09-11-2009 - Rough start

My mood while writing this blog: better

Ok for starters, I can't believe Eli is over 4 weeks old already. And I still haven't added his birth story yet! That's my goal for tomorrow. It's been a rough couple of weeks though. I had him on Saturday October 10th, and we went home on Monday evening. Technically even though this website had his estimated due date on the 29th of October, the dr. said he was due on Nov. 1st. So the hospital and nurses kept saying he was born at 36 weeks and 6 days so he was considered late pre-term. 4 more hours and he would have been full term, but whatever.

Well, on Tuesday he started looking pretty yellow - so we brought him into the pediatrician and he had his poor little heel pricked to check his bilirubin levels. Well they were in the "yellow" zone so they said to bring him in the next day and get him checked again. Long story short - we had to bring him in everyday that first week to monitor the levels. His jaundice was never bad enough to put him under the lights, just bad enough for them to have to take blood to monitor it. Uggh. I felt so bad for him. The thing with jaundice is it makes them really sleepy - so I had the worst time trying to nurse him. He just never wanted to wake up to eat. I'm not sure if that's what affected my milk supply or if it was other factors, but by the end of the first week I felt like my supply was dwindling rapidly - and I really started to worry. We even had to start supplementing him with formula, because I could tell I wasn't producing enough for him to be gaining weight on.

So I talked to the pediatrician and lacation specialists from the hospital and they suggested an herb I could try. Tried that - to no avail. Eventually it was getting to the point where I would pump to see what I was getting out and it was like a quarter of an ounce every 3 hours. Nowhere near enough to sustain my growing son. I was devasted. I was eating fine, sleeping ok for having a new baby...I just felt like I had failed somehow - like my body had abandoned me or something was wrong with me and I had so wanted to breastfeed because in my opinion that was best for him and it was something I wanted to do.

I was just getting aggravated and depressed that I couldn't feed my son. (I mean I could, but you know what I mean) So at the end of my rapidly fraying rope, last Thursday I went in to see the lactation specialist at the hospital and talked to her and told her everything that was going on. She gave me a lactation aid - a medela SNS (supplementing nursing system) to try to re-teach him to nurse essentially and I also received a prescription from my OB for domperidone (a drug that promotes lactation). Well within 2 days my supply was back plus some. I'm so relieved. Eli still wants to fall asleep as soon as he hits the breast - but we're working on that.