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.

As we prepared for Ethan’s arrival I started to get excited about breastfeeding. I was committed to raising our baby “green”. I went out and purchased nursing bras, went to a breastfeeding class and paid ahead of time to have a lactation consultant come support me in our home after his birth. I had heard of the challenge of breastfeeding from many moms  and wanted to be prepared ahead of time.  Finally on August 3, 2008, 10 days late, Ethan Paul Dumouchel, 8lbs 8 oz, arrived after a 13 ½ hr, unmedicated labour, with the support of our doula and Obstetrician. I remember that as soon as they put him on my chest, I felt such relief as I observed his perfect little face and ten fingers and toes. He was perfect and beautiful. His APGAR scores were awesome and they took us to our room right away. Through the night I tried nursing him several times as he woke up hungry to be fed. It was a holiday weekend and so the hospital lactation consultant was unavailable. We got Ethan to latch a few times but every time we would hear large “clucking” sounds and then he would fall off. I felt so frustrated as I listened to him scream. I thought the problem was that my breast was too large for his little mouth. I satisfied him as best I could by squeezing colostrum into his mouth. Matt, my husband and I had decided ahead of time that no formula was to be given to our baby and that we would spend as little time as possible in the hospital so we were eager to be discharged.  I remember the next morning as clear as day in my mind. I don’t think I will ever forget the words of the pediatrician who came to check him over in preparation to discharge us. “Did anyone tell you about his mouth?”, he asked. What we learned next was that Ethan was born with a cleft in his soft palate. This was the reason for the clucking sounds while breastfeeding; Ethan could not get a good seal while breastfeeding with a hole in the roof of his mouth; . I remember the horror that I felt as I listened to the doctor. Seeing my distress he quickly reassured me that it was “the best kind of cleft to have” because of how small it was. At the time neither Matt nor I knew what a cleft palate would mean for us or for Ethan. They discharged us after setting us up with an appointment with the “Cleft Palate Team” a few days later. The nurse was reluctant but I assured her that the lactation consultant that I had hired would be coming to the house that day to help me. My lactation consultant was wonderful. She got Ethan on my breast right away and although I felt him sucking, it wasn’t very hard and he would quickly fall asleep only to pull away screaming full of air a few moments later. She constantly reassured me that “all babies can breastfeed”. After the first night however, it was clear that it wasn’t working. My lactation consultant suggested nipple shields, whichseemed to do the trick in terms of getting Ethan to latch. He still seemed to struggle with gas from swallowing so much air through his cleft. After weighing him two days after birth, it was evident that Ethan wasn’t getting enough sucking on me. I began pumping and syringe feeding him. I would put him to breast first and let him suck for as long as he wanted and then I would syringe feed him. The “cleft palate team” came on the Thursday, four days after Ethan was born. I remember the words of the feeding specialist very clearly. “Only 1% of babies with a cleft palate successfully breastfeed. I am sorry you won’t be able to breastfeed your son. Does that make you feel disappointed?” To me her words were like a shotgun to my heart. One part of me immediately disliked her and wanted to prove her horribly wrong. The other part of me wanted to succumb to the disappointment and accept what she was saying and move on. I couldn’t even respond to her, I just stood and cried. I remember nothing else that she said that day. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the literature that they provided or to talk about surgeries etc, for weeks after. They gave us a bottle called a Haberman feeder which allows a baby to eat without sucking. I had been determined to avoid giving our baby a bottle for fear that he would prefer it over my breast. My lactation consultant told me that everything that was happening with Ethan was normal for a baby with a cleft palate and that she had helped many moms to successfully breastfeed post surgery if they kept offering the breast every time. I found it really hard to believe. I continued to pump and syringe feed every two hours until Ethan was about 10 days old. He hadn’t pooped since he was born and I was worried that he just wasn’t getting enough. I finally caved and gave him the bottle. It took Ethan thirty minutes to finish a bottle and he immediately pooped. We continued with this trend of giving him the bottle after offering him the breast. My lactation consultant kept encouraging me that we would be that 1% and that babies will always prefer the breast.

Ethan’s weight gain was slow and both the Cleft Palate Team (CPT)and some of the doctors discouraged my desire to breastfeed prior to bottle feeding at every turn. I felt as though they thought I was a bad mother for wanting to breastfeed. The feeding specialist from the CPT kept encouraging me to quit. When Ethan was six weeks he returned to his birth weight. I learned later that, whether breastfed or bottle fed, it’s normal for a baby with a cleft palate to have extremely slow weight gain and that it is common for them to not return to their birth weight until six weeks. I continued to encounter many challenges along the way. At nine weeks my milk supply dropped drastically down to nothing. A combination of exclusive pumping, PCOS and stress over Ethan’s slow weight gain forced us to have to supplement with organic formula. The first time we gave Ethan formula I cried. I felt like such a failure. Not only could I not successfully breastfeed our baby “normally”, I could not make enough milk for him. I tried everything and anything that I could. I tried Domperidone, Blessed Thistle and Fenugreek. I also took Goat’s Rue an herb tincture specially formulated for women with PCOS who are breastfeeding . It was shortly after this that my milk supply came back up a bit. Ethan began taking more and more formula and at three months his weight finally took off and started to catch up with other babies. During this time Ethan went on countless nursing strikes as he learned very quickly that the bottle was the easier way to get food. Each time my lactation consultant promised me that Ethan would come back to breast and he always did. I was determined to not let him forget how to latch. As much as I wanted to believe that someday, if I kept going, Ethan would breastfeed like a normal baby, it was a constant battle in my mind. It was that hope and desire that made me keep going every time I wanted to quit and just give him the bottle.  I tried not to take it personally when Ethan would reject the breast but I would often cry in frustration.  All along the way I struggled with blocked ducts, and sore, nipples from pumping. Every time I thought about stopping, my husband and my lactation consultant would encourage me on. When Ethan had finally started to catch up with his weight we introduced a supplementary nursing system (SNS). It was messy and awkward and most days Ethan wanted nothing to do with it, but it convinced him to come back to breast after one of the longest nursing strikes that we had ever had. It had been three weeks and he happily sucked away with his new gratification. I continued pumping and using the nipple shields, SNS and Haberman until Ethan was almost ten months old. At this point Ethan had surgery to repair his cleft palate. I pumped while he was in the hospital and sippy cup fed him after his surgery for about a week. In an effort to prevent him from doing too much sucking after his surgery I used the SNS, squeezing the milk into his mouth and offered the breast. He took to it immediately and refused to use the sippy cup. After three weeks the surgeon informed us that his mouth was healing nicely and he could now suck I pulled out the SNS and let Ethan suck away. The first time I felt Ethan suck on the nipple shield after his surgery I cried. I had no idea what a normal suck was supposed to feel like. I was amazed. Ethan had surgery May 25, 2009. For the entire month of June, I began cutting away pieces of the side of the nipple shield and then finally started to cut away pieces of the nipple. Every time I tried to offer my nipple without the shield Ethan would freak out. Finally on July 7, 2009 when Ethan was eleven months old, I slipped the nipple shield off when he wasn’t looking and he latched on and sucked away happily. It was at this moment that I breastfed my baby normally for the first time. I cried. I had known that I was always meant to breastfeed our child but I had doubts that it would ever happen.  Hope is a powerful motivator; it kept me going when I thought I had nothing left.

Today, Ethan is a happy, healthy, beautiful, fifteen month old. I nurse him anywhere from 3 to 4 times a day around my part-time teaching schedule. I plan to continue nursing until he is ready to quit. One of the complications of a cleft palate is malfunctioning Eustachian tubes. As such Ethan has tubes in his ears and will need to have them until the soft palate muscle allows the Eustachian tubes to function on their own. Until this time he is prone to ear infections. Breastfeeding as long as we have has helped us to be ear infection. I have never been so proud of anything that I have ever accomplished in my life as I have in the fact that Ethan and I did not give up. I feel joy and happiness every time I breastfeed my son. I am so eternally grateful for what we have accomplished and so proud of Ethan for how far he has come. I never would have breastfed my son if it hadn’t been for my lactation consultant and my wonderfully supportive husband. I now truly believe that “all babies were meant to breastfeed.”

Breastfeeding started out a challenge for the two of us. Before my daughter’s birth, support for me breastfeeding was mixed, the negative comments made me want to prove everyone wrong. Even the supporters were saying there was no need to BF after six weeks, due to research, I knew better.

A month early, my daughter was born and stayed in the NICU for ten days. The BF assistant made sure that I received my hospital pump, showed me how to use it and helped me get the tiny bit of colostrum I was making.

When the hospital staff finally allowed me to put my little girl directly on the breast, the BF nurse was right there at my breast helping the two of us manage. My milk came in after day six, the day after I was discharged from the hospital. Even after help from the BF nurse, we continued to struggle with her tiny mouth and my lack of knowledge about breastfeeding.

Due to our latch struggle, I pumped my breast milk for a little over a month. It was exhausting, yet I persevered. I didn’t have enough to store up reserves, so I pumped then fed, pumped then fed, for what seemed an eternity. After a month of this I knew there were only two options- give it all up, or figure it out. Choice one was not an option for me, I was going to figure this out.

After a week of mixed feedings, my daughter and I achieved true BF status. At first there was an uncomfortable tingling as the milk dropped, which gradually faded away. Upon her third month of life, I had to return to work. I am fortunate to work for a European company that provides milk-making-mamas a lockable private room to pump.

It was a lovely 5′x6′ room with two plush chairs, a fridge, sink and tiny lockers to put lock our pumps in. During the year that I pumped at work, I became very close to one of the ladies there, we are still good friends. There is a lot of time to get to know someone when you pump with them, and many opportunities for laughter.

The funny thing about my breastfeeding experience was that my daughter became very jealous if I pretended to let one of her dollies suckle. She did not like that one bit and would holler incomprehensible babble until I took the dolly off.

Around my daughter’s first year, she became less interested in BF, yet I wanted to continue, I knew that it was best for her. As her interest dwindled and my BF support from family and all of my friends but two, I felt pressured to stop BF. My active little girl no longer wanted to cuddle at my breast, she wanted a quick snack and to be off. After a month of this, my breasts were only producing 1/4 cup of milk a day.

From this point on, until my little girl was around two and lost all BF interest, she received my breast for emotional support. She knew they were always there, tucked beneath shirt and bra for her comfort. My daughter, now 2 1/2 still finds my breasts fascinating and giggles when she gets close to them.

The main point I want to make is that going back to work doesn’t need to mean the end of breastfeeding, I expressed at work until I was ready to stop, and continued morning and night feeds. The ‘end of the day’ feed, with baby in my arms, her dozing off, with that lovely milk drunk grin, were a happy time of the day.

The real hard yards of breast feeding, in hindsight, were when I was back at work after my second DD, and the odd circumstance that I found myself expressing milk. Yet I wanted to keep breastfeeding, so expressing in strange locations seemed a small price to pay.

I returned to work 3 days when DD2 was 6 months, and expressed at 11am and 2pm, and took home frozen or chilled milk each day to give her carer.

The first challenge was when I was offered the chance to go on a conference in Perth, when DD2 was about 8 months old. At this point I was still expressing 4 times per day, 7am, 11am, 2pm and 7.30pm (approximately!). I was  determined not to give up just by being at a conference and away from her, so I was pumping 4 times a day for the 4 days I was away. She was with her dad the whole time, having frozen milk. As there was no way to take frozen milk home on a long flight from Perth to Sydney (is that about 6 hrs?) plus home from the airport, I decided to ‘pump and dump’ in order to keep my supply up.

The men at the conference thought it was a little weird, I would duck off the disabled toilets, express, tip about 100-150 ml down the sink then return to the conference.

But the really strange, abnormal place that I found myself breastfeeding, was while sitting in a 4WD car, conducting field work in a forest. I was back at work as an Environmental Scientist doing research, but wanted to keep breastfeeding. So expressing in the 4WD was what came next. I warned the guys ‘I’m expressing, don’t come back to the car for about 20 mins’. I didn’t get the largest amount of milk, but it kept my supply up, and I happily continued to breastfeed DD2 until we were both ready to stop.

I hope this story can continue to inspire other mums to breastfeed after they return to work, even if they work in weird and wonderful locations!!