The Lactation Consultant With Too Many Ideas

So there I was, pumped full of saline and antibiotics for the dehydration and the fever. My husband had our sweet little girl who looked exactly like him, cuddled to his chest and, in walks Ms. Lactation Consultant. I'm all for breastfeeding and I think it's the best thing for a baby but it's not as easy as it sounds. First of all, I'd had a reduction when I was 17 so I didn't really know if I'd be able to do this or not. Secondly, Monkey #1 had a little receding chin and had an incredibly difficult time latching on. So I was shown all these different apparatus that were to aid in her ability to learn how to latch on. Yeah, that didn't work. So then she brought the little tube and syringe to supplement while she was trying to latch on. The lactation consultant said she saw this in all babies who had had their little mouths sucked out at birth. I was getting antsy for her to get out. So she sends for the hospital grade cow pump and the shows me how I might teach her to latch using my thumb, a syringe and sugar water. That was my undoing. I didn't know it then but at that moment, my ability to feed my daughter by bottle was completely screwed. I tried for 2 months to breastfeed this kid. We rented the cow pump which felt like I was at some turn of the century sanitarium. I never could manage more than four ounces and it was constant brutal chesty punishment. Monkey #1 would not take a single bottle. We tried probably 20 different brands, from the obscenely expensive French imports to the one dollar jobbies from the dollar store. Nothin'. We probably spent $200 on bottles. You're probably wondering how the hell I fed her. Let me tell you... I had these 1 ounce syringes the hospital gave me, a feeding tube and bottles of both breast milk and formula. I'd load up four syringes, stick my thumb in her mouth, which she'd suck on, slide the little feeding tube into her mouth and depress the plunger reloading syringes until she was full. It was not all that bad until she started eating eight ounces at a time. I did this for FIVE months. My Mom and Sister had to do it for a week too while I was out after my final surgery #5.

November 6, 2008, Monkey #1 was just 2 months old when I went in for "THE SURGERY". The pain leading up to the surgery during the month of October was brutal. You know those giant spears the Spartans used. I felt like three were stabbing me in the back, right around my kidney, every time I took a step with my left foot. Out of all the pain I've ever felt over the past decade, this was the most brutal, most nauseating, most untouchable by narcotics. At first we thought it was a kidney infection, negative. Kidney stones, negative. My doctor was troubled because he'd never seen me this way. They had never seen me cry from pain until then. I had even been told that my pain tolerance was so high I didn't get fevers when I should. This was the kind of pain that if you didn't know there were an end... who knows what would happen. The days before my surgery, they didn't want to prescribe anything stronger because they were worried about pain control after the surgery. They were to perform a laparatomy to have better access to my internal shenanigans than laparoscopic surgery. He had a urological surgeon and vascular surgeon on hand and was ready for anything. My Mom, husband, sister and baby were all there with me and keeping me company while I waited, and waited. I had bought these fuzzy white socks with the little plastic knobbies on the bottom and Mom was rubbing my feet... white fuzz everywhere. Mom insisted I remove them at once and attacked me with a sticky lint roller. Of course my husband goes out to smoke and they come take me away and explain everything to Mom. I was wheeled into pre-op and sure enough, as they were wheeling me into the OR, they asked me if I had been given a sedative, which I had, so they shot me up again because I was so coherent for having been given God only knows what. I awoke in recovery and for the first time, I wasn't crying. I had full confidence in my Doctor's abilities to take care of me. The news was a relief: my left ureter had been pulled beyond the mid line of my body, he removed what he expected to be my left ovary but had to send it to testing to be sure, the urologist did his part and they clipped the adhesion and everything just sprung back to where it was supposed to be. My right ovary and fallopian tube were perfectly fine. Once again they had done a ton of work and I stayed overnight. They brought me a pump but I just said forget it, just give me the drugs. It was the most painful surgery to date. I got home and it took two weeks before I could even climb the stairs. I held my baby as much as I could but was seriously heavily medicated the whole time. And I hated what they gave me, can't even remember what it was but it had to have been a really strong opiate. Six weeks later, I was given the okay to resume all my activities. It had been traumatic but we got through it again. And Monkey #1 learned how to sleep in her crib while I was incapacitated. (That didn't last long though, damn summer vacations) I had no pain. For once in over a decade, I felt absolutely zero pain. I still didn't think I'd have another but I was pain free. I can't tell you what a relief that is! Coming next... my little surprise when Monkey #1 was only 9 months old.

**The lactation consultant had also given me a horrible cold and I suffered for almost three weeks with it. Great fun with a newborn, luckily my baby didn't get it. She admitted to me that she had exposed us when I had a second consultation. I was pissed. And after five months, I said to hell with it, you are going to take a bottle whether you want to or not. And after three different nipples on a Dr. Brown's bottle, we had it. No more syringes. EVER AGAIN!!!