Our first days at home... ok, first weeks, I've written more than I planned today

The first couple days were a blur.  But I will never forget the first night home.  It was horrible.  I bit off more than I could chew.

Not only was I exhausted, in constant pain with every motion I made, doped up on pain meds almost to the point of delirium but I had invited Jay's family over because I felt bad that they weren't at the hospital as much as my family was.  Granted my mom was here first and foremost as my mom, to help me heal and adjust to being a mom, and secondly she was there as Henry's grandma.  And my sister... well, she's 'homeless' and needed a place to stay (actually she was between wildlife biology jobs up in Alaska and down in Antarctica).  Next time, there will be nobody there when we get home from the hospital (if there is a next time).  I was so overwhelmed with trying to adjust to being a mom and trying to heal that I had no patience or energy to entertain Jay's family.  I know they were (and still are) excited about Henry, but having company over really should have waited for another day.

Here's why.  I was so tired that I could barely stand up.  I was holding onto the edge of the kitchen countertop swaying trying to be a good hostess.  All the while stressing about the next feeding and how I was going to get through it without a nurse there to help me if I couldn't do it.  Literally thinking about how to get through BF'ing Henry had me in pain I was so scared.  I kept trying to go to bed so I could rest and calm down before the next feeding only to get caught up in another conversation.  Finally I make it off to bed and crashed.  I wake up to hearing Henry crying.  He was hungry.  Mom comes in to check on me and make sure I am ready to feed Henry.  I tell her to go get Jay and the baby.  tick tock.  tick tock.  A couple minutes pass, Henry is now crying bloody murder and getting worse by the minute.  I'm getting pissed.  I want my baby.  I need to feed my baby and somebody or something is keeping him from me.  The more I heard him cry the more upset I got.  I yelled out to Jay to get him in here now.  He is hungry and it isn't fair to keep him from his food.  Finally after what felt like an eternity Jay sheepishly brought Henry in.  At this point it's a lost cause.  Henry is too far gone, he was devastatingly hungry.  He is so upset that he screams even louder when I offer him my breast and arches as if he is in pain away from me.  I frantically hand expressed some collustrum into a syringe so we can finger feed him.  All the while I am giving Jay dirty looks.  I am still livid when I think back to this.  It was SO not ok to keep a crying hungry baby from it's mother, especially since we'd been struggling with BF'ing this whole time.  Jay says he's sorry, that his family kept wanting 'just one more picture' and that he regrets he let it take that long - that he should've brought him back right away and it won't happen again.  Darn tootin right.  I don't care whose family or friends it is, nobody keeps my crying baby from me, especially when I know what he needs.  This was partly my mistake.  I knew our first night at home from the hospital was going to be hard, and I let it be harder by having company over.

That night was the hardest night of my life to date.  The fact that I couldn't get him to latch after Jays family left hurt me so badly.  I felt like a rotten mother.  The fact that Jay didn't stick to our schedule and let his family stay past the timeframe we'd given them taught both of us that we need to stick to our guns about what we say we need from friends/family (at that time Henry fed like clockwork and they were to be here between feedings.  Well, Henry's feeding was half an hour late that night).  I like to think we learned from this experience.

I can't help but think that this one botched feeding set the bar for the next week.  I couldn't get Henry to latch after he got that upset.  I think he associated my breast with the pain of hunger he felt that night.  Everytime I tried to feed him after that he would scream bloody murder.  You'd think I was painfully pinching him.  All I wanted to do was feed him - didn't he know that?

The first full day home from the hospital a home health nurse dropped in to see how we were doing and to check on his weight/latch.  As we were having difficulties in the hospital the nursing staff at UW wanted them to check in on us.  Honestly, she was next to no help with getting Henry to latch.  The bad news - Henry had already lost 10% of his body weight.  Now we were going to be watched like hawks by his pediatrician.  We had so many visits that first week.  It was a week of hell for me personally.  I felt like a stinking rotten mother.  Henry rejected BF'ing for an entire week.  I was literally forced to supplement with formula (eww - it stinks by the way).  My little disclaimer - I have nothing against formula, it is there for a reason and without formula and bottles my son would be a sad statistic.  Instead he is now thriving and starting to be a chunky monkey.  Henry went from 6 lbs 2.7 oz down to 5 lbs 8 oz in 4 days.  His first week of life was my darkest week ever.

The really rotten thing though, was that during all this NOBODY thought to tell me how you pump.  All I was told was when I pump, to pump for 15 min.  No mention as to how many times a day I need to pump to keep my supply.  Needless to say I trashed my supply by not pumping nearly often enough.  I was down to just getting maybe 2-4 oz a day by week 4.  Not nearly enough for Henry.

Finally after a week of being on BF'ing strike Jay came home from work and said "I think we need to take Henry to our room and try to BF him now.  I have a really good feeling about it.  But it needs to be now."  His instincts were dead on.  Henry latched.  Angels sang.

We go on for a couple weeks of touch/go nursing and supplementing after each feeding with formula.  I'd occasionally throw in a pumping session.  We had so many meetings with so many different lactation consultants (LC's) and Henry's pediatrician.  My doula (Kate Rollins - rock star doula!!!) had thought in the hospital after his birth that Henry might have a tongue tie.  But that she can't diagnose it.  The LC's at UW were unsure if he did, but stated that if he did it was very minimal and wouldn't be affecting his ability to nurse.  Finally, a month after his birth, the LC's at UW said they really couldn't do anything to help, and referred me to a new specialist over at Children's hospital who is supposed to be some kind of Breastfeeding guru.

I arrive at Children's hopeful, I had a good couple days BF'ing and was fully prepared for the "there isn't anything I can do for you - he's doing great, good job mama!".  I couldn't of been more wrong.  I was in tears after her evaluation.  I was trying so hard to hold back the gut wrenching sobbing that I felt coming on.  Henry had a posterior (type 4) tongue tie.  This is the hardest tie to diagnose, and the hardest to treat.  Lucky for me one of the countries foremost tongue tie experts is in Seattle.  This type of tie can take a series of clippings to treat.  She said my doula deserves a pat on the back, that anyone who could see that he might have a tie has an excellent eye, that most can't even tell with a posterior tie.  Unlike traditional anterior tongue ties where the frenulum is elongated sometimes out to the teeth, a posterior tie is more like a restriction of the muscle sheaths in the back.  You have to cut deeper to treat it.

On top of this, Henry was diagnosed with hypertonia (the muscles on one side of his face/neck were overly stiff/tight) which caused his jaw to be crooked.  He also has a significantly recessed chin, which we learned in this first office visit is most likely because he was born early and because of the tie.  That the tongue tie would actually hold back his chin.  Also, he was diagnosed with a poor suck reflex, a weak/lazy suck and a disorganized suck.  Talk about a big blow.  Here I was thinking things were getting better and I couldn't be more wrong.  Henry needed treatment for these issues.  Unfortunately we couldn't get in for the tongue clipping for another month, she was booked.  This caused even more stress for me.  I didn't know if I could make it that long.  Lucky though for us we got a call about a week later with an opening.  I snatched that sucker up faster than you could say chocolate!

Thinking back on this first visit has me in tears.  I really thought that we had things under control finally, that we were on the right track.  I can't really convey just how emotionally devastated I was to be told that I was basically starving Henry with my breast.  Henry barely got half an ounce off me in 45 min of nursing.  That's not nearly enough to thrive, to grow.  And because he wasn't taking my milk, my supply was slowly diminishing, making it harder and harder for him to get my milk.  Vicious circle.  No wonder he screamed at my breast.

Well, I have typed a ton up today.  I'm feeling very emotional having 'relived' our first month of BF'ing and my little man just started crying and is probably hungry.  So I will start off where I left off another day.

My mom trying to calm Henry down during a BF'ing session

Having given up on BF'ing during that session I finger feed him.  He's probably about a week or two old here.

My scrawny little man.  He has more chunk now.  You can easily see his recessed chin even though it's not a profile shot

About a month old here, and one of my all time favorite pictures.  You can see his chin isn't as recessed as the above picture.  Recessed chins are fairly common in boys, more so when they are early.  In most cases it takes about a month to resolve, sometimes up to three months.  In our case it took three months.

At the hospital

While at the hospital BF'ing continued to be hard.  We'd have easy moments and then even more hard ones.  We found the early morning feedings the easiest.  The others were struggles.  I felt so bad constantly calling in the nurses to help, but I had to get him to eat and we couldn't get him to latch.  Henry would scream his head off as soon as we tried to feed him most times.  It didn't help that even when we did have success he was a lazy sucker and would fall asleep too quickly and it was SO hard to get him to wake up.  In hindsight my poor little man was so tired from his 'traumatic' and early birth that he was just so lethargic and exhausted.  He just couldn't stay awake long enough to get enough nutrients.  And because he didn't get enough to eat, that made him even more tired.

This whole time while I'm struggling with BF'ing Henry our family members are in and out visiting.  There were so many times I just wanted to kick them out because I was having such a hard time, I felt like I needed more time alone with him, and honestly, I just felt like hiding.  On top of that I was so groggy from pain pills and in so much pain I just didn't want to deal with anybody but my husband, Henry and the hospital staff.  Don't get me wrong (as I know many of my family members are reading this), I do not regret having my family around me.  They were all such wonderful supports for me to lean on, to get advice from, to be distracted by and to have things put in perspective.  But at the same time I felt overwhelmed and wanted to go hide under my bed.  I also was struggling with feeling like a bad mom.  My nipples were flat and in my mind that was the only problem and it was my fault.  On top of that I hadn't felt a connection to Henry right away and was feeling distant, separate from this experience.  I didn't feel like a mom, I thought it would just happen, ZING!  I'm a mom and I feel like one.  I felt like a lousy mother for not feeling bonded to Henry right away.  Don't get me wrong, I loved him, thought he was a sweet wonderful, adorable little man.  But I just couldn't feel connected.

I didn't share that right away with anybody.  Again, in hindsight, I should have.  I would've felt so much better when I heard them say 'that's normal' and have them say how they felt that way too, and it can take a bit for that bond to form.  I shouldn't of blamed myself for our BF'ing woes.  It wasn't my fault.  It wasn't Henry's fault.  It just was.  It just stinking was.

Our first night in the hospital they wanted me to sleep skin to skin with Henry.  I felt like it was so taboo - I never thought in a million years that they would want me to sleep in a hospital bed with him.  But Henry was having trouble maintaining his temperature, and the best way to regulate it is to be skin to skin.  It felt so good.  So wonderfully good to have my little man sleeping on me.  I don't think I got more than a wink of sleep.  I was so afraid that he'd suffocate.  That my boobs would suffocate him, that the blanket would suffocate him.  He was so tiny.  So precious.  All I could do was stare in awe.

Our second night at the hospital, after struggling for what seemed eternity (but probably was just 10 minutes) we called in the nurse to have her help us get him to latch.  When she couldn't get him to latch either I lost it.  I sobbed uncontrollably.  I'm tearing up right now thinking about how I felt in that moment.  I felt like a failure.  Like the worst mom ever.  How could I NOT be BF'ing my son, it must be my fault.  I could barely breathe I was crying so hard.  I can't remember the last time prior to that moment that I cried so hard, that I felt so broken.  Little did I know, I had many more breaking points to come during this struggle.  The nurse then offered us a little help, I could pump and manually express out as much collostrum as I could, they would feed it to him in the nursery with some sugar water and we could get some sleep.  She could tell I was at the end of my rope and needed somebody to help me.  But there really is only so much anybody can do for a new mom in a position like I was in.  She offered us the best thing she could do, which was give us some sleep.  Jay and I talked about it for probably half an hour before we took her up on sending him to the nursery.  I struggled - I felt like I was admitting defeat, that I was a bad mom for letting somebody else care for my son.  But Jay and I both knew that this would most likely be our last chance for any decent length of sleep in the weeks, months and years to come.  It was really strange once they took him away.  To be alone in that room with just Jay.  Jay started playing around on the internet.  I snapped at him to stop, that we just sent our son away for one thing and one thing only, sleep.  Not so we could play games.  It just felt so selfish to me.

By our last day in the hospital I felt like we were finally starting to get this whole BF'ing thing down.  I was finally starting to feel confident.

Leaving the hospital was surreal.  Made being a mom feel so real almost.  And I mean that word - almost.  I still felt like all this just couldn't be really happening - that no way did my life change so drastically overnight.  I had no idea what to do, when to do it and how to feel.  I felt overwhelmed.  That first car ride home with Henry was the most nerve wracking thing ever.  I discovered for the first time the meaning of the words pure terror.  Henry's head flopped down to his chest on the ride home.  I panicked, I had chosen to sit in the back to be with him.  I am so glad I did.  Who knows what could've happened to my floppy newborn.  Could he have suffocated?  Would he have been just fine?  I held his head up as it kept flopping.  Did Jay install the carseat right?  It shouldn't be so upright that his head flops like this!  What happens if we get in a car accident and I'm holding his head up?  Would my hand/arm crush his delicate little skull in?  I was in full on panic mode.  It was exhausting.

I was still feeling optimistic though.  After all, we were starting to get the hang of BF'ing, we were going home, and if the hospital really thought we couldn't do it, they would've stopped us and helped us with a new plan right?

Little did I know that this next week, starting with that first night home, would be one of the worst emotionally for me.  Thanks hormones for your help in that ;-)

After a few requests...

I am finally taking some time to sit down and write about my breastfeeding journey with my son.  It hasn't been just an experience, that makes it sound so short, so brief.  This was a long time in the making.  So much sweat, blood and tears (well, less blood, more tears) went into trying to breastfeed Henry.  So I will start from the beginning, and I will do this in parts.  I'm sure this will, at times, be painful to write up.  But it will also (I'm sure) be a huge release as well for me.

Henry was born three weeks early due to pre-eclampsia.  I was not happy about this.  I had a plan and it did not include complications or inductions.  I wanted a natural birth.  I was going to let the cord stop pulsating before it was cut.  I wasn't going to have the vernix washed off, we were going to rub that most wonderful natural moisturizer into his skin.  I had plans.  Well, as I hear is often the case, our son had other ideas.

Henry kept having late decels in his heart rate.  This means that his heart rate would decrease, on a couple occasions drastically at the tail end of my contractions.  It was explained to us that this was the worst kind of decel you can have, that it means Henry is not tolerating labor very well.  After very little progress on my part (I had to be taken off the pitocin b/c of Henry's decels so I stopped dilating) we had to make a decision.  Either we choose the voluntary non-emergency c-section or we continue trying to have a vaginal delivery and most likely end up with an emergency c-section.  With the emergency c-section Jay wouldn't be able to be in the delivery room with us and I would be out cold.  We decided that the best thing was to get Henry out as labor was too stressful for him and I didn't want to be unconscious for his birth.

He was born at approximately 850pm on August 14, 2010 via cesarean section at the University of Washington Medical Center.

The surgery was very stressful for me, as I'm sure it is for most women who undergo c-sections.  I reacted a bit to the medications being pumped into my system - I couldn't stop shaking.  It felt like I was violently shivering only I wasn't cold.  It took about an hour or so after the surgery for that side effect to wear off.

I remember the OB and her students exclaiming as they pulled him out.  I don't remember what exactly was said, something about his hair I think.  I was so doped up on meds I'm a little groggy on what words were said around that time (and honestly for days later too).  I remember hearing his first cry.  That was the first time it was 'real' to me.  It had been kind of surreal the entire pregnancy.  His first cry was quieter than I thought it would be, I expected a little bit more of a hellion type cry.  But it was a cry none the less and that was good.  It meant he was ok.  I remember being very teary and crying a little.  I wanted to hold and comfort him, but I was strapped down across the room from him while they performed their tests on him.  Eventually Jay left my side after the anesthesiologists told him it was ok to go and hold him.

Remembering seeing Jay hold Henry for the first time is still very emotional for me.  He was so careful, so watchful while holding him.  Very protective.  Shading Henry's eyes from the glare of the bright lights in the operating room.  Holding him for all the tests that he needed.  Even one of the anesthesiologists commented how protective Jay was of Henry.  I really don't know how to say this without someone out there thinking I'm insulting my own father (which I'm not, my Dad is so incredibly amazing).  But I can't imagine a better father than Jay.

Henry was so alert when Jay first brought him over to me.  It was amazing to look into his (then) deep dark blue eyes and have him look back.  He just seemed in awe of what was going on, a bit startled too.  But calm, what a calm little man he was.  He was a bit wrinkly and you could see his ribs, so it was obvious (at least to me) that he had lost some weight in utero, so that made me feel better that we made the right choice to induce me early, even if it wasn't what I had wanted.

They wouldn't let Jay carry Henry back to the room, but instead I got to hold him as they wheeled me back to my room where my mom and my doula were anxiously waiting for us.  Shortly after we got back to the room Jay's mom and uncle and my sister joined us.  There were many ooh's and aah's over what a handsome little man he was.  He really never had the squished up baby face, he looked more like a little man.  He was SO alert for this, his eyes wide open taking everything in.  Although I know he really actually couldn't focus on much, he took it in as best as he could.

So soon it came time to try to nurse for the first time.  The whole time I was more than ready to boot out family so I could nurse.  I was so excited and wanted to feed Henry, but didn't want to feed him for the first time in front of an audience.  I had dreamed of this moment.  Henry would latch on.  I would gaze lovingly up at him, he would look adoringly up at me.  Bells would ring and angel would sing - because that's how it's supposed to go right?

Wrong.  Henry was born with low blood sugar (I had gestational diabetes so they kept really close watch on his sugars when he was born for the first 48 hours).  So I had only a short period of time to get him to nurse, to get him to drink my collostrum before they would give me no choice but to feed him formula.  Nice little stressor to add in for a first time mom whose birth experience so far had already thrown her for a loop.  I should add, I am very stubborn.  When I set my mind to something (such as what kind of birth experience I am going to have and how I want to feed my baby) it is REALLY hard for me to let go of.  It's actually painful, physically painful for me to let go of my plans.

Henry right off had problems latching.  Luckily I had a great supply of collostrum so he was able to lick enough off me to get his sugars up sufficiently to have the nurses off my back for at least a short while.  At this point the only problem we thought we had was my flat-ish nipples, his recessed chin and the fact that he was 3-weeks early.

Once his sugars are up and I'm recovered enough we are transferred over to the post-pardem floor for the duration of our stay.  I'm still optimistic, after all, so was everyone else around me.  The breastfeeding had to get easier, and was sure to happen sooner than later.  After all, it was natural.  Normal.  Every mother, every baby can do it.  That's what boobs are for, feeding babies.  I didn't read a book on breastfeeding as to me it wasn't an option on how I'd feed him.  I knew how I'd feed him so why should I read about it?  It's natural right?

I had no idea what I was in for.  The strength I'd find.  The weakness I'd feel.  The tears I'd cry.  The ups.  The downs.  I just had no clue.  I should've read a book.