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Bottle challenge 🍼

Today (30/4/18) we are very proud of Mireya she has had her first full bottle in 4 months. You may think this is a silly thing to be proud of but bottle feeding is one of the most challenging parts for Mireya  and people don’t realise how hard it is to get them to suck, swallow and breath all at the same time for a term baby it just comes naturally but the upset and struggle we have had is upsetting to watch your baby not been able to coordinate properly. 
To leave the neonatal unit in January Mireya had to be full bottle fed she struggled with this a lot and was taking 20-30ml max and this was taking over a hour to fed her. The nurses suggested to have speech and language therapist come to see her to try get her to take more. They observed her for over a hour feed and suggested she needed part bottle, part tube feed but at the time Doncaster hospital wouldn’t allow babies to go home tube fed. So we come home with the struggle of 30ml every hour n half. 
20 days after leaving the hospital we rushed her in to Leeds hospital as her body was working to hard and this is when we discovered the heart failure. When the consultant come he said she should have always been tube fed as having a bottle works her heart to much and she gets exhausted from bottle feeding. So from that day she has been tube fed till a week ago the dietician rang and said we are now aloud to try giving Mireya one full bottle a day to get the suck, swallow & breath motion back for after her operation so she can fed normal again. This has been so upsetting for us all cause as soon as we put the teat to Mireya’s lips she arched her back, screamed, cried and didn’t stop until we left the teat away from her. We tried her twice a day and each time she was taking no more than 5ml. 
It was awful to see her so upset over something she should enjoy. 
I did a lot of research online about bottle aversion and I read one story very similar to ours and for one day only she didn’t tube fed her son and let her baby just be hungry and after 3hours the baby fed from a bottle. So on Thursday I tried it as a last resort before speaking to the dietician she cried screamed but after only 1 hour over her fed time she took 20ml over 40mins so the next time she took 25ml but then for the rest of the day she just took 20ml it was hard but at the last feed of the day she took 40ml which was brilliant without any cries screaming. 
The last 2 days I’ve tried her on every other feed with a bottle and we have been getting 30-40ml no problem over a hour. Then this morning she took 50ml in 30minutes we couldn’t believe it. This for Mireya is a big step forward we can’t give her more than more full bottle a day as we don’t want her working to hard.

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