Tongue Clipping update - long and gory!

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the well wishes and prayers - it has been a crazy couple of days! This is going to be long...

Sunday was the Jewish holiday of Purim which is basically a big party so was a crazy day. On Sunday night there was a big party at the synogogue and I was talking to the Rabbi's wife, and decided to put a letter in the Iggeros for the Rebbe. I don't do this very often, but there have been times when doing it has given me amazing answers - this was one of those times. The letter read "things you do for your children when they are very small will have a great impact on them when they are older" I chose to hear that positively and I felt good about the decision to go to LI.

(For those that are not Lubavitch, or not familiar with this custom - basically all our rebbe's letters are published in a series of books (called the Iggeros). They are not by subject or anything like that, nor are they really indexed, I believe they are in chronological order. Basically you write a letter to the rebbe , choose a book at random, open it to a random page and put your letter in. Then read the letters on that page to get the answer. Some people beleive that the answer is direct from the rebbe to them. I am more of the belief that there is Divine Providence that leads me to the letter, written to someone else, that G-d wants me to see)

We left at about 5:30 AM, figuring I would be going through some larger cities during rush hour but it wasn't that bad at all. We did stop a couple of times to feed the baby, etc.. and got to the Rebbe's Ohel (grave) at about 9:15. We did most of our morning prayers there, then wrote letters to the rebbe to read at his grave. It was a bit chilly outside -colder than I was expecting - and the girls were a bit antsy from being cooped up for so long - so we didn't stay at the grave that long. Basically read our letters and said a few Psalms and then went back inside and were back on the road by 10AM.

Walked in Dr. Coryllos's office at 10:30 for an 11:00 appt, but I wanted time to pump before hand anyway. I have a Pump in Style that I brought with me as it is lighter than the hospital one I rented. But it is also pretty old (I got it when I had my 7yo) but it was working fine a few weeks ago before I got the rental. But I have never been a great pumper and have always needed the highest suction available. I guess the power on my hospital pump is a lot higher and my body got used to it. I put the PIS at full power and could barely feel it. I pumped for 5 minutes and got nothing out- not a drop. By then it had been about 5 hours since I had pumped and I was farely well engorged and knew it would be a long day before I would be able to get home by which time I would be in major pain -never mind the damage it would do to my supply! So very unhappy about that. I did pump about 13 oz when I got home last night - and had a hard time driving home since I couldn't get my arms around my breasts! LOL But subsequent pumps have been lower than I had been getting, so I am going to try to pump a lot today and boost it up again. UGH!

Anyway..Dr. Coryllos then arrived and we did the family history speil, and as we finished that, another MDC Jewish mama and her DS came to be with us. It was such a relief to see them. I am generally not a needy person, and hate that part of me. But yesterday, I really needed her and I am so glad she came! Dr. C talked to us both for a while, showed us a big model mouth and then we agreed to clip L's tongue. She also wanted to clip the frenulum on his upper lip, since he had been having problems flanging it as well. So we swaddled him up and did both. Nicole held his head and I held his body down, while she put some ambusol on the spots to numb them a bit and then clipped then. I then held gauze on the spots for what seemed like forever to try and stop the bleeding. He bled a lot, and then a lot more. I was really getting worried about him, there was blood everywhere. It looked like there had been a gun fight or something. It finally abated, and I cleaned him up and changed his clothes, gave him some tylenol and he looked much better. I tried to nurse him there but he wasn't having it. I did however notice that his tongue was moving up to the roof of his mouth now and is a TON better than it was. I gave him a bottle, and his upper lip flanged better around it and he also got his mouth down a lot lower on the nipple than before.

We left there about 1PM and went to lunch at a Kosher restaurant around the corner and that was a nice treat. And then headed home at around 2PM. DS woke up at around 4, so we pulled over to feed him, and it was just about time for him to get some more tylenol anyway. So, I gave him the tylenol first and then the bottle, and the fluid re-opened the cut and he began to bleed again. Fortunately I had some dry cloth wipes in my diaper bag, and I used some of those on him, but he was just soaking them. Finally I decided I just needed to get him home as quickly as possible. He didn't have much to eat- only about an oz -but was bleeding too much to take more, but that at least had slowed down to a dribble. So I drove the second half of the trip home with him bleeding the whole way, and dozing in and out in between fretting. It was NOT a fun trip.

We got home at about 6:30 and the first thing my DH sees is the baby covered in blood - his face, clothes, carseat all covered in blood. Dh wants to bring him to the ER, but I said I wanted to clean him up first and see how much he was really bleeding. By the time I was done, I realized that he really wasn't bleeding at all anymore. B"H. And I decided that we had to take the risk of reopening the cut to feed him. Fortunately it did not reopen again.

While we were feeding him, my MW called to see how it went and I told her and she offered to bring him over some oral Vit. K, since he hadn't had any at the birth. I agreed, even though he wasn't bleeding then, I didn't want it to re-open. I also started taking the Alfalfa pills I was taking prenatally to hopefully boost his Vit K a bit more as well.

Fortunately, he hasn't started bleeding again since then, unfortunately he still has not latched on yet. But Dr. C did say he would probably be very sore today. He has been waking up about every 4 hours like clockwork so we have been giving him tylenol then and arnica and I did sleep skin to skin with him all night, and his tongue is MUCH better, so hopefully as his mouth starts to feel better he will get back on.

So that is the long full story with probably way TMI!