Preeti is a researcher, writer and historian. Her debut book The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom was published in 2023 by Dialogue Books. She can be found on X @preetikdhillon and via her website.
Missed Breastfeeding and Pumping part 1? Read it here.
“Fine”, the paediatrician said, not offering up even a solitary word of support. “But she is not gaining enough weight, you need to pump after every feed.”
Every feed? Like, every single feed? Even the two, sometimes three, that happen at night? Yes, I understood correctly, that is what she meant. It wasn’t exactly the supportive solution I was hoping for. I felt like I was being punished for doing something I thought the paediatrician of all people would have supported. There wasn’t even an ‘atta girl’ to go along with it.
So I started pumping twenty-four hours a day. After every single feed.
The worst time was between three and four AM, the sound of the pump adding to the white noise we had on for our daughter and almost sending me to sleep as I pumped. Sometimes I was so tired and would knock over a bottle of milk before I’d had a chance to put the lid on and seal its precious contents. That elicited immediate tears. At some point stubbornness took over and I just wanted to spite the unhelpful paediatrician by showing that I could do it.
Around nine weeks in there was one day that my daughter flat out refused the breast. She screamed and screamed at my breast, and I cried as I tried to manoeuvre her in all the different positions I knew. She would only take milk from the bottle, and we quickly used all the milk I had built up in the fridge. We hadn’t managed to freeze any because there was never any surplus.
I hit rock bottom. I found the number of my local La Leche League volunteer and called a stranger named Catherine.
To my surprise, she picked up. We spent the next half an hour on the phone and she not only reassured me that we would find a solution, she gave me actionable advice there and then (“feed her the bottle slowly, called paced feeding, so it resembles milk from the breast”) and invited me along to a support group meeting in the park that Sunday.
All three of us went along, and as Catherine observed me breastfeeding she noticed straight away that the nipple shield I was using was too big. I told her the pump was making my nipples flat and even harder for my daughter to take. She scrunched up her face. “Huh, that’s odd. Usually they recommend people with flat nipples to use a pump to help with that problem. Maybe you’re using the wrong size flange.”
And just like that, everything changed.
I giddily bounded to the chemist as soon as it opened the next day and ordered a smaller nipple shield. I started using the smaller flange size that came with my pump.
Alongside feeling hope for the first time in weeks I was also so, so very angry. Ten midwife home visits, three paediatrician visits, and two lactation consultant meetings in the clinic and at no time did anyone mention how the size of the nipple shield or flange would affect milk production.
Catherine changed my life. It was such a simple fix to a problem which robbed me of precious time with my newborn. The time that everyone says you must “soak up because it goes so quickly”. I only needed to use the smaller nipple shield once; at ten weeks old I offered my daughter the bare breast as I usually did in some delusional hope, and she took it. And she didn’t let go.
My daughter is now twenty months old and I am still breastfeeding and I love it. It is our special time together, and it still feels like a superpower when nothing else will soothe her. I’m not going to say that this made it all worthwhile, the lack of bonding time, the tears from both of us, the feeling like a failure, the judging looks from visitors because I couldn’t feed properly. The exhaustion from pumping day and night. Those were the longest ten weeks of my life, and they haunt me still. But I am eternally thankful for my stubbornness, husband, and for Catherine.
‘Successful breastfeeding requires a support network’. I came across a variation on this line in nearly all the baby literature. It always struck me as weird, why did I need a support network when breastfeeding was surely just me and my child? Oh, how wrong I was.
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