Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Oct
23
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“It Would Probably Be Easier To Just Give Her A Bottle…”
“It would probably be easier to just give her a bottle anyway.” – Said to a mother who was hoping to successfully start breastfeeding after baby had needed to be bottle fed for a period of time.
There are 13 comments to this post.
first time mommy had this to say,
Oct 23, 2011 @ 7:38 pm (Quote)
Hmm.
It’s 3am. Baby wakes up crying/hungry/scared. Roll over, offer breast, baby suckles at it and is instantly soothed.
OR
It’s 3am. Baby wakes up crying/hungry/scared. Force yourself out of your nice warm comfy bed, stumble across the room, prepare bottle of formula while squinting bc the light hurts your eyes, shuffle back to baby, pick up baby while balancing bottle, sit with baby upright to make sure baby doesn’t suck in air, get baby back down to sleep if didn’t fall asleep while eating, shuffle out, clean out bottle again while squinting at the light, put bottle away, stumble back to bed and attempt to fall back asleep.
YES. I get it. BF CAN be hard at first and challenging at times, but IMO, the amount of work it takes is nowhere near that of bottle feeding.
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Formula is expensive, can be complicated (mixing, measuring, scrubbing, sterilizing), and requires carrying supplies if you go out anywhere.
Breastfeeding may require some initial effort, and may come up against obstacles from time to time (such as ignorant unsupportive comments from the medical professionals who are supposed to HELP).
Long term, breastfeeding is easier, cheaper, more convenient, and doesn’t increase the baby’s risk of asthma, obesity, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, etc.
It might be easier *this minute* to give a bottle than to teach the babe to breastfeed, but long-term it’s not easier or better, if breastfeeding is possible.
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Remember when I said what came after the birth made me nearly want to forget about the stuff at the birth and complaining about it? This is a snippet!
Baby born happy and well at 34 weeks and they’re happy to send us straight to Transitional Care – it’s a ward that’s an extension of the NNU, for rooming in (something this hospital is good at) or if a baby is well enough to leave NNU but not for home etc – but TC had no beds and baby went to NNU whilst I was sent to a postnatal ward. Because it was quite late, they put a tube down (no teats to BF babies here) and FF her until the next day when I’d be able to BF and pump but she brought the formula up, every time. They gave her some of my colostrum next day but for some reason I never understood they did half and half so that when she brought the formula back the colostrum came too! Of course this is really bad if she can’t even tolerate MEBM so she went to nil by mouth and a drp put in until her stomach had been rested and they’d investigated what was wrong with her.
Eventually they started her on 1ml MEBM an hour, after 8 hours it was 2ml an hour, another 8 hours 3ml and so on until she was taking mls and hour then they go to every 3 hours. When she was 10 days old, never having taken a feed from me they had her on 3 hourly feeds and decided it was time to move to TC. For some reason, again I don’t understand it, they decided to go fully breastfed. Here’s a premature baby who has never fed before, has lost a lot of weight and they’re expecting her to pick up full breastfeeding… For the best part of a week she carried on losing weight until she was -10% and it was decided we needed to top up, I had enough milk in storage and was pumping more again. After 3 days her weight was going up slowly and her bilirubin levels were coming down on their own for the first time.
On the 4th day (a Sunday) I had an afternoon out (I’d been in hospital for 4 weeks by this point so they insisted that I went out for a few hours with my other children) and whilst I was gone they weighed her, she’d lost 5g! Seriously, a spoonful of sugar! Everyone went into serious mode, really concerned, we need to do something about this terrible weight loss… So the next day along comes the paediatrician to look at her and decides this is a very sick child and we can no longer be breastfeeding her, she needs to be fed by a bottle so she’s getting a set amount and we know what she’s taking.
The plan was for me to put to breast every 3 hours for 15 min tops, bottle feed then pump. This doesn’t work, a baby fed a set amount every 3 hours (especially based on 180ml/kg/day) never wakes up so I gave up breastfeeding. As she got bigger she woke more and asked for the breast and I’d give it to her. It took two weeks before we transitioned to breastfeeding, she wanted the instant hit of a bottle still so I had to give a small amount before a feed and occasionally she was too hungry to eat at all so needed a full bottle. Took a week to get over that and within another week she had the odd bottle at night. We’ve been bottle free from about 2.5 months.
As you can imagine with 6 weeks in hospital (and having done this twice before with my other babies) I got to know the staff quite well. One day I’m chatting to someone about how I want to reestablish full breastfeeding eventually and she came out with the line above and tells me how she never bothered, couldn’t be doing with all that it’s far easier to just give a bottle… Who was she? The domestic!
Whilst getting advice from a domestic might not be worth much anyway, it’s a Unicef Baby Friendly hospital and the rules are that all members of staff, even domestics need to be supportive.. Besides, who’s she to be handing out breastfeeding advice especially to someone working hard on getting things going that it was obviously important to.
Like I said, this one’s just a snippet. The stuff that went with this, that I never mentioned, is crazy.
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The Deranged Housewife had this to say,
Oct 24, 2011 @ 6:31 am (Quote)
This is really sad. Sometimes I think they do it under the guise of things like low blood sugar, etc. when really there is no reason for it other than they just want to feed a baby, *any* baby. They just give you some BS reason – and “since the formula is right. there. why not? It’s so much easier, you don’t want to nurse! We have free samples!”
So sad. 
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Claire Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 12:32 pm (Quote)
Fortunately here in the UK there’s no free samples and it’s a good hospital usually for breastfeeding, it even has Baby Friendly status. If it was a nurse you could sort of understand it being easier on them but a domestic trying to put someone off breastfeeding altogether is just a personal agenda – making herself feel better about not doing it herself, maybe?
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Add Your Comment.
I’ve done both. While things can be rough at first with BFing (cluster feeding and such), bottle feeding is definitely NOT easier. With my second, it was awesome to nurse on my side in bed, while still able to snooze a little. And even though we use a nipple shield for the almost 18 months we’ve been nursing (undiagnosed lip tie), it was still easier to nurse her while out and about instead of carrying all the supplies for mixing formula.
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