Note: The Department of Health recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months. If you would like help in coping with difficulties like these, please see our Support Links.

I was a firm believer in breastfeeding being the best option for babies and mums until I became a mother myself. I read the books, took a pre-natal breastfeeding class and signed up to the NCT in preparation for the birth.

My daughter fed almost constantly for the first three days (part of which I put down to her need for the sucking reflex to release endorphins to relieve her probable headache from being ventouse and forceps delivered). Even though she was latched on properly (and I had had this verified by a breastfeeding trainer in the hospital) I was in agony by the third day. I could hardly bear to put her to my breast and was praying for her to just go to sleep and give me a chance to rest. At 3am on the third night I felt a searing pain in my right breast while my daughter was feeding and just had to take her away - to my horror her little mouth was full of blood and my nipple was bleeding badly and had a blood clot on it. I broke down exhausted and terrified while a midwife took my baby away to give her some formula. I spent the rest of the night and most of the next day crying with guilt at 'letting my baby down' so badly.

I was told not to put her to the breast for 24 hours and to let the air at my breasts to heal them (my other nipple was very sore as well). I had to feed my baby with formula from a plastic cup and cried along with my frustrated baby every time I did it. I was told that I should have been putting lanolin cream on my nipples after every feed (something which I had never been told in classes). I had previously only been told to rub colostrum onto my nipples. The lanolin (Lansinoh worked best) helped my nipples to heal but they took a few days. By now my baby's mouth was looking sore from the plastic cup and she was spilling more formula than she was taking in so I gave her a bottle when I got home because I couldn't stand to see her so upset and frustrated. I had to spend 5 days in hospital in total because of this feeding problem and I got no sleep there so was exhausted when I finally got home, where my mother and husband were a great support.

By hand-expressing I could only manage to get a few drops out of my right breast, so I started to use a hand-pump and tried putting my baby back to the breast using nipple shields (something much frowned upon in my ante-natal classes and by a lot of midwives but they do cut down on the pain). When my nipples had healed properly there was no more pain at all when I fed and I no longer needed the nipple shields. However, there was more disappointment for me. My milk only came in in one breast - the other breast had just dried up. My baby would still latch on but it was obvious to me that she wasn't getting enough from me anymore as she had got used to the formula feeding.

Over the next few weeks I continued to try to put her to the breast but she gradually got more and more upset when I did this as she was getting her food quicker and easier from the bottle. I also continued to express using the hand-pump but could only produce half the volume that she was used to getting in her formula feeds. I still only had milk in one breast. I used the expressed milk to start each feed and topped her up with formula. Trying to feed her this way was more exhausting as it was like having two babies (one breastfed and one formula-fed). Finally after 4 weeks I stopped trying to breastfeed and allowed my milk to dry up.

I felt like such a failure and cried many times over this. I was ashamed to feed my baby in front of visitors or in public because I thought people would judge me for not breastfeeding. Every time I had to feed my daughter in front of someone new I would explain why I wasn't breastfeeding - I didn't even notice that people didn't seem bothered but were more interested in what a lovely little baby I had.

Then one day my health visitor told me that she had concerns that I was getting postnatal depression and that scared me. She said that I needed to focus on how well my baby was doing and that I needed to rest and recover my strength or I could end up on anti-depressants. I didn't want that so I started to talk about my feelings to friends and family. When my friends started to tell me about the difficulties they had experienced and how many of them had given up breastfeeding relatively early, I started to accept that I wasn't a failure and I wasn't alone. I began to get better and with a beautiful baby girl growing healthier and stronger every day, I had little to beat myself up over.

My daughter is almost 10 weeks old now and has been sleeping through the night since she was 6 weeks old. She is alert, healthy and has a lovely, sunny personality. I am not depressed and am enjoying being her mother. I accept that being formula fed isn't having a bad effect on her at all. Yesterday I fed her in public for the first time (in John Lewis Dept Store) with a bottle and didn't care what anyone thought. And did the passers-by have a go at me for not breastfeeding? Of course they didn't. One old lady complimented me on my cute baby and another mother asked me about the Dr Brown's bottle I was using to feed her - hardly a witch-hunt!

Mags