The lactation consultant

Good evening! I will post Lucy's birth story a little later but I wanted to get down in writing our little visit today from the LC.

In light of an impending frankenstorm coming up the east coast, our LC made a house call on a Sunday. She is pretty great. She confirmed a lot of what I already suspected and came up with a plan for us.

Lucy is a sleepy baby. She's been tested for jaundice multiple times. She is also still loosing weight. We have lost a full pound. So we were refered to our LC by our pediatrician for dehydration. She is always falling asleep on me when we are trying to feed her. She looks healthy. She's responsive and has a strong suck. She is not overly eager for the formula we have had to supplement her with. I've been pumping but we need to get her weight to come up. She also gets tense during feedings and will often clamp down. VERY painful!

After watching Lucy in action and poking around into Lucy's mouth she determined Lucy likely has a tongue tie. Not the kind that Logan had. Logan's frenulum was tied all the way to the tip of his tongue. It was obvious and needed immediate attention. We had a hard time finding a doctor to clip it. I guess it has recently been described medically as cosmetic. But it's not. It negativly affects breast feeding because the baby can't get the nipple all the way into the mouth. This causes rubbing (read BLEEDING) nips. It also makes the baby easily tired. It also often causes speech impediments later and simply makes doing anything with your tongue more difficult.

Now, I've watched the procedure twice before (Logan's was clipped in a two part process). It's so simple! They just give the baby a little sugar water on a syringe. Stick in two little sticks to keep the tongue out of the way and a quick snip. No bleeding, no crying, no anesthesia. I don't understand why someone wouldn't get it fixed as a baby. To get it fixed later, it's a bit more involved and a bit more painful.

There are 2 types of tongue ties, posterior and anterior. Logan's was anterior - where the frenulum is connected too far down the tongue:
This is not Logan, just  pic I found on google.
Lucy's seems to be anterior - The frenulum is in the right spot but it's tied too tightly. This is much harder for a pediatrician to detect visually. The LC only discovered its likely existance due to feeling her suck reflex. She doesn't roll her tongue, rather she just moves it like a piston. She is sending us to the expert that just fixed her own tongue tie for a confirmation. I didn't find a good picture of this kind but I did find blog upon blog describing all of Lucy and my symptoms and attribute it to the tongue tie.

So, my little ladies inability to properly latch could also cause my supply issues. And this is why I will be power pumping around the clock for the next 3 days or until whenever the storm knocks out our power. Power pumping required pumping for 5 minutes every hour. This is suppose to raise the prolactin levels in your body to get you to produce more milk. Other variations of power pumping include pumping, waiting 10 minutes and then going through the let down process again on the pump.  We will also be doing the other supplements as well: oatmeal and more milk plus tea.

I said I wasn't going to go nuts with BFing this time... but I guess I need to give it a try at least. And I am glad it helped us find Lucy's tongue tie. It's a lot more common than people think and often goes undiagnosed.