Liezl's story - breastfeeding preterm twins

-0ctober 2022

I'm a mom of four children. My oldest is four, the second one is two and a half, and then I've got twin boys. They're nine months old. It's quite a busy household. But we're having fun through the process.

I got to know of La Leche League before I was even a mom. I was pregnant with my firstborn, and luckily for me, a friend of mine told me about the group. I went to attend some of the group sessions before the birth.My first birth turned out to be an emergency caesarean, and I hadn't planned for that at all.

I was so scared that you can't breastfeed if you have a caesarean but because of hearing stories from the La Leche League group, I knew that that was not the truth. Knowledge from the group meetings helped me with my firstborn while we were in the hospital. I was able to ask for my baby immediately and just do skin to skin and latching came automatically. I must say I feel my first breastfeeding journey was quite an easy one. I'd gotten all the information from the LLL group and had the support of everybody. That makes your mindset different when going through this journey. My firstborn breastfed until she was one. 

Then my second born was also an emergency caesarean birth. What was really great about the experience with the second child is that she was born just before COVID. That meant that we were home the whole time which made it easy to be able to exclusively breastfeed her whenever she wanted to. I breastfed her until she was a year and a half. She was still breastfeeding while I was pregnant with the twins. My body, sadly, was not happy with all these kids feeding off of me. So unfortunately, we did stop at a year and a half. Otherwise, I probably would have carried on longer.

Then came my journey with the twins; they were born at 34 weeks gestation. They were kept in hospital, one was in ICU initially and then in high care for a week. The second one was in high care for a month. They were taken to two different wards!

It's been crazy. I've been around the LLLSA group and breastfeeding is a passion for me. I try to help support as many other women as possible to have a successful breastfeeding journey. But the birth of the twins was so traumatic for me. I did not see my babies straight after birth, I was sent to the recovery room with no babies. The nurses just came and they were like, “Okay, you need to start expressing,” and I was like, “I don't know how to," because I'd never expressed or pumped breast milk before. I'd always just breastfed.

I had packed my manual silicone breast pump, the one that you kind of just attach to the breast. I thought, okay, great. I'll start getting some colostrum and then I'll see if I can get anything more. Even though I had breastfed two children and I'd been around breastfeeding groups for years, I started to doubt myself and thought maybe I had no milk because I did not go full term with the pregnancy. I didn't even know if I had any colostrum. With all that doubt, it was quite stressful. Obviously stress doesn't help the expressing process.

I was able to get in touch with some of the LLL Leaders and some of the breastfeeding mommies in the La Leche League world. And they were so helpful, helping with flanges etc. This was a whole new journey for me. 

I remember clearly I had one millilitre of colostrum in the hospital, and I walked to the ICU unit where I saw twin A, Tyler, and he was on oxygen. I said to the nurse, “this is almost nothing, it's not going to help him. I don't know what I'm doing. How do I even get this into his mouth? Should I even try?” She replied that every drop of colostrum or every drop of milk is important; that it could make a massive difference. That gave me a bit more encouragement. It helped me to go try again because the milk was not coming easily.

I was sent home after three days with no babies; they were both still in the hospital. By that stage, some LLL Leaders had explained to me how to express and shared some tips to get the milk flow let-down going, even if the babies were not with me. With all of that help, I was able to then start expressing milk more easily. My husband went and bought an electric breast pump, which helped. 

I was home for one night without a baby. The second night I went back to hospital and then slept in the hospital for a few nights with twin A, just so that the staff could see that I can breastfeed and he's latching well and that I know how to look after a baby. Tyler had a birth weight of 2kg and was in ICU on oxygen for the first two days and then in high care for another five days. After that they let me go home with him.

During all that time, the smaller twin, Tegan, was only 1.4 kilograms. He was given donated breast milk.

Every time I fed Tyler, I would express milk on the other side. At night I would wake up, feed the baby, express and then put the expressed milk in a bottle for the next day to give to the hospital. Because of COVID, Tyler wasn't allowed to go into the hospital with me again when I went to visit Tegan. Tyler would stay with dad in the car and drink some expressed breast milk.

And I would go and be with Tegan in the hospital and try to latch him. And while I latched him, I expressed milk there again for Tyler. So it was a whole upside down thing, and this continued for a whole month.

But still people were saying to me, “Are you sure you have enough milk if you have two babies, like how are you going to feed two babies?” I just stuck really close to people in the La Leche League environment and to the group Leaders and just kept on asking questions. If I wasn't sure about something, I would just ask more questions and get the answers from the right sources rather than listen to other people that don't have the specific knowledge about breastfeeding. Because even some of the doctors and nurses made me question whether I could feed two babies.

After that month, COVID rules had changed and I could take Tyler back into the hospital with me while I visited Tegan. Then I was able to latch one and feed him, put him down and then take the next one and feed him. We did this for two weeks until Tegan was finally discharged (after 26 days in high care).

When we left the hospital, the nurses asked if I'd like to take my extra breast milk home that I'd expressed. I wasn't sure how much there was, but the nurse came to me and said, you've got close to six litres of milk that's still in our kitchen! I had been taking to the hospital what I pumped out at night while Tyler was drinking. I would take in three of those glass honey jars with about 300mls of milk every morning. And obviously when I was in hospital with Tegan, I wasn't using that milk. So anyways, we just said to them, no, it's okay. They can rather just keep it for the next babies that they help because that's what someone did for me and for my baby.

So yeah, after that, they were both out. It was very interesting latching both twins at the same time and feeding them at the same time, but it has been quite helpful in getting a lot more sleep at night if you just feed them at the same time. People do think we're crazy, but I literally just latch them both on top of me and then we go to sleep. I lie on my back, and they have free access to me. They can drink whenever they want. And now that they're a bit older, they can actually move their bodies and move their heads.

I exclusively breastfed them for eight months. They are nine months old now and get little bits of pumpkin or apple that's been pureed twice a day. But funny enough, they still actually want breast milk.

One thing I've realised is that I must never say never, because as soon as I said I'm never going to have a caesarean, I'd gotten two emergency caesareans and then another third one. And then I said, no, I'll never express, I'm never giving a bottle because my gran had twins and she said bottle feed one and breastfeed the other one. So, I said, no! I'm pretty sure you can breastfeed both. But I'm never going to put a bottle in their mouths! We’ve been through a lot and learnt a lot. But it's fun now. If they're tired, I think everybody knows that they want to drink, but whenever I don't know what to do with them because they are cranky or I'm not sure what's happening, I just latch them and then they're just fine again.

My husband did ask how long am I planning on breastfeeding the boys? And because I know it's our last children, I said they can drink as long as they want. So as long as there's milk, it's available to them.

PS. Tyler breastfed for 2 years and Tegan breastfed for 2.5 years.