Breastfeeding my premature baby
Just wanted to share this story I wrote for my local ABA group newsletter. You may know the story of my premmie DD, if not her birth story link is here - this is the story of how we established breastfeeding
~~~~~~~~~~~
I went to my regular antenatal appointment on Friday 7th August 2009 thinking that I would have a long six weeks until I was to meet our baby, but at that appointment I was admitted to hospital for strict bed rest because I was showing signs of pre-eclampsia and I needed to be monitored. On the following Sunday 9th August 2009 I was induced due to pre-eclampsia and HELLP. I was 34+1 weeks pregnant!
My DD was born 6 weeks premature but was otherwise well. She didn’t have a good suck reflex, so a nasal gastro tube was placed in through her nose and into her stomach. Prior to my milk coming in, I had to express my colostrum into a syringe which was given to DD—it was quite difficult to get the precious colostrum into the syringe and not all over the place. I used a combination of hand expressing and stimulation from a breast pump to assist my milk to come in. We were able to attempt a breastfeed on day 3—it was a very special moment and one that brought tears to my eyes (and still does!).
I woke up on the morning of day 5 with watermelons where my breasts had been the night before and was very relieved when I got to the hospital and was able to express on the breast pump and I collected quite a few mls of milk that morning. By the end of our hospital stay, I had 12 litres of breastmilk in the hospital freezer!
DD and I learnt to breastfeed; we started slowly having one feed from me per day at around 8 days old and then increased to two breastfeeds per day, one in the morning and one at night. DD tolerated the increase well so we were then put on alternate feeds where she would have a tube feed, then a breastfeed. We were then able to change it so that she was only having one tube feed per day. By day 13 DD was on full suck feeds from me—it did feel like it took a long time to get to that point but also felt like it was such a quick progression at the same time.
I am proud to say that we were discharged home on day 15 on full suck feeds and we are currently happily continuing our breastfeeding relationship now at 14 months! The road to here has been well worth it.
