It really, really doesn’t.
A special guest post by my wife.
Today I decided to stop expressing, here is my story.
With my girls being premature expressing breast milk is all I could do for them in the beginning and it gave them the best start possible. It was difficult and never have I worked so hard for such little reward. The heart ache of spending 30 minutes massaging and hand expressing to not even get a glistening let alone a drop of breast milk.
It was about 3 days in and I was being asked to produce a magical elixir that my body wasn’t expecting to need for about another 17 weeks. I felt under so much pressure. Even though for their first few days on feeds the girls were having 0.3ml per hour of donor breast milk, I couldn’t produce 0.3ml in a day. And that was before dropping the syringe on the floor, after my husband had been painstakingly collecting the tiniest droplets known to man.
At about 2 weeks in I was prescribed Domperidone which is an anti-sickness drug but has a handy side effect of increasing milk in lactating mothers approximately 50% of the time. By this time I was expressing milk but not enough for one baby let alone two. I was also taking fenugreek capsules which are absolutely disgusting.
By week 4 I had started to get a good supply of milk to feed the girls at their current rate but at this point I’d had enough. I cannot tell you the amount of times I’ve found myself screaming at the top of my lungs “There’s not enough time!”It just didn’t seem possible that during all this pumping I was supposed to be eating, resting and spending time with the girls.
My girls are 14 weeks old today and I cannot take any more. If it were my friend I would have told them weeks ago that they weren’t Superwoman and if it made them this unhappy to stop. Clearly I’m not a very good friend to myself.
I love my girls more than I ever thought was possible and this decision, although much deliberated, makes me feel incredibly guilty. But if I am going to be the carer of two sickly babies then my mental health needs to come first. If I’m not coping now, how will I cope when I bring my youngest home in a few weeks?
I’m sure I won’t be the first person to say that pumping just isn’t the same as breastfeeding. During the day is one thing but waking at 3am is really hard when you don’t have a baby to snuggle; Instead you sit tethered up to a glorified hoover wishing death to all breast pumps.
After the 14 weeks we’ve had, something had to give and it was the expressing. That said here are a few hopefully handy tips to consider:
- Get a reliable breast pump. An obvious one but none the less, I rented a Medela Symphony pump and cannot recommend it enough.
- Buy more pumping kits, it really helps with not having to wash after every single pump.
- Milk storage bags, they take up a lot less space in the freezer and are great to help stockpile milk for when you’re ready to hang up your cow bell.
- Get a car adapter for your chosen pump, fantastic for long journeys or when your trip out takes longer than planned. The symphony has an adapter which you can pay a deposit for and you get the money back on return.
- Tubagrip! It will revolutionise your life and save the RSI in your wrists. Order some Size L Tubagrip from the internet (or ask the unit as they may have some.) Cut some holes in for the breast shields leaving your hands free for all sorts of things: eating, scratching your nose, surfing the web or whatever you want. It’s also so much cheaper than a sports bra.
- Get your partner to help out with washing and drying the kits so they’re ready for you to use.
- Consider microwave steriliser bags if you only have a couple of kits or perhaps invest in a steam steriliser if, like me, you have more kits than you probably should just so you don’t have to wash them every few hours.
- Stay away from the salads. On the days when I didn’t have chance to eat much, or could only locate relatively “healthy” foods I noticed that my supply would drop for the following day or so.
- Drink loads, but not alcoholic (sorry). If the basis of milk is water, you need to remember to take water on board so you can express it as milk.
- Be proud of every single day you manage to persevere with the torture of expressing for your baby.
The First 6 Weeks 