Giving up on direct breastfeeding

I have an 8 weeks old baby who was born at 38 weeks. I delivered vaginally and without an epidural, and my milk came in very quickly and in good supply.

A few things happened in the early weeks:

• my son was diagnosed with a mild tongue tie
• had jaundice as soon as he was born requiring 36 hours of phototherapy, followed by two re-admissions over the next 3 weeks for the jaundice for 24 hours and another 72 hours respectively
• he was a sleepy feeder (possibly due to jaundice)

The second hospital re-admission for phototherapy in Week 3 also occurred for weight loss (he had regained birth weight but it started to drop again and jaundice levels kept fluctuating), and the care team at the hospital was worried about his weight loss, as a result of which they encouraged him to formula feed for the 72 hours that he was re-admitted. We hadn’t introduced a bottle until week 3 when we had to formula feed him.

Now at week 7-8, my son’s weight is stable as we have been bottle feeding him EBM mostly, with 1 formula top up a day. I would latch him 1-2 times a day from week 4-7 so that he didn’t “forget” how to breastfeed.

Fastforward to the past few days and we are trying to get him back to drinking mostly from the breast except for night bottle feeds with EBM, and he is just not having it.

Sometimes, he will latch on and drink the let down but struggle with drinking the hind milk and give up, crying for a bottle top up. This is more likely to be the case on the right side over the left where my nipple is a bit more pointy (left nipple is slightly flatter). He has successfully latched both sides deeply in the past but now fusses on the right before eventually getting on. On the left, he just shallow latches and then cries out loud.

I fear he might have developed a bottle preference and after seeing several lactation consultants, we finally met one yesterday in front of whom we had somewhat of a normal latching experience followed by a tube feeding which went very successfully.

Today at home, however, my son’s weight fussed at the breast and vomited the second time after he tube fed.

I feel heartbroken to watch him struggle at the boob / have to be tube fed and I have been crying about breast feeding for the past 3 weeks. I think at this point, everytime I hold him or do skin to skin with him (we do so several times a week), I go in with this silent hope that he will latch and drink, and my anticipation of that has made it very stressful for both of us to spend time with each other.

I have been pumping round the clock to maintain my milk supply and it is still good but I think I finally need to call it quits on direct latching and hoping that he drinks from the breast. We have not left home other than for hospital or LC visits in 8 weeks and it’s taking a toll on us both. Every interaction between us feels feeding motivated, and I obsess over whether he is transferring milk on the rare occasions that he does successfully latch.

I am not sure if anyone else has been in this position. I am thinking I just switch to exclusively pumping (I have mixed emotions about feeling like a factory, tethered to my pump), and seek help for potential PPD. In the meanwhile, I don’t know how to rebuild my interactions with my son to not be feeding focused.

Would appreciate anyone’s insights on this. I am heartbroken and sad that I obsessed over this in hopes of it working out when from the start I should have clearly just prioritized feeding in general over just feeding from the breast.