I think one of the key things that I had, that helped me when I first had Lily was the nurses that nursed me were incredibly supportive and the first thing we really did after Lily was born was we breastfed, so they put me, they put Lily directly onto my breast, they almost did it for me because I'd had a caesarean and I had no real feeling so I couldn't really move, I couldn't move the lower part of my body and, but it was an amazing feeling she would only have been twenty minutes old something like that, maybe thirty minutes old I can't remember exactly, but I know the pictures of her hair's still damp and, and, and the fact that she's sort of, could do it and we could do it was really powerful for me it really meant a lot, and that was important because in the next intervening few days we couldn't actually breastfeed because her body sugar was too low, so they were desperately trying to get food into her, but because she'd done it once I felt fairly confident that we could go back and try and do it again. and we did try and do it but I knew that I couldn't actually feed her, it wasn't going to be enough, in the, the first sort of two or three days, but certainly that kind of experience and, and just the practical thing where one of the nurses showed me literally by pulling her lower lip back that got into the kind of latching position, and then once she did it, I thought, 'Oh that, that's how it feels' you know, I kind of knew what it meant then and sort of demystified it for me.
Can you describe that feeling of a good latch?
I think for me it was the fact that she seemed able to, she seemed to have enough of the nipple in her mouth and she seemed to be able to suck so that she, if you like, didn't seem to be wasting any of her energy, she seemed to be sucking and getting milk, sucking and getting milk, sucking getting milk, and she seemed to quite comfortable, so it was almost like there was this sort of, like a seal, you know a kind of a seal on my nipple and, and as I say having sort of literally the nurse, you know, showed me that pull Lily's lip down for me, and having done that a few times it then became quite natural for the pair of us really, so.
A bit like learning to ride a bike?
Yes absolutely I mean kind of once we'd done it two or three times I thought 'that's it, that's what you do' and then Lily seemed to also understand what she had to do I mean, I was very lucky with Lily she seemed to instinctively know what to do, she didn't seem to have any problems latching on, the initial difficulty was really just about the fact that they needed to get food inside her, because she was little and her blood sugar was low, her body temperature was low as a consequence of the blood sugar, we just had to get some food inside her so we had to feed her, feed her formula feed for the first few days.
So did you need much help from day three onwards to, to get to that stage of exclusively feeding?
No, not really, no I didn't really need much help, because I think Lily having gotten over her initial problems just energy really, just seemed to know what to do, she just instinctively knew what to do, and, you know, I was in hospital and I guess I was, because I was in hospital I had nothing else to do I mean I wasn't at home, I wasn't being sort of distracted by anything else, so I was able just to sit and feed her and she really fed virtually all the time. I don't know that she was getting that much milk necessarily but we were just doing the kind of the, the breastfeeding and that kind of thing, so that by the time we came out of hospital I was quite confident that I could breastfeed her, and I guess having been in hospital for that amount of time helped as well as ordinarily I would have been out perhaps in two or three days. |
