Breastfeeding After Reduction Surgery - 19 months and counting

I wrote before about my breast reduc­tion and the first year of breast­feed­ing my son, now I thought I’d give you an update on how it’s going.  I’d planned to do an 18 months and count­ing update, but life got in the way, and here we are at 19 months and still going strong in our nurs­ing relationship.

The first six months was a strug­gle, I had low sup­ply issues, drank nurs­ing tea by the gal­lon, and had to sup­ple­ment about 40% of the liq­uid he needed with for­mula.  At around 6 months, I dis­cov­ered BFAR.org (Breast­feed­ing After Reduc­tion) and started tak­ing Shatavari cap­sules (an Indian root) and Motherlove’s More Milk Spe­cial Blend, which is spe­cially blended for moth­ers with Poly­cys­tic Ovar­ian Syn­drome (PCOS), breast reduc­tion or implant surgery and for adop­tive moms.  Both of these are herbal galac­t­a­gogues (sub­stances known to increase milk pro­duc­tion).  They really helped and I was able to stop sup­ple­ment­ing with for­mula.  It was pretty smooth sail­ing for the next six months.

Just after Oliver turned a year old, I started wean­ing myself off the galac­t­a­gogues.  These herbs should not be taken while preg­nant or try­ing to con­ceive, I knew most women become fer­tile again around this time, and I wanted to start try­ing to con­ceive as soon as we could.  I knew even with a pos­si­ble reduc­tion in my sup­ply, the immune ben­e­fits would still be present in my milk, and I was hop­ing that there would be no reduc­tion in sup­ply.  Nurs­ing for a year should have helped to increase the amount of milk pro­duc­ing tis­sue in my breast.

My period returned when Oliver was 13 months old.  After wean­ing com­pletely off the galac­t­a­gogues, I did notice a reduc­tion in my milk sup­ply.  I no longer get painfully full breasts, even when I’m away from my son for a full day.  My breasts feel a lit­tle heav­ier, but that’s all.  When he drinks, I still hear him gulp­ing away, so I know my sup­ply isn’t insignif­i­cant, but I am no longer able to hand express much milk.  I used to be able to hand express quite a bit, as much, if not more, than I could pump.  I haven’t tried pump­ing at all, but I don’t think I’d get a very dif­fer­ent result.

Even with the reduc­tion in sup­ply, Oliver is still a lit­tle booby lover.  He can fill up on lunch, a glass of cow milk, then come straight over for some “mama milk” for dessert.  I’d read some­where that it’s hard­est to wean between 12 and 18 months, but I don’t see that it would be any eas­ier to wean him now, if that’s what I wanted.

His breast­feed­ing fre­quency is extremely vari­able.  If we spend the day at home, he tends to breast­feed a lot, every 2 hours or so.  But when we spend the day run­ning around, he breast­feeds much less.  I recently had a day where we spent the morn­ing at play­group and the after­noon at a friend’s and he over the whole day, he only asked for the breast once, just after we’d arrived at the play­group (I think he was feel­ing shy and needed a con­fi­dence boost).

I had some issues with night­time feed­ing.  A cou­ple months ago, his night­time fre­quency began to increase to the point that he was feed­ing every two hours at night, and occa­sion­ally used me as a human paci­fier.  I became pretty mis­er­able with this fre­quency and started try­ing to gen­tly refuse him.  He wasn’t hav­ing any of that, so my hus­band had to hold him until he fell back to sleep for sev­eral nights.  Things are much bet­ter now, with Oliver gen­er­ally falling asleep between 8 and 9pm, then sleep­ing till 7am, when he has “good morn­ing booby.”  We’re still co-sleeping, and he seems to be fine with sleep­ing next to me with­out need­ing to drink dur­ing the night.

We still breast­feed every once in a while in pub­lic, and haven’t had any prob­lems here in Ger­many with that.  In the last week I have noticed a cou­ple of peo­ple look­ing, but they didn’t say any­thing and I can’t be cer­tain they were look­ing in a neg­a­tive way (my gut feel­ing says that was the more likely rea­son though).  Oliver really doesn’t ask to breast­feed in pub­lic much any more though and is either too busy, or happy to wait till we’re home.  He does still ask to breast­feed fairly often in our English-speaking play­group, but nobody minds that at all and many of the moms are breast­feed­ing.  He never asks in our Ger­man group, where no one has breast­fed since I’ve been going.

I’ve read two books on extended breast­feed­ing that I thought were extremely help­ful, Moth­er­ing Your Nurs­ing Tod­dler and How Wean­ing Hap­pens.  Both these books are pro-extended nurs­ing and dis­cuss child-led wean­ing meth­ods.  I feel pretty strongly about extended breast­feed­ing, I think, despite the night­time trou­ble we had, that it saves my san­ity.  Oliver is a lit­tle ball of energy and there are days when the only time he sits still and when I get a chance to relax a moment is when we stop to breast­feed.  It’s like a lit­tle 30 minute win­dow of rest for me.  I’ve seen other kids of sim­i­lar tem­pera­ment who aren’t breast­fed just going and going and going, so I’m quite happy to have my lit­tle breaks.  It’s also a nice time to recon­nect.  He lays in my arms and we stare into each other’s eyes.  He points to my facial fea­tures and I name them (“That’s my nose, that’s my cheek…”).

He’s hardly ever sick (knock on wood), and colds rarely last more than a day with only a runny nose to show he even has one. But when he came down with the flu last month or when he was recov­er­ing from his surgery two months ago and wouldn’t eat or drink any­thing but breast­milk, I was glad to still be able to do some­thing for him.

If he’s feel­ing frus­trated or hyper, the breast helps him calm down.  When he’s tired, it works like magic to send him off to sleep.  I don’t know how long the rela­tion­ship will con­tinue, but the plan is now to keep going till he’s at least two years old.  I’m let­ting him take the lead in this for now, as I still love breastfeeding.

You may also be interested in reading:

• Breastfeeding After Reduction: One Year In (13)
• Breastfeeding after reduction surgery - the second time around (0)
• Thoughts on Parenting (2)
• Our Weaning Story (3)
• Cultural Differences in Parenting (15)

Tagged as: bfar, Books, Breastfeeding, galactagogues, Motherlove, Shatavari, toddler