Tongue Tied

A couple weeks ago my mom noticed that Fredrik never sticks his tongue out. I remembered reading in a breast feeding book that tongue tie can be a problem with nursing, but I knew it was rare so I didn't think twice about it for a couple days. I mentioned it to Peter who typed "tongue tied baby" into Google (the parents best friend). I have had a lot of trouble nursing since Fredrik was born, so that was why we decided to do some research. He had all of the symptoms, first of all I should say what tongue-tie is, the fraenulum (the membrane under the tongue that holds it the bottom of your mouth) is too tight. In Fredrik's case, it was connected all the way to the tip of his tongue. He could only stick it out to about even with his lower gum, but the middle of his tongue would not even reach that far, but remained puckered back, or heart-shaped. Other symptoms were that he could not cup his tongue around my finger or follow my finger from side to side when I rubbed his lower gum. He also dribble milk out the sides of his mouth when bottle-fed. It is hard to establish breast feeding with a tied tongue. My milk supply never increased much because my breasts were never emptied fully, only the "easy" milk came out, so since it's a supply and demand situation, I didn't get enough demand to supply. So, once we decided that this was a problem we quickly made an appt. with the pediatrician in Hutchinson. I should note our disgust that the doctor who delivered Fredrik didn't check his tongue, nor did the 2 lactation consultants we met. We were fully discouraged when the ped. refused to snip his fraenulum. Instead she told us that it would probably stretch over the first years of life and if he could take a bottle it was fine (not much of an advocate for nursing). They told us to meet with a speech pathologist (what?!) and if he/she recommended we get him snipped, we would then need to anesthetize him for the procedure. Today we went to Litchfield to my family doctor growing up, Dr. Deb Peterson. She snipped his tongue without a doubt that it was contributing to the nursing difficulties. The procedure lasted a couple seconds and he hardly cried. He was upset that we woke him from his nap, but the numbing agent did the job and he hardly bled-just a few drops. Now we have the task at hand of getting the nursing to work. He's been nursing/bottle feeding for the past 5 weeks, so he is pretty accustomed to the nipple on a bottle. I'm attending a La Leche League meeting tonight-they are the ones that told me to see Dr. Deb and I hope they can help us figure out how to transition to boob alone.