I was asked to put something about myself on here. I do so slightly reluctantly - but realise that my story may be of interest to some people who want to know a little bit about who I am, and why I keep this blog and the facebook group. Be warned though, it's pretty long - and some of it ain't pretty - but since so many of you have shared your own 'mother stories' I think it's only fair that I share mine too.
My name is Anne, I'm 35 years old, I’m married, and I have two amazing daughters.
The birth of my first daughter was very traumatic for our family and I realise with hindsight that the whole experience has been a motivating factor in my desire to support other mothers to breastfeed.
M was born (weighing 8lbs) following a normal pregnancy but a very difficult back-labour with a very extended pushing phase and finally a ventouse delivery. Not surprisingly the trauma of being in the birth canal for so long meant that M was unwell upon delivery. Although she was able to look at me and respond to my voice, she was not breathing and was immediately taken away to SCBU. She was making 'cyclical movements' and the consultant told us she may have suffered brain damage. You can see from the shape of her head just after delivery that her head had become quite mis-shapen during delivery.
I wanted to feed her in SCBU but she was on a drip and I wasn't allowed to, so I requested a pump so I could express milk for her - I did not realise at the time that hand expression of colostrum is far more effective than using a pump.
Whilst we were separated I later found out that my child had been given IV antibiotics, a brain scan, and a variety of other injections all without our knowledge or consent. Despite all the trauma, we were fortunate that she was as desperate to breastfeed as I was to feed her! I gave her her first feed the next day and as I saw her stats on the monitor climb from the mid-80's to almost 100% during a feed (numbers the nurse told me she hardly ever saw in the SCBU), I realised that breastfeeding itself was healing for her. I found out over the next few months just how healing it can be for a mother too.
Sadly when I went down to give M her next (arranged) feed, we discovered that a nurse had just given her 40mls (just over 1oz) of formula from a bottle without our consent. It states in the hospital records that my breast milk supply was 'insufficient' (yes, it was only day 2).. I was slightly embarrassed when my mother flew across the room and shouted ‘what do you think you’re doing?’ – I didn't realise at the time how lucky I was to have such a strong breastfeeding advocate in my corner…
I now fully understand the implications of giving formula to a neonate- though unfortunately (or possibly fortunately!) - at the time I didn't appreciate the risks of what he'd just done. Even though I didn't understand why, I knew I didn't want M to have formula so I requested donor milk for her and mixed my (seemingly paltry) amounts of colostrum into the bottle.
I now realise that the SCBU should have supported my wish to breastfeed by encouraging me to cup-feed or syringe-feed if additional fluids were necessary, but at the time we didn't know this either. Needless to say the hospital where I had M is not 'Baby Friendly' - just another thing I didn't know to ask about!
It's important for me to say at this point how indebted I am to all mothers who donate breastmilk. I would urge anyone who thinks they might be able to do it to donate milk - it really does make a massive difference to sick babies.
Despite everything, M made an incredible recovery and was brought back up to my room following two nights in SCBU. I was so happy to finally have my child in my arms! The doctors were relatively sure she hadn't sustained any brain damage - we were extremely lucky. Sadly that night, alone with a child who had recently been so compromised, I felt completely out of my depth. I felt unable to settle her (I know now that it's not unusual to feel this way!) and I was worried that I didn't have enough milk to satisfy her. I gave her formula - something I now regret. If only I’d understood more about normal newborn feeding back then I know I’d have made different choices.
M was exclusively breastfed after I left the hospital. I had more than enough milk for her.
The next two weeks were spent sitting on the sofa, holding my baby and crying. I guess the shock of everything that happened only began to sink in once we got home. I still cry easily when I think about it all – perhaps that’s the reason it has taken me so long to write my story for you! M would only sleep on my chest for the first three months of her life. I’m not telling you this as a recommendation, but because that’s how close we needed to be all the time and it’s the truth.
After all the drama, things went pretty well for a couple of months. My lovely community midwife told me I was a ‘natural’ at breastfeeding and I felt very proud of how well she was doing on my milk alone. Then M started to resist feeds. She would arch, scream and spend hours on nursing strikes. At one point aged around 4 months she went nearly 24 hours without a proper feed. You can imagine how worried we were - she had 'dropped off her centile' and the health visitor was asking to weigh her every two weeks. Having gone through a process of elimination we realised she must be suffering from silent reflux (GORD) – the next step was trying to convince the medical profession that we weren’t just being paranoid parents!
I took her to our doctors numerous times and in between the ‘is this your first baby?’ comments and prescriptions for Gaviscon (it gave her dreadful constipation requiring the use of suppositories), we felt like we were tearing our hair out. I had to pin her down to syringe the disgusting mixture into her, and hold her upright for 30mins after every feed - day and night - for literally months. I was utterly exhausted.
My husband was an absolute rock – how on earth he managed to go to work every day I will never know. He would often return home to find his daughter screaming her head off and his wife in tears.
We went to children’s A and E three times, and to the out of hours doctors countless times. We were sent away with calpol, daktarin gel, more gaviscon, and eventually ranitidine. This seemed to work for a short while we thought our problems might be at an end, but then the familiar symptoms started again and this time I came very close to stopping breastfeeding. She would gulp a bottle of expressed breastmilk down in two minutes (because she didn’t yet associate a bottle with pain), and that made it seem like she preferred the bottle to me. I could see even my close friends and family thinking the same thing.
My best source of comfort and information at this time was the friends that I had made online, my ‘birth club’ and other mothers who had been through similar experiences. Without them I KNOW I would have stopped.
I learnt about how giving formula before gut closure has occurred may set up a dairy intolerance in babies, and I learnt that dairy intolerance could make reflux worse. There is growing evidence to suggest that the widespread practice of giving formula milk to newborn babies within the first few days of life (as was the case for M in SCBU) is a possible cause of some babies developing cows milk protein intolerance. In my opinion this money-saving intervention needs closer examination, and certainly where donor milk is available it should be used in preference (see link for explanatory info). The upshot of all this was that gave up all dairy. It was hard, but it was nothing compared to stopping breastfeeding my daughter – at least, that’s the way I felt about it.
M had a barium meal – it showed that her gut was normal and that the reflux was likely to be something she would grow out of – that was a relief at least.
We visited a cranial osteopath repeatedly - travelling some distance to do so and at considerable expense. Although she was happy during treatment and we were shown exercises to relax the diaphragm (which can be tight after a traumatic birth) I'm sorry to say that in our case, her symptoms did not improve. However this treatment can help with infant reflux and other problems so it's definitely worth a try if you ever find yourself in the same situation with a child who won't breastfeed!
We went back to the hospital to see a reflux consultant who told me to express every feed, put my milk into a bottle and thicken it with carobel paste. She said ‘it’s still breastmilk’. I told her that it was the surest way I could think of to put an end to our breastfeeding relationship, a relationship which I considered important to us both. I told her ‘I know it’s breastmilk but it’s not breastfeeding’ – when I left the room I am in no doubt that she was glad to see the back of me!
During one terrible night my husband rang the out of hours doctor - again. I was in tears – again. I will never forget the doctor’s words to me:
‘under no circumstances stop breastfeeding your baby.’
Finally a doctor who was supportive of breastfeeding! He told me about all the good I was doing for her, and said lots of things I suppose a non-breastfeeding mother might refer to as ‘bullying’. For me, it was quite the opposite. For the first time a medical professional was actively supporting me in continuing to breastfeed my child, and if he’d been in the room I’d have kissed him!
He told me he had worked in paediatrics for 7 years and they gave a drug called losec in hospital to babies with reflux who hadn't had success with other medications. He wrote us a prescription and within two weeks our lives had completely transformed. My local chemist learnt how to make the drug up into liquid form and my doctors (after several weeks of 'negotiations') agreed to continue to prescribe it for us. They were not aware that it could be used for small babies or that it existed in liquid form.
At 10 months old we were able to start to wean her off the losec and at around a year she began eating more normally (although she was very slow to wean onto solid foods).
I wrote to that out of hours doctor and sent him a picture of M. I never met him but he really did change our lives and I will be grateful to him forever. He told me I had done the right thing and he proved to me that my instinct had been right all along.
M didn’t hate breastfeeding, she was in pain.
You don’t need to meet people to change their lives. It was the internet and the telephone that made the difference to M and me….
But why did I start this blog and why do I get so fired up when I read stupid and negative things about breastfeeding?
The initial motivating factor behind the DBM campaign was the story in Mother and Baby magazine (June 2010). My first reaction when I read that breastfeeding causes saggy boobs was to want to take my clothes off, point at my chest and say 'do these look saggy to you?'. I somehow managed to convince lots of other mothers online to do it with me, and the pictures are here on this blog. Then came the facebook group, and that has grown way beyond my expectations.
I get angry about articles like the one in Mother and Baby/ Closer magazine, because they put people off breastfeeding. You can see that MANY things went wrong for M and me, and lots of mistakes were made. However, I am passionate about helping other people to enjoy the same positive, healing breastfeeding experience that helped me and my daughter to get over the trauma of her birth. If I've learnt anything it's that the biggest barrier to breastfeeding success is lack of support and information. Mothers need to help each other because the system frequently doesn't support us in the way that it should. We need to campaign for the changes that will help us nurture our children best.
In the summer of 2009 I learnt that my local healthcare trust was doing some breastfeeding peer support training. I pestered them until they allowed me to attend and now I support other mothers within my local community. I’ve met some amazing people (both real and virtual!). The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they have ALL been through some tough times. Some of them have been through some VERY tough times. I am now undertaking further training to enable me to help more mums.
The old phrase ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is true. When something bad happens to you it’s so easy to say ‘poor me’ – and believe me I did - but there IS another option, and that’s to say ‘what happened to me was awful and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else’. That’s the reason why I want to facilitate peer to peer support through the group and blog.
A second daughter joined our family in September 2011 - this time at home. Lots of our decisions second time around were very different - we learned a lot from the first birth experience. Her arrival was a wonderful and healing time for us all. M2 was 100% well after a peaceful and 'textbook' home birth, there was no separation, and she took straight to the breast. She has a touch of infant reflux, but our nursing relationship has been blissfully 'normal'. I have been able to donate to our local milk bank, and knowing that I have finally been able to repay our 'debt' to the milk bank gives me great pleasure. If you think you could express a little extra to donate to your local milk bank you can find them here.
So in answer to the question 'why do you do this?' I can only answer - none of it was intentional, there was no 'grand plan'. DBM has simply evolved.
I’m just an ‘accidental' activist!
