Breastfeeding The Shrimp

Sorry Real, and everyone else, for the lack of a birth story so far. Hopefully this issue will be resolved and we can move on to more exciting things.

A few minutes after Shrimp was born, we got to nurse for the first time. It was great! She latched right on and has a powerful suck! I was so excited after the nightmarish first several weeks of my breastfeeding relationship with Little Chub. My midwife reminded us that in the first 24 hours or so, newborns are often more interested in sleeping than anything else, so it was okay if she didn't nurse quite as often as would be the norm after that. Still, she woke up every few hours (not quite as often as 2-3), and she latched on pretty well still. I noticed that there were a few minor things we would need to work on to alleviate some soreness for me, but aside from that, things were great. Day number 2 came around--Thursday. Shrimp's latch was the same as the day before, but I had to aggressively wake her up a lot of the time. Still, once she latched on, it was mostly perfect. Day 3--Friday. The Shrimp is nearly impossible to wake up. But, I still manage to do it, and she eats. My excitement about her nursing abilities compared to Little Chub's and the fact that she was tormented at the pediatrician's and very much needed to nurse after the visit kept me from really realizing that things were going downhill (already had, really). Incidentally, we went across the hall from the pediatrician to the lab where they stuck her heel and took a million drops of blood for the bilirubin test. Also incidentally, my milk was starting to come in that morning, and continued to do so all day, until Friday night, I was engorged. I hadn't realized with Little Chub when it was coming in, probably because of so many stinking sore areas I had, until I was engorged, so as the milk was fully coming in this time, I was optimistically (still! and I didn't really think I was an optimist...) thinking The Shrimp was eating enough to keep us from a repeat performance of engorgement. Unfortunately, The Shrimp was unable to latch on-to my engorgedness, so I had to pump some off the top. By the time I had one side ready for her, she had given up. She refused to try to latch on, and I was getting frustrated. We decided that with all that we learned last time, we might as well feed her what we had pumped, so we bottle fed her the pumped breastmilk. It was breastmilk, but I was not happy about it. She became much more alert after drinking 2 ounces of breastmilk, and even woke up twice in the night to eat (each time after about 3 hours). I had to pump some off the top each time, but after that, with some hard work, we managed to get a successful latch. Now we were thinking that if we could manage to un-engorge me that everything would be a-okay. Sadly, one breast will not un-engorge, with any amount of pumping. The other one is HUGE, but the engorged one in comparison is like Alaska compared to Rhode Island or something (yes, that's an exaggeration...). The Shrimp has been sleeping ALL day, so we've stuffed a bottle into her sleeping mouth to feed her (after trying in vain to breastfeed repeatedly). Then we got a call telling us that her bilirubin is high. They wanted us to go to the ER tomorrow to repeat the bilirubin test, and make sure she's okay. We get to go to a lab instead. We're trying to stuff her full of milk before then, and we're putting her by windows all the time.

So, here I sit, with edema that makes me look worse than when I was pregnant, and causes me to weigh only 3 pounds less than when The Shrimp was born, with a boob the size of Alaska (but as hard as the Grand Canyon), and with a baby who won't wake up (unless it's nighttime and I'm trying to have her NOT sleep on the bed), and therefore, cannot eat without a bottle. It's kind of depressing.