Not finding the right flange size did have its own set back but I was not letting it be the end of a probably beautiful journey. Then I thought to myself, why not just get another pump, maybe then the different flange shape will also have some sort of impact.
Buying another pump worth it???
I then went over to look for another pump. I made sure that I researched a lot and read all the reviews I could find before deciding on which pump to buy. I bought the breast pump with reviews where a lot of people said that they also tried other pumps that didn’t work for them but that particular one was the best. I also found some sort of comfort from just reading the reviews. It turned out that I was not the only one facing an issue with pumping. Don’t get me wrong, I was not expecting as much milk as my baby would suck for himself, only a reasonable quantity would be enough for me. Reasonable for me was 100ml to 120ml. I would be up in the morning before the baby wakes to try and pump and still have time so that by the time he wakes I would have enough milk produced for his feed. But I would sit there with a pump for over 30 minutes, and I would only manage to get about 50ml. 50ml in the morning? This was too little for me. I wished to get double that.
The new breast pump helped me to get about 80ml if I pumped before the baby wakes up. Sometimes I would even get about 100ml-120ml. I distracted myself from looking at the sessions duration by watching an episode or two of a series, making a total of +/- 40minutes. When I saw the results, I ditched the other pump and used the new one, by ditching I mean using it less, lol. The downside of the new pump was that it was not rechargeable so I could not move around the house if I was pumping or use it during load shedding. I must mention that it came with batteries that I could use if I didn’t have electricity but when I read how long the batteries lasted, I just decided that I will stick to the old pump if there was no electricity (50ml was still better than not pumping or buying batteries all the time there was load shedding.
Stress can affect the breast pumping output
Exchanging two pumps helped me to build enough stash for going back to work. I must mention that my stash grew even more when I was at back at work. I managed to get more than 200ml in 30minutes and I was doing two pumping sessions. There are so many reasons for this but the main one was that when I was pumping at work I was not under pressure and didn’t stress too much about the baby waking up while I was still pumping. Most of the time when I was pumping at home, I would really be worried about those “few” mils and this would affect my throughput. When I got the hang of it I started understanding that I was not going to get the same quantities everyday. If my baby nursed more towards my waking up time then I would obviously get lower volumes. The afternoon sessions would give me even lesser volumes because of nursing my baby in between.
My forever breast-friend
Always winning