If you breastfeed and bedshare, does your back hurt?

[Turquesa]

We're set up so that DH is on the left, DS (age 18 mo) is in the middle, I'm on the right, and DD (age 3) is in a side-carred crib strapped to my side of the bed. 

By early morning, I'm engorged and DS is super hungry.  I can easily turn on my left side and nurse on my left breast.  But when it comes time for the right breast, I have to hunch over for him to reach it.  There's no room for me to pick him up and put him on my right side.  I think it's because of the hunching that my back is KILLING me.  The muscles especially ache on my left side next to my shoulder blade.  Have any of you experienced this or come up with solutions? 

[marinak1977]

I'm not sure how helpful this would be, but DS used to insist on sleeping attached to the breast early on and one thing that helped me to keep my back from falling apart was to strategically position pillows for support. For me it was my lower back that would hurt. Maybe you could tuck a pillow under your head/right shoulder while her nurses so it's supported? I also got pretty good at plopping DS on my stomach and sliding over so that we switch positions. This way we still take up the same room but have switched sides. My back is doing much better now that I use the pillow (and he doesn't stay attached all night).

[RoamingWidgeteer]

To nurse from the right breast while lying on my left side, I tilt towards ds until the nipple is at mouth level & arch the back a little. To maintain the position (and go back to sleep!), I bend the right leg and bring it forward*, and drape the right arm up over my head/pillow**. No complaints from the back, but the hips sure have something to say if I sleep like that the whole night.

Your mileage may vary - I have wide hips, big breasts and a narrow waist and this seems to work reasonably well for us.

*with knee on mattress to support hips in tilted position

**this keeps the shoulders in position

(edited for clarity)

[lovepiggie]

I always hated nursing from the 'top' breast while cosleeping... I find that my hips, and back, really ache too if I sleep on my side all night long. And I hated feeling engorged in the morning! So, I kicked my husband out of bed :D Either he sleeps on the sofa bed, so I can move around freely to nurse.. Or, I nurse half the night on one side, and then switch sides on the bed halfway through the night... DH barely wakes up, he just moves over. This helps my hips not hurt as much too.

[savithny]

I had this problem something awful, and it didn't matter which side I nursed on.

For me, if I had a baby or small child in the bed with me the entire night, I hurt the next morning, no matter what I did.    My back and ribs and hips ached, and for some reason it would also trigger my asthma and I'd have difficulty breathing (might have been the awkward breathing from the sore ribs/back?)

They say, in defense of cosleeping, that an aware, undrugged, etc parent will sense the baby in the bed and not "overlay" or smother the baby.  That means, though, that you spend the night holding half-consciously holding yourself off of the baby when the baby snuggles up next to you.  In my case, that meant not as much deep sleep and cramped muscles in the morning.

So for me, the answer was non full-time cosleeping.   We put the kids to bed in their own beds (cosleeper, basinnette, and later crib) and then moved them when/if they woke in the night.   This meant in practice that I usually got to sleep deeply for several hours on my own in any position I wanted, and spent the second half of the night cosleeping.  As long as the cosleepign stretch was less than 4-5 hours, my back was fine,  

[Peony]

Chiro. It is the only way I can function after having 1-3 co-sleeping children in my bed for 8 years now. And once they are no longer newborns, I sleep with lots of pillows supporting me. 

[penstamon]

Oh yes, my back hurt terribly in the beginning.  The only things that helped were getting a better mattress- latex, getting a tempurpedic pillow, the chiro, and constant stretching.  I tended to always sleep on one side since DS was between us so I started putting my back to him once he was a little bigger just so the other side could get stretched.  Also a co-sleeper helped with me having enough room.  The only thing that made it go away was to stop all night nursing.  Easier said than done!

[Turquesa]

Thanks for the suggestions.  We're already using up all of our pillows as it is, but I took some throw pillows from the couch and have been experimenting with them.  No luck yet, so I may just do as lovepiggie does and boot DH over to the other side!