From: kim@m44.unm.edu
Subject: Re: breastfeeding and nipple rings
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 20:36:36 GMT
Organization: UNM Cancer Center, Albuquerque, NM
Reply-To: kim@m44.unm.edu

In article <T2uJoB1w164w@seaspray.welly.gen.nz>, kerry@seaspray.welly.gen.nz (Kerry Dalley) writes:
>> 
>> After all the pain I've suffered in nursing, here's a complicating 
>> factor I'm grateful not to have! (The pain is *finally* getting better--

My wife went to a professional lactation consultant at our hospital shortly
after our daughter was born.  She suffered intense pain during nursing, and the
consultant told us that there should not be that much pain on nursing, as long
as the baby is latched on correctly and is nursing normally.  With some
assistance and baby training with an orthodontic nipple on a bottle, the pain
was relieved greatly.  It is very difficult to find someone who really knows
about the many variations in nursing problems.  If you cannot find a real
lactation consultant, you might try calling around to other hospitals, even in
other states, to get a referral.


>> I don't know what I would have done without the Medela pump to give me 
>> a break. So now I'm suffering from a pump-induced excess supply. What 
>> do you do about that? To taper off the supply, you have to suffer with 
>> engorgement. This is just like pregnancy--one problem becomes bearable 
>> just as another, rises to take its place! Fortunately the following 
>> problem is never as bad as the preceding one. And it is worth it.
>
>Just a thought, Paula....Oversupply is often helped by nursing one-sided for 
>a few days....At each feed, only give one breast, and let the baby really 
>empty it.....If it needs a little more, offer the other....but that isn't 
>usually necessary for women with too much milk.
>
>One-sided nursing can settle down oversupply very quickly....the reduced 
>stimulation lessens the flow, and the baby tends to get a btter mix of fore 
>and hind milk at each feed.....
> 

More about our nursing experience. . . 

To you who are blessed with an oversupply ("supermomcows" take note as well):
Our daughter has a great number of food intolerances, including an extreme
sensativity to components of all formulas.  She was only able to subsist on the
real McCoy . . everything else gave her rashes, diarrhea, insomnia, and
irritability.  It was my wife's ambition to totally breastfeed her from the
beginning, but she mysteriously lost a great deal of weight.  We were told that
any woman who can produce any milk can produce enough for a child.  (We often
thought about the dead mother in Mexico whose breasts fed her live baby for
three days until rescue workers got to them under a collapsed hospital.).  This
was not true.  My wife is physically unable to produe more than about an ounce
of milk in a day  our baby was literally starving in the first four weeks of
life because we believed that advice.

The combination of a baby who cannot live on anything but mother's milk and a
mother who cannot produce enough milk is very difficult.  Fortunately (and
here's the pitch) there are a few milk banks in this country where mothers milk
is collected and stored, frozen, for these cases.  The milk is collected
entirely from volunteer mothers, screened for disease organisms, pasteurized,
and stored for shipment.  The non-profit milk bank at the Womens and Childrens
hospital in Denver has to charge $2.00 per ounce to defray part of the cost of
this processing.  We gladly pay this money, because it has meant the difference
between life and death for our child.

I urge you, who have sufficient milk and time, to consider becoming a volunteer
milk donor to the milk bank nearest you.  I cannot say enough to express my 
gratitude to those mothers who have fed our child.  Thank you.

Daniel Kim (and Barbara and Rachel)
KIM@FLOVAX.LANL.GOV