Without wanting to cause controversy, because this is anecdotal and for my mother's family only, we've found that the smaller the breasts pre-baby, the better the breastfeeding. Could be because the larger-chested women were more keen to give up, I don't know, but DS does better on BF than BF and FF combined, whereas his second cousin didn't gain weight even with two-hourly BFs - I have a small chest, my cousin a large one. Maybe fat deposits have something to do with how easy the baby finds it to get the milk?

Sarah, I was in active labour for 33 hours, pushing for 6, nearly ended up with a section... I had problems with DS's weight loss and feeding too, he ended up re-admitted to hospital and being tube-fed. No-one told me that the drugs they were pushing affect breastfeeding too, plus DS's first feed was the day after he was born, no-one wanted to help me give him his first feed... sorry, I'm waffling a bit but I am thinking that if I weren't so stubborn about BFing and had a fantastic team in the SCBU who encouraged me to BF and express then I wonder if I'd be BFing now. Not saying that you weren't committed to BFing, your labour/birth sounds more traumatic than mine too, but I am starting to wonder about the early stage of our feeding and what went so horribly wrong for that first week or so.