Tongue Tied Much?!

Until a couple of days ago, I had never even heard of a medical condition known in the vernacular as being tongue tied or lip tied.  But I had a very fun and enlightening conversation with my cousin's wife who has a baby boy, Blake, who is about 2 weeks older than Brighton.  She was telling me about having a lot of difficulty with nursing due to extreme pain, and that she ended up finding out that her son with both tongue and lip tied, as is his daddy.  In case you were in the dark on this one as I was, it is when that little thingy at the top of your mouth between your gums and your upper lip is connected too far down near your two front teeth.  Or in the case of being tongue tied, when the similar thingy beneath your tongue is incorrectly attached.  Kind of hard to explain...so perhaps a couple of pictures will help illuminate what exactly these "thingys" are. :)

Class II (closest to normal but still problematic)

what mine looks like

Class III 

what Lorien's looks like

Class IV (most severe)

what Brighton's looks like

Needless to say, these incorrectly attached "thingys", aka in the medical world as frenum, are incorrectly attached, it can cause all kinds of problems with breastfeeding, and then later on down the line with speech and placement of teeth, particularly the two front teeth.  And, yet, no one seems to ever talk about this!  Not lactation consultants, not pediatricians, not dentists.  Even though the fix to this problem is so quick and simple that a small baby doesn't even need any general anestesia when having them clipped. WHAT?!

So of course, this is wildly ridiculous.  But why, you may wonder, why does Christie care so personally about this topic that she feels the need to blog about it?!  Well, if you recall, I learned this from my cousin's wife, about her son and her husband.  And these traits are apparently genetic.  Doesn't take much to make the connection, though it did take my genius self 3 days to make it!  I too am tongue and lip tied, and so are both of my girls!  The things I don't know about myself and my children could apparently fill a book.

The thought to check into this for my family occurred to me because my husband Brian has a gap between his two front teeth, which is a classic sign of being lip tied.  My oldest daughter, Lorien, also has this huge gap and very crooked two front teeth.  So I checked my husband a couple of days ago, but he doesn't have this problem and so I forgot about it.  Then, this afternoon as I was putting Lorien down for her nap, I suddenly remembered and much to my shock, found that her lip connector thingy is almost all the way down to where her teeth start to grow from her gums!

My sweet girl had such a hard time learning to nurse, took no less than 45 min. to nurse every time she took to the breast, could never drain off all my milk even for all that time, and had a fair amount of difficulty gaining weight.  Lactation consultants confirmed that her latch was good, and both the pediatrician and my ob/gyn said that my milk supply was great, so I was reassured that I shouldn't worry or be concerned.  And frankly, no one, including myself, seemed all that taken aback by how painful it was, or I would get lumps in my breasts from time to time.  I mean, I knew that breastfeeding isn't supposed to be easy, so I just thought it came with the territory I guess.

This knowledge makes my heart so sad.  Could Lorien has nursed easily and received much more milk, much more quickly for the 14 months she nursed?  Why yes.  I do believe she could have.  Could she be above the 25 percentile for her weight?  Likely so!  Could her teeth have grown in straight?  Quite likely.

As soon as she went down for her nap, I went to get up Brighton to nurse.  She has had so many less problems with nursing, that it just started to seem to make sense that most of Lorien's nursing/weight gain problems had probably come from being lip and tongue tied even more than from being a preemie.  I was so surprised I started texting my cousin, Cindy, about this while I was nursing Brighton.  Then, all of a sudden, a lightbulb went off, and I checked Brighton's mouth.  And lo, and behold!  Her's is the same way too!

My cousin must think I'm a real genius, because she was getting the real time texts...Oh my gosh!  Brighton has it too!  Wait!  Are you kidding me?  I have it!

While Brighton is much bigger and healthier, and doesn't have nearly as much difficulty with nursing as Lorien did, I still have noticed a few peculiarities with the way she nurses.  Sometimes she seems to struggle to establish a good latch.  And other times, rather than trying to latch on, she will just suck in as hard as she can to get my nipple in her mouth.  This concerns me for when she gets teeth, so I asked her pediatrician about it, and he didn't know what to make of it and suggested that she might outgrow it as she gets older.  So far, that hasn't happened.  And she struggles to get a good latch, especially when she is tired...which would be mostly in the evenings.  The biggest side effect she has shown so far is not sleeping well at night.  I have tried everything I know to figure out why in the world this girl wants to eat all night long, and have managed to cut her back quite a bit, but she still consistently wakes up hungry.  And I think I now know why.

I don't know any of the details about what it will take to get her to someone who can help correct this problem for her, but I sure don't want this to go on and on.  And I don't know yet if it is even worthwhile to try and correct it for Lorien now that she is no longer nursing.  I will have to find out, and post info as I learn it if anyone is interested.

Mostly, I'm just shocked that this problem exists, is so prevalent, and is so easy to fix.  And yet, I repeat, NO ONE KNOWS about it!