It has been a hundred days since Little Bear was born, and I still don’t seem to be able to meet her milk needs. We are still doing mixed feeding.
The idea of seeing a doctor came after a chance conversation downstairs in our apartment complex. My husband was out walking with the baby when he ran into another mother. She said she had also started out combining breast milk and formula, but after inviting a lactation consultant to her home when her baby was a little over three months old, her milk supply increased. Her baby was now more than seven months old and fully breastfed, no formula anymore.
That got me thinking: if exclusive breastfeeding was still possible, maybe it wasn’t too late. Little Bear still had another seven or eight months of milk ahead of her. I had already spent plenty of time searching online and waiting for things to improve on their own, which had gotten me nowhere. So this time I decided to stop asking the internet and go to the hospital instead. Someone had told me there was a clinic there specifically for this kind of problem, so I searched for it on the map and went.
After wandering around the hospital a bit, I found a room labeled “Breast Specialty Clinic.” That had to be it. Inside was a male doctor, and I explained my situation from the beginning.
He told me that in many cases, not having enough milk is more of a perception than a reality. Often the baby is actually getting enough, and the real issue is incorrect feeding technique. He said the baby needs to be held closer, and shouldn’t latch onto only the nipple, but take in the areola as well. In his view, milk production depends mainly on stimulation: the more the breast is stimulated, the more milk is produced, and the best stimulation is the baby sucking more often.
He was especially firm about one point: mixed feeding, he said, was making things worse. A bottle is easier to drink from, so once a baby gets used to that, they may become less willing to nurse at the breast. If supplementation is necessary, he said, it should be given with a spoon rather than a bottle.
I told him my baby was not refusing to breastfeed. It was just that I felt there wasn’t enough milk. In the first few minutes, I could hear big swallows, but later on it only felt like she was sucking without swallowing. And if I offered formula afterward, she could still drink several dozen more milliliters. Didn’t that suggest my supply really was low?
His response was blunt. People can breastfeed twins, even triplets, he said, so how could one baby not be fed? The problem, in his opinion, was still the method, not the milk.
I asked whether a person’s constitution might make a difference.
He dismissed that too. Unless someone has a serious illness, he said, a healthy person should generally be able to produce enough milk for their baby.
I asked if maybe I wasn’t drinking enough soup.
That, he said, makes very little difference. As long as you are eating enough and not going hungry, that is enough.
Then I brought up another thing I had heard: some people say massage from a lactation specialist can bring in a lot more milk. Could it be that my milk ducts were blocked?
He did not think much of that idea either. In his view, those claims were exaggerated. Massage is not that miraculous, he said. What matters is still the baby sucking more. Since I had no hard lumps, he said there was no blockage.
Then he offered an example I was absolutely not expecting. A sow can feed a whole litter of piglets, he said. What does that have to do with massage? A pig’s legs are so short it cannot possibly massage itself anyway. What tells the body to secrete milk, if not the stimulation from all those piglets nursing?
By then I was half stunned, half amused. He had brought piglets into the discussion, and somehow the conclusion still came back to the same thing: go home and let the baby nurse more.
I had gone in half expecting medicine, or maybe some kind of hands-on treatment, but his main advice remained unchanged.
He said that if the baby was unwilling to suck, then my husband should help stimulate the breast instead. And if my husband was unwilling, I could bring him in and the doctor would speak to him personally. If possible, he added, it would be best to bring the baby in next time so he could watch a feeding, check whether my breastfeeding position was correct, and adjust it if needed.
In the end, he did write me an order for treatment: low-frequency pulse electrical therapy.
He told me to do the physiotherapy twice a day for three days. Together with the baby’s sucking, he said, it would also serve as breast stimulation. Then he told me to go downstairs and pay.