No matter what we do, our newborn falls asleep instantly breastfeeding
Hello there,
First time father here. I want to consult the good people here.
TL;DR: We have tried anything we can think of, anything we found online, and what our nurses, our LC and our doctos told us. But our 28 days old just keeps falling asleep immediately on breasts. My wife is very emotional and stressed. Any recommendations?
Below, I am listing everything we have tried and summarizing what our story has been since birth.
So our girl was born on March 13th, shortly after birth, the nurses visiting our hospital room tried to breastfeed our baby but told us that mother's nipples were hard to latch onto. So they recommended us silicone nipple shields for baby and we've been using it ever since day 1 because baby doesn't suck on the bare nipples without those. Later on we found out from our LC and Doctor that the silicones were not really necessary and the nipples were completely fine. Anyways...
So even with the silicone nipples, the baby has been sleeping on the nipples since day 1. The behaviour is: The baby is fully awake, cries out of hunger, tries to latch on to the nipples, shakes/bumps her head a few times, latches on, closes eyes and sucks a few times and then falls asleep. With our efforts, we MAY get her to wake up and suck a few times more but that stops working after a few times and she is completely asleep almost immediately again. This is still ongoing to this day.
What we have tried;
-Skin-to-skin feeding
-Pinching her foot
-Tickling her
-Playing with her hands/feet
-Shaking her head
-Holding her and waking her up
-Laying her on her flat so she cries or wakes up
-Dripping some formula or pre-pumped milk inside her mouth or inside the silicone nipple
-Squeezing the breasts from each side
-Breastfeeding while standing up
-All sorts of positions (Normal, football, laying down, sideways, standing straight, and more)
-Dripping some water on her head/body
-Moving her chin to imitate the sucking motion
All of the above work only for a few sucks (2-3 seconds) or don't work at all. Then she falls asleep again. Each sleep on the breasts gets harder and harder to wake up from.
This has been going on since day 1. With the recommendations from nurses, we started to feed her formula with syringe. First with 1ML and then moved on to 5ML. Doctors said it was too early for bottle and she would reject nipple. So we kept using the 5ML syringe. After every breasfeed, we were giving her 10-30 ML of formula.
However, on day 2 and day 3, the doctors said that "She wouldn't sleep if she was hungry". We naively believed that and she ended up getting jaundice. She was born 3,890 KG and was down to 3,300 KG only after a few days. By day 7, she was 3,400 KG and by day 15th, she was about 3,590 KG but jaundice was all gone. All this time, we breastfed her 8 times a day and about 45-50 minutes per feeding.
She wasn't getting enough weight so we went to doctor again. Doctor said we could use bottle and that's when we started to get very strict. For 5 days, we fed her 30-60ML after every breasfeed with formula, most of the times until she puked. And we were able to get her to 4,050 KG by day 25.
Thankfully, all of her checks are fine and she is very healthy. But it is mostly due to formula support. I'm completely fine with pumping and supporting with formula but all these issues have taken their toll on my wife. She's very emotional and prone to panicking. She doesn't want to lose her milk and wants to try everything we can.
A few more details;
My wife is able to pump about 80-90 MK every 4 hours. We are not sure if this is normal.
We have been using hands free electronic pumps
Baby is completely fine and relatively fast with drinking from a bottle. She drinks about 90 ML in 20 minutes.
We have been pumping after most breastfeeding sessions.
Any recommendations anyone can give us? Thank you all in advance!