A Milky Affair

Warning: this entry contains mumsy details that only breastfeeding mums will understand. And yeah, some details could be too much for some of you to handle.

Ever since I fell ill about a month back, I noticed that my milk supply's dwindled somewhat. It's also a combination of stress, fatigue and lack of sleep that led to this. I don't have any problems feeding Wei directly but when I'm at work, I experienced difficulty in expressing my breast milk into the bottles. The absolute worse hit me when I realised that my frozen supplies were depleted.

My initial thought was that my Medela pump or power adapter (bought in 2005) wasn't working well so I bought a second hand double pump from ebay. But I still encountered difficulties expressing even though I could still "feel" the milk in my breast and couldn't experience the "letdown".

So I did some research on what else I could do/eat to increase my milk supply. My new colleague Sherrie, a fellow BFD mum, recommended I take Fenugreek supplements. I was hesitant at first because I never liked the idea of consuming too many vitamins and supplements, particularly when I'm breastfeeding.

But after struggling to fill one bottles of milk at work (I used to easily fill two, or at least one and a half.) I caved in and bought two bottles of Fenugreek capsules from GNC and put them to the test.

Did it work? Perhaps it's a placebo effect, but there was some slight improvement. Still, I wasn't satisfied and got even more stressed over the situation.

Out of sheer desperation, I resorted to manually expressing the milk from the breast with my bare hands - and viola! Milk!

Over the past week, I've been using the double electric pump (it's kept in the office now that I've got an extra breast pump) at work and when the electric pump can't extract the milk efficiently, I use my hands.

The only drawback is that manual expression by hand can be very time-consuming and absolutely tiring.

At my first try, both hands were trembling after half-an-hour's work. But at least I can help empty the breast, which in turn prompts my body to produce more milk. Hopefully my milk supply will stabilise soon because I refuse to feed formula milk to Wei.

On a lighter note, I know this is completely irreverent, but hey! I can now imagine how a cow feels like during milking time!