One of the difficult things of my new motherhood has been trying to get this whole fabled breastfeeding down. It turns out it’s a lot more complicated than anyone would have you believe. It’s dependent on the mother, her breastmilk production and her patience/skills getting the kid to feed, as well as dependent on the child and their ability to suck properly, be awake and stay interested.

There are a lot of things that possibly didn’t go right with my breastfeeding. It’s too complex to tease out what went awry first and when. At any rate, I’ve gone to a lactation consultant (using hospital grade breast pump, using various supplementing tools), followed the recommendations of the pediatrician to keep the kid fed (he’s on a supplement of formula), and now I’m going to a naturopath who has prescribed me domperidone, which is not FDA approved (though approved in Canada, and available there), and isn’t even for lactation, but for Crohn’s disease with the side effect of increasing lactation. In America, you can be prescribed Reglan (also for digestive issues) off-label for lactation, but it has a host of nasty side-effects, including tardive dyskinesia and increased incidence of depression (which is not good if you’re already at risk for post-partum depression!)

I was instructed to take my prescription to a specific compounding pharmacy, which was a bit out of the way for me. I was told not to say anything, not to talk about it, just to hand over the slip of paper. I was also told that other mom’s had said that this pharmacy was good – and that the quality of the substance beat what they got in Canada. It makes me wonder what other kind of not-exactly-legal-yet-legal substances I could get from this pharmacy.

I titled this Dom Parignon just because the name of the drug sounds like the champagne. It’s not like I haven’t been recommended a host of things to increase lacation. The list, so far:

Avocado
Oatmeal
Almonds
Goat’s Rue
Fenugreek
Guinness
whisky
domperidone
Reglan
meditation/looking at my child’s picture

Seriously.

It’s quite an adventure so far. Now, hand me some bourbon.