t mine. I didn’t really have a giant stomach tumour or an immune system disease. I was 28 weeks pregnant. There was a whole baby inside me, well developed enough to survive if it was born that very day.

I don’t need to tell you that I was in a lot of shock for the next few months. I hadn’t planned or intended to have a baby. On the one hand, my fiance and I were planning our wedding, paying our mortgage and in good jobs, so we were in just the right circumstances to have a baby. But on the other hand, I was studying, had travel plans and was on medication for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

As soon as I knew I was pregnant, I stopped taking the Pill (yep, still on it and everything happening as usual) and my antidepressants. By the time I went in to labour, I had all the usual worries and fears of a very pregnant woman as well as increasing anxiety due to the OCD.

At that stage I still hadn’t decided whether I would breastfeed or not. I hadn’t decided anything much! Apart from repainting the spare room (my fiance insisted that if the walls were still magenta, he wasn’t doing any night time nappy changes in there!) and reading as much as I could about childbirth, I hadn’t been able to really face the reality of a baby. I hadn’t even turned up to the breastfeeding antenatal class.

On top of that, I really don’t like my breasts being touched, never mind sucked on and chomped on! But I hadn’t decided to go for bottlefeeding either, because it seemed selfish to me to not even give it a try. I had had 12 weeks of feeling guilty over all the things I had done to my baby already – drank at parties, flown to Seoul to eat street food and hike around the city at -12C, taken my Pill and my antidepressants and stayed out dancing all night. Not to mention not loving my baby or talking to it at all! I felt that I owed it to this baby to make up for six months of unintentional neglect.

I was so proud of myself that I lasted 18 hours into a 24 hour labour before having an epidural, and my little boy was born in the early hours of the 3rd of June. Just like every mother, I promptly went into shock, adrenalin taking the place of exhaustion and I happily let the midwife help my baby attach for the first time. It wasn’t too bad, certainly not yukky like I expected, and I decided that for now, I would try breastfeeding.

Four days later when I left the hospital, Dominic had a name but he still hadn’t had a proper feed. We had tried with every different midwife giving us different advice. I had refused to let him be bottlefed, but had learnt the uncomfortable art of hand expressing so he could be syringe fed some colostrum. I had a little bit of success using a nipple shield, and of course when my Mum came to see us Dominic would attach and drink like a little angel, meaning Mum was reassuring me that he was just fine. The midwives were getting worried because Dominic was sleeping for 7 or 8 hours overnight and not waking up for a feed because he wasn’t getting enough milk to get any energy. So I was pretty stressed by the time I took him home.

Over the next few weeks, my nipples cracked and bled, becoming more and more painful. I was starting to dread every feed, and Dominic still wasn’t getting much milk. We hired an electric pump from the chemist, and it was pretty clear that I was producing hardly any milk. In an hour I could manage perhaps 10mL or 20mL and it was scarcely less painful than feeding him myself.

We had many visits to the local clinic, where the nurses ranged from kind to brilliant, and they were all encouraging, but nobody had the magic solution I was looking for.

Some time in the third week, as I sat on the sofa, both of us crying our eyes out, my wonderful fiance went to the kitchen and made a bottle of formula. Dominic had his first bottle feed with Daddy. I felt a huge pressure had lifted and I realised that if Dominic and I were crying and dreading our feeds, we couldn’t possibly have a good relationship.

So for the next few weeks, I would feed Dominic a bottle whenever my nipples felt too sore to feed comfortably. And a couple of times a week, Daddy would do bottle feeds overnight and give Mummy a rest. My fiance really treasured those times with his little boy, and he delighted in sending me out to do the shopping or visit a friend while ‘the boys’ had ‘boy time’ together.

I was really lucky at this time because my Mum, my sisters-in-law and some of my aunts are very very pro-breastfeeding. They were encouraging me to keep on giving it a go, when I felt I could. My sister-in-law in particular said to me that I should stick to it for six weeks, using formula and expressing to help, but that if I managed six weeks, I could be satisfied that I’d done my best. So I persevered with nipple shields and Lansinoh, and fed Dominic at least a few times every day. During this time I also had Maxolon prescribed by my GP to try and increase my milk supply, which was still very poor.

At the same time, Granny and some other aunts had bottle fed, either from the start or from a few weeks in, and they were quick to point out that there was no shame in deciding not to breastfeed.

I had encouragement from both sides of the bottle/breast divide. And I had it fixed in my mind that if I persisted, even just once a day, until the six week mark, I could then hang up my maternity bras and pat myself on the back.

One evening when Dominic was about four weeks old, I was giving him a pre-bed cuddle when he threw up all over me. Not unusual for Dominic, he was the spewiest baby I’d ever met, but this time it had blood in it. It seemed far too much to be from a cracked nipple, so I shouted for my fiance. We bundled Dominic into the car and rushed off to casualty. Being such a tiny baby, he was attended to instantly, with specialists being hurried out of bed and all the nursing staff fussing over him. It seemed that he had reflux, and that he had thrown up so much that he’d irritated his throat to the point where it was bleeding.

After this drama, as well as combining bottle and breastfeeding, we were now adding reflux medication and formula thickener to our repertoire. That worked straight away, and Dominic’s paediatrician even gave me permission to take my OCD medication while breastfeeding, so ‘anxious cranky Mummy’ and ‘crying spewy baby’ almost overnight became ‘happy Mummy’ and ‘contented baby’.

Suddenly making it to six weeks didn’t seem like such a big trial: I would just keep on rubbing Lansinoh on my nipples, using the nipple shields and topping up with a bottle of thickened formula. I could do this!

Then one day, when he was about six weeks old, Dominic just… latched on! All by himself! No nipple shield, no careful inserting of nipples, no aiming. Within a day I was breastfeeding at every feed, and topping him up with a bit of formula a couple of times a day. Within a week, my nipples were completely recovered and I hardly ever needed any Lansinoh. ‘They’ were right, once breastfeeding worked properly it didn’t hurt at all.

We continued with mainly breastfeeding and a little bit of bottlefeeding until Dominic was six months old. Doing both meant that I could go out to a party and leave Dominic with his Daddy or his grandparents for a few hours. I would still be home within a few hours because my breasts would be huge and leaking everywhere, but at least I knew that if he was hungry, Dominic could have a bottle. On the other hand, breastfeeding is so much more convenient out and about. I could just find a comfy spot and breastfeed any time Dominic was hungry or stressed, and stay out as long as I wanted without worrying about running out of bottles.

I was due to go back to work at the start of January so I started to offer him a bottle for his feeds during work hours, followed by a breastfeed top up, so that hopefully when I was due to go to work I could send him to daycare with bottles of formula. My Mum was very positive about managing part-time breastfeeding as she continued with morning and night feeds for some months when weaning my sister and I. But Dominic had other ideas. Over the course of a week he completely dropped the breastfeeds and had his last breastfeed on Christmas Day. It wasn’t our best feed. I was engorged and a bit sore, and spent ten minutes persuading him to suck just a little bit so I could relax and enjoy Christmas lunch!

At first, we continued to cuddle Dominic during his bottle feeds so that he did not miss out on the closeness he had experienced with breastfeeding. But he decided very quickly that he prefered to lie on his wedge pillow and hold his own bottle, in fact he insisted on it! So these days we sit with him and read a story instead. At ten months, he is a happy, healthy, well-adjusted baby. And as they say, you can’t tell whether he was breast or bottlefed – just that he is well-loved!

I’m really proud of myself for sticking with the breastfeeding for six months. I feel like I gave Dominic the best possible start in life. I managed to balance the nutritional benefits of breastmilk with the benefits of having a calm, relaxed Mum at mealtimes. When Dominic was born, I felt I’d had very little choice, and therefore very little control, about having a baby. With the support and encouragement of my friends, family and clinic nurses, I felt in control of my body and chose to stop breastfeeding when it hurt too much, and persist again when I felt ready to, while still giving my baby the best care possible.

The biggest barrier I faced was the idea that breastfeeding is ‘all or nothing’. That might be true for some, but it doesn’t have to be. If you are finding breastfeeding a struggle you often receive advice that points you to either breastfeed in agony or bottle feed exclusively. You don’t have to do that. You can mix and match, try different things, and work out your own perfect balance.

Here is a list of things we tried, which all more or less worked (and were undertaken with the supervision of a paediatrician):

* Breastfeeding
* Breastfeeding with a nipple shield
* Hand expressing
* Pump expressing
* Using Maxolon to help produce more milk
* Lanolin for cracked nipples
* Bottlefeeding expressed breast milk
* Bottlefeeding formula
* Thickening formula to reduce reflux
* Using a dummy
* Breastfeeding, with a top up of thickened formula at each feed
* Breastfeeding, and topping up once or twice a day with formula
* Having Daddy, grandparents, godparents and family do bottlefeeds
* Dreamfeeds, where you feed the baby right before you go to bed to increase your chance of a longer sleep
* Bottle handles, because Dominic insists on holding his own bottles
* A kidney shaped pillow to breastfeed on
* A wedge pillow to bottlefeed on (once Dominic decided cuddles were not happening during feeds)
* A variety of bottle and teat styles, and now a variety of sippy cups, straw cups, pop-top drink bottles, regular cups etc. In short, Dominic will take the food however it is dispensed!
* Early start on solids (Farex) to help with reflux, while continuing to breastfeed.
* Cabbage leaves while I was weaning
* Hand expressing while I was weaning
* Pleading with Dominic to please have a little bit of a drink so Mummy was less sore (didn’t work terribly well, but I gave it a try!)
* Your obstetrician and psychiatrist will probably defer backwards and forwards to each other, neither wanting to say that it’s ok or not ok to take your medication while pregnant. Get in touch with a paediatrician as soon as you can, and talk to them about it.
* For any OCD mummies out there, start out by not caring which breast the baby drank from last. It’s only going to end in tears because one night you WILL be too tired to remember and you don’t want to get yourself in a state over it! I’m not a ‘germ phobe’, I’m a counter and a worrier, so I haven’t had as many problems as I expected.
* If you have a mental illness, be extra aware of the possibility of postnatal depression. You probably already have a support network set up. Tell all the midwives and nurses about your mental illness and how it might affect you as a parent. I did, and got lots of extra help in the hospital and at the clinic.
* Only listen to family, friends, midwives, nurses and doctors who said things we liked and encouraged us to find the best solution to our feeding problems without pressuring us.

When my daughter was born our first feed went pretty well, I was very relieved as I have one flat and one inverted nipple so knew there was a chance that I’d have some trouble, she also had a retracted lower jaw, which means she can’t open her mouth quite as wide as most babies. However our next feed, and all of them after that were not so good. Mackenzie could attach to the flat nipple ok, but not the inverted one, and the midwives at our hospital were terrible, each one would give you conflicting advice and instead of coaching they would snatch my daughter and my breast and force them onto one another, one midwife did this and wouldn’t listen when I said she wasn’t attached properly and when she finished I had a big blood blister on my nipple. Another midwife tried to tell me I was starving and dehydrating my daughter and that they had to give her formula. I refused this though and at that point remembered something my sister had told me “If you have any problems ask for a lactation consultant and don’t listen to anybody else”. I didn’t even know if the hospital had one I’d never heard of one before but at this point asked to see one. The midwife tried to refuse me but I insisted and sure enough a lactation consultant was provided.

To begin with we tried using a breast pump to pull my nipple out but when this didn’t work she gave me a nipple shield and said that the midwives would probably try to tell me that you can’t use a nipple shield before your milk has come in because the colostrum is too thick but this isn’t true and she will get some out. This worked wonders on the inverted nipple and the other nipple she was ok with, I thought my troubles were over. The next day my daughter was admitted to the special care nursery to be observed as she’d turned blu on me and they had me feed her every 3 hours and then express to make sure she was getting enough milk because she had dropped a bit of weight (perfectly normal in the first few days I thought). The midwife who’d tried to give me formula turned the breastpump on full ball on my good nipple and tore it to shreds, there was blood everywhere and over 12m later you can still see where the big tear in my nipple was. It was so painful I couldn’t feed from it so had to use the nipple shield on that side as well. Then to top things off I developed an infection in my uterus which the midwife ignored so I ended up very sick and on an antibiotic drip for a few days. It was so painful I could barely move, every time my daughter needed a nappy change it would take me a good half an hour to get up and do it, plus breastfeeding her was made so much more difficult. They also took a sample of my breastmilk for testing at this time and discovered that on top of everything else I had mastitis.

Finally I got through all the infections and was able to go home with my new baby. When I got home I began suffering from sciatica, which made it very uncomfortable to find a comfortable position to sit in, to feed Mackenzie. I would have to sit on 3 pillows on the couch then I had another 3 pillows arranged on and around me to assist me to hold and feed Mackenzie. To rub more salt in the wound a friend came to visit with her 10mo breastfed baby and of course when she fed her it was so easy and quick and painless it reduced me to tears. She assured me she suffered to begin with and it would get easier but I couldn’t foresee it. I continued to suffer from multiple infections and bouts of mastitis plus a case of nipple thrush (OUCH) for the next few weeks and was constantly on antibiotics, which of course went through my milk causing Mackenzie to have a very upset tummy and lots of diarrhoea. Through all of this, and I can’t emphasise just how painful it was, not feeding was never an option. I never thought of giving up feeding or switching to formula cause it would be easier. Instead I just became more determined to stick it out and it was going to get easier if it was the last thing I ever did!

I decided early on that I wanted to feed for a minimum of 12m or until I got Mackenzie off the nipple shields – whichever was the longer of the two (I’ve since changed my mind and am now well on the way to 2 years old) because I absolutely hated the nipple shields. They took so long to fumble with to get on which meant my daughter would be getting quite distressed, plus many people had never seen or heard of them before so they attracted quite a bit of attention. I tried a few different ways to wean her off them but she wouldn’t touch my nipples without them. I hated that it had to be so difficult – why couldn’t it be easy for me, like it seemed to be for everyone else? One night I went along to a friends church thing with her and they had a parenting room there where about 6 mothers sat feeding their babies with ease, I was so jealous. I went home so angry and upset, but also all the more determined and funnily enough Mackenzie must have picked up on this because she didn’t even try to fight me then next time I tried to feed her I didn’t even have a shield nearby just in case. She latched on like we’d been doing it like this all along. We never used a shield again I was so happy I sat there and cried for hours – happy tears of course.

I continued to suffer with the infections and mastitis (I had a severe oversupply of milk which was in no hurry to settle down) for the next few months but finally somewhere between 4-6 months it all finally settled down and I was able to enjoy what was now a wonderful, easy breastfeeding relationship with my beautiful daughter. I developed post natal depression and had to go onto medication during that time and was very apprehensive about doing so whilst feeding but it was either that or no medication, giing up the breastfeeding has never been an option, even now when contraception has become an issue (I can’t take the mini pill) I would rather go without if necessary then stop feeding her.

She is now 14mo and still feeding wonderfully, giving her her precious boobies is the best part of the day I sit down, relax and cuddle her, it is so beautiful – like nothing else in the world. I still suffer the odd bout of mastitis – for example if she has a few night feeds in a row then sleeps a full night I’ll wake up very sick but that’s ok, I recognise the signs and my dr is very good about getting onto it early. My plan now is to feed her until at least 2 – give her the chance to self wean but I don’t know if I can go that much further – we’ll see I originally thought I’d only go 12m and I quicklychanged my mind on that. I have seen so many girls/women I know give up early on claiming they “couldn’t” breastfeed when in actual fact they just want their babies to sleep through the night or because they got a small crack in their nipple and it hurt too much, this makes me very sad – especially when I fought so hard to continue to feed Mackenzie. It also makes me feel very sorry for the people who really can’t feed because they would probably do just about anything to be able to and get a bad name in certain circles because of other people. If I could tell new mums anything it is to perservere as much as you can, it really is worth it. Somedays you may question that but I am so proud of myself and my daughter and I are so close as a result of it, I’m so, so glad I did.

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.

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!