Breastfeeding a Premie

by Tanisha
(Las Vegas, NV, USA)

My daughter was born at 33 weeks gestation and I really wanted to try breastfeeding desperately even though she was in the NICU. I wasn't able to breastfeed for the first couple of days so I was given a hospital breast pump so the baby could still have breast milk. The hospital pump was huge, metal, noisy, and intimidated me greatly. I remember seeing the settings of low, medium and high so I set the pump to high thinking that I wanted to pump as much milk as possible for my nearly 4 pound daughter. I heard stories that breast pumping or feeding can be quite painful right away so I tried to grin and bear it knowing it would be a really great thing for my daughter. After pumping on high for nearly 20 minutes I couldn't take it anymore and was in tears. Thankfully a nurse walked in and saw the pain I was going through and tried to help figure out what was going wrong. At that point I realized my nipples were bleeding and I was ready to throw in the towel. The nurse then let me know that the hospital machines are very powerful and I could have put the setting on low and still produced enough milk. I was in pain at the time but I laugh now because I clearly had no clue what I was doing but everything worked out and I was able to maintain breastfeeding my daughter while she was in the hospital until she turned 1 years old. For those of you who feel that there is no hope and everything seems to be going wrong when you attempt to breastfeed, don't give up because the rewards are definitely worth struggle!