I felt great, for the most part, about transitioning her to formula. I did miss nursing. A lot. But by this time, she would no longer latch...she had taken to the bottle and wasn't going to settle for anything slower.
I noticed almost right away that sunflower oil was a top ingredient in her formula. But, as my doc said, I wasn't the one who would be ingesting it. And the amount was probably small in there so even if I came in contact with it, it shouldn't hurt. (BUT! Did you know oils such as palm, safflower, coconut, sunflower etc are in there for the DHA and fatty acid benefits so it's NOT that small of an amount). At any rate, I left it at that and disregarded the issue.
But as time went on, I was feeling more and more tired. Exhausted. Nauseated regularly. Stomach upset. Just blah. Had to take a a day or two off work. I wasn't feeling better ever. It was a rough start to the new school year.
At one point, I had a thought.....what if it's her formula bothering me. At first, my doc kind of shunned this. No way was her formula causing this. But I was convinced, call it intuition, that it was making me sick.
Now, at this point, I had all but weaned. I was pumping an once every other day. Sometimes I would get two onces. I was pumping less and less. I started doing research on re-lactation. Before I knew it, I was renting a hospital grade pump and taking supplements. And doing a lot of crying. I didn't know what to do in the meantime to feed Avery. We ended up finding out that similac was ok, but then she wouldn't really take it without a fight. I was so stressed and was barely pumping a half an ounce a day.
The Bronson Milk bank stepped in to help. Avery was born at Bronson Hospital so they were more than willing. They generously gave, and continued to give, donor milk to us, no cost. This has been a great blessing to us. And best of all, within a few days of stopping that formula, I started to feel back to normal again. Some say maybe I felt bad because I was weaning but my doc wasn't convinced that was it. I know deep down that it was from contacting the formula.
Even if it was already prepared, which is mostly was, because Dan would mix up a batch for the day....I would still touch it. Either from a leaking bottle or Avery's leaky mouth. :) Or her spit up. All of it seems trivial. But I can't even come in contact with lotion that has sunflower oil in it. Or a body spray. Nothing. Luckily I don't go into anaphylactic shock. But my doc has often talked to me about keeping an epi-pen on hand because you never know when the body will turn on you.
My re-lactation efforts are going slowly but surely. I am getting between half an ounce and an ounce more each day to the total. Yesterday, I hit 7oz. In one day. I have something called domperidone to thank for that. To the Twitter friends and a lactation consultant who told me about it?? Thank you. I will write another post on that another time, I'm sure. But if you landed here because you aren't sure the stuff works? It so does.
They say it can take a month for re-lactation to really WORK. So I hope that at the end of this month, I will be pumping at least half to 75% of Avery's needs. And while this isn't the path I originally wanted to take?? I'm ok with this. Really.
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