Appreciative of being able to financially take care of my baby and sad that after four months of my maternity leave, I had to go back to work. So, 2 months after having my baby I started thinking about preparing for returning to work. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months was on top of the priority list. This meant that I needed to pump some breastmilk and store for use when I am at work. I then bought the breastmilk freezer storage bags so I could get on building some stash. I preferred building the stash as I didn’t want to stress about the baby not having enough milk for the following day or missing a pump session at work. I wanted to minimize my chances of having anxiety about going back to work by doing all the necessary preparations. So there I went singing my way to building best stash ever.
Getting started
Since I wasn’t struggling with breastmilk supply, I had the idea that I wasn’t going to struggle with pumping some breastmilk to store away. But boy I was so wrong and my music soon faded. I was not able to get the quantities I needed. I even tried pumping at different times and it did not help at all. Soon I realised that I had to rely on reading up and researching about a lot of things. I was surrounded by people who have had babies before, but somehow I didn’t feel comfortable about talking about a lot of it with anyone (I have since learned that there is no harm in talking and asking about someone’s experience – if they are not willing to share it is also okay). I then went on to research on what I could to do improve my supply, since I thought my issue was the supply. How I came to that conclusion, only the sleep deprived me can tell you. What I had already read was that lots of fluids could help, but it didn’t seem to help me a lot. I would only manage to get a reasonable quantity if my breast were engorged, to a point that I even sort of loved it when I was engorged because it meant I would at least get a good pumping session. My letdown would come in very easy, but the flow would soon fade.
Sitting on that pumping session for 45 minutes and barely getting some breastmilk out made me think that I would not be able to maintain the goal of exclusive breastfeeding. Just that idea was so unbearable. Some days it would make me feel like a failure. I would get so frustrated and end up just focusing on the present, and that was my ability to be able to breastfeed my child. But, I could only focus on that for a short while. The reality was that I would go back to work and if I didn’t have the breastmilk stash then we would have to go for formula. That was not happening, no, not again and not before six months. Nothing was going to stop me from trying and giving it my best shot.
Soldiering on…
Strength, I have no idea where I got it from. I then took time to go through YouTube to find my solutions. To those who have camera friendly characters please keep on making those videos, they do help us a lot. So online I went, looking for information and walah, I got lots of it. Breast pumps have a way of putting then on, I just thought the idea was to just have your nipple in, but I found out that if you don’t put it in correctly then the pumping would not be efficient. So time to try… I would spend 2-3minutes setting up my nipple into the pump. I glorified God for helping me with the solution as I managed to increase the pumping efficiency.
Loving it again
I, then started to enjoy pumping. I was not getting a lot still, but at least the session would go on easier once I had set everything up. I also understood that I would not get significant amounts like in those videos because a lot of the ones I was watching were those of the mothers doing exclusive pumping and I was nursing full time. But I kept on thinking that there should be a better way of improving the time I spend on setting up my nipple into the breast pump. It would also get uncomfortable some sessions so when that happened I would try setting up from the beginning and if it was still not comfortable I would then stop. This whole process taught me a bit of resilience.
The second solution
When I say I survived my breastfeeding by YouTube it is no lie. I then went to continue with my research on how to get the best out of my pumping sessions. That is when I found out that breast pumps have different flange sizes, who knew huh? It all started making sense. Different breast pump flange sizes are there to accommodate the different size nipples that we have as women. Different size nipples? Yes, that is right, I found out when I was struggling with getting my baby latched, but it never crossed my mind that the pump, mimicking the sucking, would also mean that I would have challenges with the breast pumps as well (The brain wasn’t working anything close to its capability, that is normal I guess when there is so much happening during the first few months of the new born’s life). Breast pumps are anyway made to “fit most breast sizes”. “Most” is the keyword and I didn’t fall under the “most” category. After the flange size discovery I started understanding why I could get more breastmilk from hand expressing over an electric pump. But hand expressing is really a job and a half, it is tiring and I found it very hard to maintain.
Now let’s try to bigger flanges. Online window shopping said nope “error 404” for the for the pump I was using. Lo, and behold the world was against me. I prayed to God to give me strength and a solution before I could give up. How sad that I found the solution but I could not get my hands on the right size breast pump flange. I went as far as checking if I could get it from outside the country, but it just turned out that they just had one size flange. What a disappointment. This is when I asked a friend who was also breastfeeding at the time which pump she was using and what she used previously since it was not her first child. Turned out she was using the same one, so I didn’t care much for how she was finding it because it was not going to help my situation.
My story goes on… but defeated is not how it ends. Part 2 to follow…