help me with my supply!

So I had been primarily breast feeding but supplementing with formula, so they gained weight and I was waiting for my milk to fully come in, and it was going great and my supply was building but now I've got aan issue going on with supply.

I have a connective tissue disease, ehlers danlos syndrome. I knew the pain with my joints was going to come back after the pregnancy, I was prepared for it but honestly its gotten bad, I finally called my doc to find out if I could take my topamax and.breast feed, he said he'll research it and let me know. Anyway with the pain, Marshall has wanted me to get as much sleep as possible so hes been staying up with the twins at night and bottle formula feeding them and honestly it's just gotten easy to do rather than.pumping or bfing.

Ive still been.breast feeding and.pumping but not regularly for the last week or so and my supply has gone down. I know my pump is losing suction bit im still not pumping as much as I had been.

So my question is ... What can I do to get my supply back up???

 

Nursing is the best way of keeping and increasing your supply. If you are not pumping or nursing during the night, your supply is going to go down. Drink lots! At the end of a nursing session or pumping sessions massage your breasts. Good luck managing the pain!

 

Can you get a new pump or rent a hospital-grade one? Then you could at east pump after each BFing session during the day and bottle feed at night. I pumped after each feed for 10-15 minutes in the first weeks. It really helped. Good luck!

 

Things to do to increase supply:

Drink a LOT of water
Blessed Thistle (herb)
Fengreek (herb)
Domperidone - a digestive medication w/ side effect of causing lactation.
Eat oatmeal (no kidding, made a BIG difference for me)

and of course pump/bf as much as possible.

I am an adoptive mom so I had to find all the help I could to make it work!
if you are interested in more information, dosages, etc. then PM me.

 

I have heard many ladies here recommend a nursing marathon to build back your supply ie. Stay in bed for a couple of days with both babies and nurse, nurse, nurse. You will need support of course and will need to have everything at your fingertps, snacks, water etc - hopefully someone who has done this will come and elaborate on this more.

@ Amy (daisies) - so did you lactate? I've read about this! How interesting!

 

yes, they were each getting about 30% b-milk when they were 3 and 4 months old, decreasing to about 5% at the end (only bfing once daily, pumping once). I just stopped bfing this week, they are 7.5 months.
I think if I had had a singleton I could have done 100%.. everyone here knows the difficulties of bfing twins
I am so happy that I was able provide them some milk! It was an amazing gift to be able to nurse my children!

 

Essentially you told your body to make less and it did. Now you just need to tell it to make more and it should. So nurse, nurse, nurse and in a couple of days your babies will raise your supply.

 

Yup, this. :good:

 

This early on, you really do need to pump or nurse at night to keep your supply up. The biggest prolactin spike is typically in the middle of the night (after midnight) when breastfeeding.

I totally understand that you're trying to stay healthy, but that hardest part of breastfeeding is that supply isn't fully be established for the first 12 weeks and you need to nurse frequently to build and maintain it during this time. The good news is that you can totally build it back up with lots of nursing (nursing marathons are a good option) but the bad news is that you really do need to probably be pumping or breastfeeding at least twice overnight.

I'm so sorry that you're experiencing so much pain again now that the babies are here.