DD I am sorry that you are travelling a difficult journey once again, you are a strong woman and I hope that with all of your research and preparation that you will be able to achieve a beautiful feeding relationship with your DD.

Some of the recommendations above are brilliant, expressing from 36 weeks or so is a great idea, every ml will count. With the feeding these are the things that I found worked for us. Our SCn journey was only 11 days, but we took DD home on a 40gram loss and she didn't gain weight until she was 23 days, so it was a very stressful time, but it can be done.

Inititally we were only allowed to have one BF attempt a day, DD was still recovering from extremely low BLS and was a 33 weeker so not a lot of energy. I took it as an opportunity to get some lovely skin to skin, she didn't really suck, more as played, but she was able to smell and find the BBS.

We did NGT feed with her skin to skin when we could, even place her near the breast and feeding through the tube at the same time. We only used a dummy when we were doing the NGT feeds, so that she learnt to associate sucking with getting a full tummy.

I did use a bottle a couple of times for top ups or if I couldn't get her to feed from the breast (while still in hospital as I boarded with DD), but it was after breast, so she had less energy left but had already "worked" for her milk.

We had to intorduce some formula top ups at 10 weeks as DD started losing weight and was already 1kg below the bottom of the chart, so we didn't have room to move as such. But we always offered breast before bottle, and we still managed to achieve exclusively breast feeding/ebm at about 6 1/2 months.

I expressed until 6 months before having a short break (sanity break from the pump ) and then began again for feeds while I was at work.

I am not going to say it was easy, and yes there were times I wanted to give up, but in the end it was work every second, and every drop of EBM or BF she received was worth it.

If you want to PM me I am more than happy to chat on Messenger or something like that

Take care
xxoo