I didn’t know how I wanted my baby to be fed. I knew breastfeeding was best but I didn’t know how hard it would be. My breastfeeding journey definitely started off rocky.

After my caesarian section I was wheeled out of the operating theatre and greeted by my husband and my newborn, a medical staff member advised that my newborn and I spend some time doing skin-to-skin and attempt breastfeeding before I was to be transported to ICU to recover from the surgery. It was a success, but only because the anaesthetic was still active, so one can imagine my surprise at how painful and difficult nursing with the boobs actually was later on. The realisation that it was a learning curve for both the mother and child really hit hard then and I was turned off when the second try at breastfeeding left me with grazes and a baby that was still unsatisfied. For the rest of my hospital stay, I fed the little one with a combination of expressed breastmilk and formula, but I didn’t want to write off breastfeeding so soon, so I requested to speak to a lactation consultant and get their feedback based on a live breastfeed attempt. This turned out to be helpful in the continuation of the breastfeeding journey, as the lactation consultant was able to suggest a different position of holding the baby, being the football hold, and that led to a successful latch that didn’t cause any grazing or significant and persistent pain during the session.

Then upon returning home after discharge, the real challenge began. Frankly when I was at hospital, I didn’t sleep very much so I felt worse for wear upon discharge, and I was still reeling from the trauma of the birth, so I relied on my husband a lot to care for our baby while I recovered slowly. This meant that we were very dependant on formula at the start. It wasn’t until our of sheer desperation due to the bottles and breast pump parts not being washed one time that I resumed breastfeeding, but with the assistance of my husband. The football hold position was difficult without help, so I bought a breastfeeding pillow to try and assist, specifically the My Breast Friend pillow, but there was one major problem, being that I had difficulty burping my little one with the My Breast Friend pillow on. Another problem was that I didn’t have any spare pillow covers if the cover was soiled. Before I knew it, my husband was on his last week of leave and I needed to really step up and take on caring for our baby during the night. Since the football hold position didn’t work if I was alone, and I didn’t want to risk waking up my husband while our baby would cry from waiting for a bottle to be warmed up mustered up the courage and energy to try the crossbody position on my own and voila! It worked and it didn’t hurt! From then on, I repeated that breastfeeding position gradually and eventually I came to exclusively nursing my baby with my boobs.

Lately the problems that I have been dealing with regarding breastfeeding are blisters that appear on the teats and this weird hard-to-describe sensation that I sometimes get during breastfeeding that makes it unbearable to cradle my baby. These don’t occur often though, so other than those problems, I think I’ve gotten to a point where I’m mostly comfortable with nursing with the breasts.

I guess the key takeaway here is if you hate doing any washing and you haven’t ruled out breastfeeding entirely, a little persistence does go  a long way. As with most things, practice makes perfect. For the mothers who did give up on breastfeeding though, I’d like to know how long you’ve tried to breastfeed and why did you ultimately discontinue, so please comment your answers to this!