Being Momma G: Day 13

I had a little meltdown today.

Even though Sean and I were doing quite well all day with breast feeding and settling, I was still very nervous about next week, when Jonathan goes back to work and I'm looking after Sean on my own. Jonathan has been so supportive and wonderful, and he has been great company for me over these last couple of weeks, so I felt I was within reason to feel a bit teary and emotional just thinking about how I would cope by myself.

Jonathan reassured me that I was doing a good job and that I would be able to handle everything. Still, I felt uneasy and cried, and it took Jonathan a little while to calm me down.

Adding to my uncertainty was the fact that I was feeling an added amount of pain near / behind the C section incision. I keep forgetting that I have had major surgery, and when I'm asleep and hear Sean cry, my automatic reaction is to jump up to see what he wanted. While there hasn't been any damage on the outside, the inside felt different. I raised this issue with Jonathan, who insisted that we visit a doctor to get everything checked out, if nothing else than to put our minds at ease.

We broke confinement again to pay a visit to the doctor, and I was seen to by the lovely Dr Sharan Siva, who examined me thoroughly and asked me lots of questions. Dr Siva didn't think I had done any damage to myself, but to be on the safe side, she sent me to have an ultra sound in the afternoon.

The ultra sound was scheduled for 3pm, and with the little man asleep, I decided to try and drive myself to the appointment and leave Jonathan at home with the baby. Although I was still very sore, I got to the appointment without too many problems. The radiologist was very thorough and took his time scanning my insides. At the end of the appointment, he said that all seemed fine and I have nothing to worry about.

I arrived home to be greeted by both Jonathan and Sean, who had woken up minutes before I got home. We sat down to a feed, and the little man went to sleep for the next 4 hours.

Sean woke at 8:15pm, so I went about trying to feed him. Unfortunately, he didn't seem so interested in either breasts, so we had to give him a top up with the expressed milk. While Jonathan fed him from the bottle, I got on the pump and expressed some more for storage.

We've now just fed the little man, who gulped down 80mL of expressed breast milk like he was in a sculling competition. Seeing him drink the milk so quickly makes my heart heavy - it takes an hour to extract the milk, and to see it disappear down Sean's throat in a fraction of the time it took to get the milk into the bottle is enough to make me cry. On the bright side, at least he's getting breast milk.

We are going to break confinement again tomorrow with a planned visit to the drop in breast feeding clinic at Chatswood. I really need to know if I'm breast feeding correctly before Jonathan goes back to work, and tomorrow is my last chance to go out to a clinic with Jonathan's help.