“She was perfect,” Jordan Talley, 25, tells PEOPLE of her little girl. “My entire pregnancy, I had that worry that I wouldn’t be able to love a second child as much as my first. But when she was here, none of those worries mattered anymore. Everyone told me, ‘Your heart jut grows in size’ and it sounds cliche, but it really does!”
Talley, who first shared her story with Love What Matters, says that during her time in the hospital with Lucy, breastfeeding the little girl was painful. The discomfort continued when she took the baby home, but Talley says she thought nothing of it—“I thought, maybe I was just a wimp, and it’ll go away.”
But it didn’t. The pain continued for weeks and Talley says Lucy was eating “all the time.” This was not much of a concern either, Talley says, until a doctor’s visit revealed that Lucy had dropped considerable weight. Soon, Lucy’s physical appearance began to change too.
“She had a very thin face and no longer had that full, chubby-cheeked baby face,” Talley recalls. “Her eyes were dull and sunken in.”
The baby had lost a pound in less than a month.
Desperate, the mom of two took Lucy to a lactation consultant who determined that the infant had both a tongue and lip tie, in which a piece of tissue ties a portion of the baby’s lip and/or tongue to another, restricting the range of motion when breastfeeding, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“I was relieved that we had an answer. Lucy had to work really hard to get milk out… which explains why she was nursing so frequently,” Talley tells PEOPLE.
The lactation consultant, Amanda, suggested bottle-feeding for Lucy, using breastmilk from both Talley and a donor as doctors corrected the ties with a non-invasive procedure. Lucy immediately began gaining weight and, just weeks later, was back to her “chubby-cheeked” self.
“I felt like I could breathe again,” Talley tells PEOPLE. “When we took her back for a weight check after the revision, Lucy’s doctor was thrilled with her progress.”
She gushed about the baby’s improvement in a Facebook post on Monday, sharing photos of Lucy at 1 month and 6 weeks old.
“6 weeks of Lucy and we are amazed by her every day,” the doting mom began. “If I didn’t take the photos myself, I’d think they were different babies. Forever grateful to the support network that helped us get her healthy. She is up to 8 lbs, 4 oz. That’s a gain of almost two pounds in 12 days!”
Now, Talley is encouraging struggling mothers to seek help from a lactation consultant before they “give up” on breastfeeding.
This article originally appeared on People.com.
