I had desperately wanted to feed dd. I naively thought I didn't need to learn anything before hand I would get all the help I needed in hossy. After the birth I asked the nurse if I could feed her. She looked at me like I was an idiot. As if to say why would you want to do that? So she gave me a fully cocooned dd and put her to my boob... Of course dd just screamed. There was nothing gentle or comforting to her. The same nurse took me to my room and I asked again. This time she said"you won't be able to feed with those nipples you have to use a shield but they won't work til your milk comes in" goodness knows what I was meant to do in the mean time. I was so overcome with it all, bawling my eyes out when I lovely nurse came and said we will just give her some formula tonight you can try tomorrow. I felt relief knowing at least my baby would eat! Dd ended up with jaundice and in SCN, I ended up expressing. She would have a bit of a go at feeding with a shield but I had lost ALL confidence, questioning myself constantly. I wasn't expressing enough to feed her to flush the jaundice so she was having formula too. We took a tin home and she had formula until I could express enough for full feeds, this took about 3 weeks. I had help from the ABA but I was comfortable with expressing. I then continued expressing exclusively until she was 10 months. I was very proud of that but it was a relief to be free from the pump. I stopped because I was returning to work and really felt I had given dd a good start. She went back on to formula then.
With this baby I intend to BF, I will do classes and have DH offering support and saying he will make sure we get to do a breast crawl (bless him) but if we have troubles I will use formula again and assess whether I can do the expressing thing again. I have to see how we all are coping.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their stories.