Not much is known about IGT, but it is essentially a lack of milk-making tissue due to one’s breasts not having fully developed during puberty, and it can only be diagnosed by excluding all other potential causes of low supply. I begged my GP to do extensive hormonal tests so I could see if I had some underlying condition, and he reluctantly obliged (I think I scared him), but all the results came back as expected for a breastfeeding woman. It was then that I joined an IGT and low milk supply support group on Facebook, and started coming to terms with the fact that I do indeed have Insufficient Glandular Tissue. I quit pumping. Overcoming my denial (I recognise some physical characteristics of IGT now), was immensely freeing and the first step towards healing, though it was of course painful knowing for sure that I would never be able to exclusively breastfeed my baby when it was something I wanted so desperately. While people had been telling me to have faith in my body, and well meaning though it was, I would actually have been wrong for doing so. I have been disabled since birth and am a real advocate of selfacceptance, but coming to terms with my faulty boobs has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and the only time I have ever truly wished for a different body. I was jealous of anyone with boobs who had any problem other than my own—as long as they could make milk. The tits were not ready. They never would be. Wading through the fog and just as I was beginning to make out various shapes, River started rejecting his bottle. This really was a cruel twist of fate, and it got to the point that I was having to practically force feed him his formula. All he wanted to do was breastfeed, and though strangely flattering, he would still be hungry afterwards. I was tormented by intrusive thoughts—when I’d see other breastfeeding mums, I’d imagine handing River over and fading away, knowing he’d be so much happier with them. It was suggested by a number of people that the reason River had become so anti-bottle was having available to him, and in a sense the obvious solution was to quit breastfeeding in the
name of getting him fed. But I had an overwhelming instinct that River wasn’t ready to stop; that whatever he got from breastfeeding was a powerful part of his little life. Plus, how could I be sure that quitting would solve the problem? If he continued to reject the bottle and my milk dried up, we’d be left with nothing. There had to be another way. I visited my local breastfeeding support group (which was a lifeline to me in the early days), and there they showed me how to use a Supplemental Nursing System.An SNS is basically a bottle of milk with a fine tube that you put next to your nipple so that while the baby breastfeeds, he gets your milk and the supplement at the same time. This device turned out to be game changing for my whole family, and the colic that had plagued him his whole life stopped dead the day I replaced bottles with the SNS at three months old. It was truly amazing, and I exclusively SNS’d for the next few months. Some of the lactation consultants at the breastfeeding support group also confirmed River had a tongue-tie, which they suspected was why he struggled so much with his bottle. (Note: in my case, there was never any question of the tongue-tie being the reason for my low milk supply as River has always been very effective at milk-removal — the type of tie he had just made bottles particularly hard.) Although the SNS had been so good to us and a vital part of our healing journey, it was hard work, and River still wouldn’t drink from any sort