Breastfeeding

Well, we've been struggling a lot. Nursing started out fine, but after the first full day and night of Aliyah wanting to stay latched on 24/7 I asked my midwife for advice. She said to get a pacifier and give that to her when she just wants to suck.The next day (after using the pacifier) she refused to nurse on one side. I have one fab. nipple and one wonky one and she was not interested in the weird one. No dice.So I call a lactation consultant. She comes over and watches me try to nurse Aliyah on the left side and gives me a nipple shield. Okay, great. Now she's nursing on that side, but she refused to get on the right side as well now without the shield. Grr. On top of that, weight was still dropping.So we started pumping. I got on herbal supplements and kept nursing and pumping. Weight kept dropping. We got formula to supplement so we were doing expressed breastmilk and formula with an SNS. Weight still kept dropping.We get her off the shield and I started waking her up every 2 hours to nurse. Weight still kept dropping. At our last weight check Aliyah was 8 lbs 8.5 oz down from her 10 lb 1 oz birth weight. So now we're on special weight gain formula, I'm still pumping and nursing and every second she's awake I'm trying to get her to eat. So fun.Anyways, keep your fingers crossed for us. The LC said she was impressed that I was still keeping with breastfeeding. I'm impressed too. It's crappy that it's so hard. I hate using stupid formula and I hate watching her weight drop. It pisses me off because my biggest regret with Ziva was not nursing her. On the plus side, I now feel a lot less guilty about not nursing Ziva because I now know that the challenges were not because I slacked off, but we're more likely all the stuff I'm dealing with in regarts to milk production, my reduction surgery and the like. I can at least stop beating myself up over it.Bluh. There it is.