Have you ever heard of being tongue tied? Did you think it was just a figure of speech? Well unfortunately it's not. It's a very real issue, and so is a lip tie, and sadly Hannah was born with both. I thought about posting pictures of what they look like, but they're pretty yucky so I won't. Tongue ties are actually pretty common, and are one of the most common undiagnosed reasons that women in America don't breastfeed longer than 3 months. They inhibit a baby's movement of the tongue, making breastfeeding difficult, and in some cases near impossible. Hannah definitely had one of the more severe cases. My midwife figured out she was tongue tied after only a couple minutes of watching her try to eat. The poor thing just couldn't do it. She tried and tried as hard as she could, but she just couldn't get her little tongue to do what it needed to do. So pretty quickly Donellyn took a look inside her mouth and gave me the bad news. But the bad news didn't stop there. Hannah was also born with a very severe lip tie. It was grade 4, the most severe. You know that little flap that attaches your top lip to your gum? Well, Hannah's comes all the way down and wraps around her gum, basically splitting it in two. This also causes some trouble with breast feeding, since she was unable to get her lip up and over to make a good seal. But this can also cause trouble down the road when her teeth come in. It can cause tooth erosion by trapping milk, and can also cause her to have a very large gap in her two front teeth. Thankfully there is a dentist here in town that specializes in lip and tongue ties, and who studied with the doctor who invented the procedure that she needed. When she was just 3 days old, we took her to his office for a consultation. He told us he that he would do the procedure, but he was booked right now and couldn't get us in until the next Friday. Well, I started to cry. I just couldn't help it. The last three days had been absolutely miserable. The pain for me was excruciating, to the point where I would cry every time I had to feed her. And on top of that, she would get very frustrated every time because she just couldn't get it to work. We even had a lactation consultant come and help us, but that only helped to a point. We NEEDED this procedure, and we needed it NOW. Well, thankfully, one of their patients for the next day cancelled their appointment and so we were able to go and get it done. It took all of 15 minutes, and she immediately began eating better. The rest of that day was still pretty difficult, though, as she was completely freaked out by how much her tongue was moving. That thing would stick straight up and she couldn't figure out how to get it down. Thankfully we had a hospital grade pacifier that we were able to use to help her learn how to put her tongue down to suck. Since then, she has gotten better and better at eating and her mouth is almost completely healed. A couple of days after her surgery, we were taking pictures of her and got this shot kind of by accident, but it's the best picture we have of the scar under her tongue.
