I spent a considerable amount of my first pregnancy reading about breastfeeding. I talked to older friends who had breastfed their babies and I took my 38 week bump to a couple of breastfeeding support classes. I thought I’d got it sussed – home birth and then feed on demand. However, things didn’t work out as planned. When my contractions started, 9 days after my due date, my blood pressure shot through the roof and at 10 am the midwife instructed my husband to take me into hospital, where my waters broke. After 12 hours on an oxytocin drip we were only up to 2 cm dilated and I begrudgingly opted for an epidural believing it might ‘save’ me from a c-section, which I wanted to avoid that at all costs, as in my head a c-section meant bad for breastfeeding. By 2am the epidural wasn’t working and I was taken in for an emergency caesarian. Once we were out of the operating theatre I tried feeding her some colostrum, which seemed to work fine. By the next morning we were both exhausted and recovering from the drugs, and my tiny baby girl was too sleepy to feed and ended up jaundiced, on a UV bed and being fed formula through a naso-gastric tube. I was devastated.
We were 
moved to a side room for my sanity. I pumped whilst she was being fed to keep my supply up. I put her to the breast whilst the formula was being injected down the tube to associate the feeling of eating with suckling. I kept her to my breast as much as I could in between being told to keep her on the UV bed, and I insisted she was fed from a cup not a bottle. After a week we were allowed home with the proviso that we fed her with top-up formula, as my milk still hadn’t properly ‘come in’. Still bloody minded I headed down to our local breastfeeding support group as soon as I could waddle safely, I got the breastfeeding councillor to come around to the house at least twice, and I demanded assistance from the midwife and the health visitor. I pumped, I borrowed an electric pump, I took domperidone, and I pumped some more. Finally we got to a stage where my little one was gaining weight; having two small bottles of formula each day and breastfeeding the rest of the time. It was a compromise everyone was happy with.
The breastfeeding support group did so much for me that I felt I had to give something back to society, so while I was pregnant with my second baby I took theNHS funded peer support worker training course. There were a few instances where I had a lightbulb moment about my first birth experience. There were so many things I had no idea about despite all of my reading and asking; like the importance of skin to skin, how breastfeeding works from a biological point of view, the way a newborn is programmed with a reflex action to find the nipple and suckle. It made me more determined to spread the word and gave me the idea of writing a course for mums to be. I don’t have a huge amount of time for volunteering but mine is the name that gets passed through to my friends and family if anyone needs help with feeding. I also help out with a local online support group because sometimes you need somewhere to ask questions, find information or just vent your frustrations at 4am.
Because of my previous c-section I was given the option of a planned c-section or to hold out and hope for a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarian). I was still convinced that caesarians are all bad so I opted for the VBAC, right up until half an hour before my planned caesarian, 14 days after my due date, when the registrar examined me and confirmed there was absolutely no sign of dilation. After the peer support training this time I was prepared – I requested the surgical sheet be placed well below my breasts, I requested immediate skin to skin, and when it came down to it, my clever little girl even managed to pull herself to my nipple. She was feeding within a minute of caesarian birth. She continued to be exlusively breast fed for six months and didn’t stop until she was almost two years old.
