Breastfeeding 1-2-3

When Breastfeeding Goes Wrong

by Angela White, J.D., breastfeeding counselor on December 10th, 2006

Today’s breastfeeding story isn’t really a breastfeeding story, it’s a formula-feeding story. It provides a bit of balance both for that reason and also because it’s written by a father (who asked to remain anonymous). This story offers an important reminder that as the parent, YOU are the expert on your child. If your child is listless, not acting like himself, or showing any sign of medical distress, seek medical attention immediately and persist in getting help until the problem is resolved.The father writes:

“So we do all the pre-natal classes like the good parents we are supposed to be, and it started from the very first one: breast is best, don’t use formula, everyone can breastfeed and if you don’t it’s pretty close to child abuse.

So my son was born. Guess what, despite any jokes I made to my wife about her now officially being a milking cow, she wasn’t very good at breast feeding. She delivered via cesarean section so she was in hospital a full week, during this time she struggled with the breast feeding….turns out she didn’t make a good milking cow after all, but I make that note because we had 7 days in a private hospital with lots of one on one time with midwifes about how to get breast feeding right.

Anyhow so we get home thinking, ok, it’s hard but they’ve spent all this time with us, surely this will work out. Mind you, at this stage, although we’d both raised switching to formula up, we were told basically it was tantamount to child abuse, and were told it’s not an option. So things start getting bad, our son clearly isn’t putting on weight, and he starts to get quite gaunt. At about 10 days, as much as he was still with us, his skin had started to turn blue, and his limbs were limp. I eventually convince my wife to take him to emergency at 10pm at night. After waiting 3 hours to see a doctor were told he’s fine (and the post-natal specialist wasn’t available till the next day). We take him home, at this stage I’m in tears, you could see life was dripping away from him. The next day the specialist calls us and we rush off to hospital, where he is admitted immediately into emergency and he’s put on a drip. So then we go through the bs again: my wife mustn’t be breast feeding properly, it must be her fault, she should have stayed longer than the 7 days in hospital so she could get the breastfeeding right, etc, etc…this goes on for 2 days with them treating her like she was a child. Still no change. If it were not for the drip and the little breast milk he was managing to get, he’d be dead.

Then if there is a god, he decided to be kind, because a new nurse came along. My wife explained what had been going on (by this stage I actually couldn’t be at the hospital because I was about 2 steps away from wanting to kill someone, and my anger wasn’t helping given by this stage my wife is now nearly constantly in tears). God bless this nurse so much, she actually turned around and said that as much as breast is best, it’s also not for everyone and despite everything we’d been told, some mothers just can’t produce adequate amounts of breast milk! My son started on formula straight away, and both of them checked out of hospital within 24 hours. You could literally see life come back into him within his first couple of bottles of formula.

Four years later and he’s in the top 0.1% statistically for his age in terms of height, and he’s a strong, smart and healthy boy…and he grew up drinking formula (I might add though, we always bought the best and most expensive available…which had lots of added stuff I can’t remember but certainly sounded good). Sure, like any parents we’ve had a few health hiccups along the way, we had some hearing issues and he had plugs (which have since fallen out) and more recently we had his tonsils and adenoids removed (but that’s hereditary, I suffered from tonsillitis as a kid as well), but certainly zero health issues relating to him taking formula as a baby.

Moral of the story. Breast Milk is great, but not everyone can do it, and your child can and will still grow up strong and healthy on formula…oh yeh, and it’s not child abuse!”

How does this story make you feel? Aside from lamenting what this family had to go through, it makes me wonder whether there was ever any evaluation of what went wrong - was there a medical reason for a supply issue? Did they try any galactagogues (medicinal herbs or prescription medications)? Did the baby have tongue-tie? Didn’t the hospital monitor the baby’s weight loss and the baby’s output of wet and dirty diapers? There has to be more to the story. This family worked so hard to breastfeed and it would be nice to know what went wrong.

And now back to our regular programming: if you’d like to contribute your positive, touching, humorous or otherwise inspiring breastfeeding story, click here.

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POSTED IN: breastfeeding stories, health of the baby