u/sparkleptera

First two days were with the medela symphony and the colostrum collector, the 4th day we switched to the baby buddha I brought from home and hand expressed until milk was flowing, then applied the pump on expression mode with hands on pumping and worked up to level 4 across the whole day. We also hand expressed afterward. My milk is thinning out enough that I am now able to hand express myself though I absolutley could not in the beginning. It feels really good to be able to produce enough to meet my 34 week nicu baby's feeding needs so quickly. It has been very stressful and emotional but I am glad I can make this one thing happen for my baby.

My baby is a 34 weeker and his suck is basically non existent at this time. He is to be tube fed donor milk until his suck is effective and suck swallow breathe reflex coordinates. I have been extremely sick wirh HG my entire pregnancy and then got covid a month ago and just never really recovered. I knew somehow deep down something like this was going to happen and did a lot of research on prematurity and breastfeeding. I also did an orientation in lactation consulting before and had a good amount of experience with pumping and hand expression.

My baby was born via planned Cesarean and I did not enter natural labor or have any contractions. 2 days before the planned delivery my husband and I watched hand expression videos together and we both attempted to get started hand expressing. We immediatley noticed he could get milk started and was using a lot of force but was very effective.

We had a single Braxton Hicks contraction and decided to wait for delivery to do any more hand expression and didn't try pumping.

1 hour after birth I was unable to see my baby and had not done skin to skin and had missed the golden hour. However we hand expressed until the milk started flowing, went on the initiate mode of the medela double electric pump until it shut off and then hand expressed until both breasts were soft. We just finished our third session and are getting great results, almost nothing actually comes out during pumping at this time however during hand expression we get enough for a tiny syringe and the nicu is very happy with our progress! For our baby who is on TPN this is more than enough and we are thrilled.