I’m never going to finish a post again, but hey, this one’s about breasts…

So.

I haven’t been writing much, although I’ve started a couple of posts and stopped.

I have a newborn at home. So sue me.

I still intend to write about Torsten’s birth, but unfortunately, I’ve been consumed by other things.

See, Torsten was born at 7 lbs, 12 oz. A respectable weight, though not huge by any means. However, he lost almost a pound in the hospital – we left the hospital on day 4, and only then did my milk come in, so he really didn’t have any chance to gain weight before we left. No one seemed worried – that is, until an hour before we were to check out from the hospital, when health care was basically transferring over from the hospital to our HMO. And then the freakout began, because it was more than 10% of his body weight (never mind that he’d only had colostrum for 3 days and had output a huge amount of meconium shortly after birth for the first several days), and that magic percentage sets off the magic red flashing lights.

Now, all newborns lose some weight after birth, and formula-fed infants gain back their weight quicker, but the doctors expect all infants to gain back their birth weight by 14 days. Given that infants are expected, on average, to gain an ounce a day, I suppose we were screwed from the start on this, since little guy only had 9 days to gain before his 2-week appointment, but nevertheless, the HMO nurse practitioner at the hospital and the home care nurses that came to visit us twice have made it a mission, and piling that stress on top of learning to breastfeed hasn’t been fun.

Add to that that instead of recognizing that my milk was just starting to come in as we left the hospital, they freaked and decided I had a supply problem, I was supposed to be pumping and supplementing after each feed. Given that newborns feed every 2-3 hours, and this little guy feeds for a long time, doing that on top of breastfeeding meant all I was doing for those first days home was feeding Torsten. Not sleeping, and, stupidly, not eating very well beyond what Christian fed me (and he did a great job, but I did need to eat more).

Oh, and did I mention I’m recovering from a c-section?

Yeah. Major abdominal surgery. It sucked.

Anyway, those first few days home were really bad – I was actually nearly passing out when I fed Torsten or pumped, and it was scaring me. Since I’m a little anemic from blood loss during surgery, we thought it was that, but experience has shown it was a combination of not having time to eat well and so much freaking feeding plus pumping.

Somebody should have mentioned to me that if my milk came in like gangbusters (which it did), the pumping was perhaps not a great idea.

But then again, given that I tried to get the lactation consultant to help me for two days in the hospital and she only showed the night before I left because the nurse dragged her ass into my room, why should I expect that anyone was actually paying attention?

So. Anyhow. We had home nurses come by to weigh Torsten, check him out, and check on his jaundice, as well as to check my incision. I do think that’s a pretty awesome thing my HMO does, but I should also mention that all it managed to do in the end was make me worry more about Torsten’s weight, never mind that he was still gaining. (Of course, we were supplementing with donor milk and some of what I’d pumped, but he was doing well…)

We still had no idea how he was doing weight-wise until we saw the pediatrician at his two-week appointment, though, and while he’s gained 9 ounces from his low weight leaving the hospital (an ounce a day, as desired), he’s still only up to 7 lbs, 5.2 oz, so I am still worried, because they are apparently still worried, even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be. Maybe it’s because the pediatrician wants to see him again next week for a weight check, I don’t know. But since we only supplement him maybe once a day now (and then only when he seems to be eating forever in the evening), I worry that my body somehow isn’t providing for him properly, and that’s getting me down.

Because what they say about children is true – once you have them, you don’t want to see anything bad happen to them ever, and you would do absolutely anything for them. (Note to the first person who breaks Torsten’s heart: your arse has my foot’s name all over it, so you’d better run now…) So the idea that I might somehow be undernourishing him or anything that might hurt him has been making me sick with worry.

The funny thing about the whole breast business is that I’m pretty sure my current problem is oversupply – for a while he was eating forever and extremely frequently, and one day he didn’t have a bowel movement all day (he’d been a textbook outputter up to then) until this green mess came out of him that evening – a textbook sign of getting too much foremilk and not enough hindmilk, from what I’ve been able to read, that that often happens with oversupply (also, he’s um… afraid of the torrent that he’s deluged with when he starts feeding, so I think that’s a pretty good guess). And too much foremilk (low in fat, high in sugars and protein, lower in calories) and not enough hindmilk (high fat) often leads to poor weight gain.

And so I’m frustrated. Maybe we don’t even have a problem and I’m just superparanoid because I’m a first-time mom and I love my baby and I’m so ticked off with our medical care (they’ve been so little help with breastfeeding – and, IMHO, a hindrance – that I sort of wonder if the formula companies are paying them…), but I really want our little guy to be ok. And he probably is – he looks fine, the jaundice liver test they ran on him yesterday came back negative and his bilirubin levels are nowhere near treatment levels, and he is gaining weight.

But I’m still stuck in this worried mood – I admit it, I’ve cried a lot – because when we left the hospital, they sprung this worry on me and every time we have contact with the medical establishment they reinforce it.

And it’s kind of keeping me from enjoying my wonderful, sweet, adorable little boy, and I really, really resent that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t adore and enjoy him – I do – but it’s made it harder to concentrate on that and that makes me pretty mad. He’s a cool little kid.

Anyway, a better post should come soon – it’s just that this has been seriously on my mind.

Baby is well otherwise, as are we.