Your Breastfeeding Experience in Hospital
November 9, 2009 by Angela White, J.D., breastfeeding counselor
Filed under carnival
The November Carnival of Breastfeeding will focus on “Breastfeeding Experiences in the Hospital.” Did you have a particularly good or bad experience you’d like to share? Do you have tips for choosing a breastfeeding-friendly hospital? Please email me your post by November 16, 2009, for consideration for the blog carnival on November 23, 2009.
Photo by TheTruthAbout...
As a reminder, here are the guidelines that will increase the chances a post will be selected for inclusion in the carnival:
– A well-written, grammatically correct post
– Thoughtful commentary directly on point for the carnival subject
– Overall quality of the rest of your blog and whether the general subject matter is something of interest to our readers (breastfeeding, parenting)
If your post is selected for inclusion, you will be asked on the day of the carnival to publish or re-publish your post with links back to each of the other participants in the carnival.
Oh, yeah. I am all. over. this one.
Time for Mama to do some venting!
Yikes – just saw the deadline! The kid and I are heading out of town tomorrow, returning on the 17th. I’ll do my best to get it written while I’m gone.
I had my third daughter one year ago yesterday and I am still breastfeeding. I have now breastfed for a total of 5 1/2 years. I LOVED the hospital she was born at. The only bad experience I had was with the lactation consultant. When I got pregnant with my newest addition I was still nursing my almost 2 1/2 year old. I was slowly weaning her off but once I found out I was pregnant I went ahead and called it quits. I never really dried up completly. When I gave birth to my newest little one I had an emergency C-section (yuck) and I wasn’t able to nurse her until about 5 hours after she was born. They had to keep her in the nursery and as soon as I could feel my legs they let me go down to feed her, she latched on perfectly. I got her in the room that night and was able to feed her with no problem. The next afternoon I was already engorged. The lactation consultant came in and I was very open to her being there. I explained to her that this was my third daughter and I breastfed my oldest for two years and my second for 29 months and that my milk never dried up while I was pregnant. My husband hadn’t brought my pump up yet and that I was so engorged that I wanted the pump for a little relief from the pain, so that I wouldn’t get mastitis and so Chloe could eat more comfortably. She basically told me there was no way that my milk was already in and that I shouldn’t pump the milk out. So I then squirted the milk out across the room. I felt like she thought that I no idea what I was talking about. She basically shrugged off everything I said. At least that’s what I felt. Then she told me how I was holding the baby wrong. I was thinking in my head, You know she is making this very stressful. If I hadn’t been so comfortable with breastfeeding she would possibly be making me not to want to do it at all. Breastfeeding is overwhelming enough to have someone like that making you feel like an idiot. Someone else finally brought the pump to me and I did what I need to with no help from her and everything is still fine today. On a positive note, I was surprised to see the diaper bag for breastfeeding mothers. With my other two daughters there where only the formula bags. It’s nice to see that hospitals are more involved in helping mothers breastfeed. That they even have lactation consultants is wonderful I just happened to get someon that thought she knew everything. All I can say to that is everything isn’t written in black and white, there are other circumstances to what she thought was correct, mone was one of those. I’m not saying that every mother will need to pump like I did. I am now going to school to become a nurse and I will then do what is needed to become a lactation consultant.