Lisa Leighton, IBCLC at Dyad Breastfeeding Support

Lisa is the reason that my wife is able to exclusively breastfeed our 4-​week-​old daughter.
Our baby had lost more than 10% of her birth weight and our docs [rightly] suggested that we start supplementing her feedings 8x/​day. We really wanted to avoid formula and went into high gear trying to find someone who could help us assess the problem and get on the right track.
We started by going to a well-​regarded lactation consultant at CPMC. She agreed that there was a problem and made a variety of suggestions, but the meeting ended in tears and, ultimately, the advice we were given did not solve the problem: our daughter would latch on but lose interest, and her weight gain was still lackluster.
A few days later we were referred to Lisa. Her initial visit was the turning point for us… we learned that the supply problem we’d been dealing with was really not a supply problem after all, but an issue with the relative positioning of the baby and the breast, etc.
We also learned that the advice we’d gotten about hand-​expression from this rather experienced lactation consultant at CPMC was actually damaging my wife’s breasts. The method that Lisa suggested (a) didn’t hurt, (b) was easier to accomplish, and © produced a lot more milk!
Lisa further helped us to establish a safe co-​sleeping environment, answered questions about general baby stuff, established some guidelines for normal/​abnormal crying/​pooping/​sleeping/​etc, and so forth.
On top of it all, she is a lovely person who is reassuring about the 1000+ things to be needlessly worried about and gentle about the 1 – 2 issues worth focusing on.
Basically, Lisa has been a life-​saver and we give her our highest recommendation.

Lisa is a gem! I discovered her on Unilocal after being incredibly misled down a path of more and more formula into my son’s mouth as outlined by a different lactation consultant. All I wanted to do for my baby was breastfeed him, and from the moment he was born, it was a struggle for us. Turned out he had a tongue tie. Yes, our first lc AND our pede saw it at week 2, but they both thought «he’d grow out of it.»
After that comment, I began to mistrust the first lc, that, combined with endless hours of finger feeding without giving us too much latching technique feedback (and of course, bad latching led to an immediate drop in my milk supply), made me search for a 2^nd opinion. This time, upon finding Lisa, I thought her combination of both nurse and lc could bode well for my little family.
I called Lisa crying out of frustration (and hormones!). She was wonderfully soothing during our initial phone call, and came to my home the next day. That day she spent most of her time assessing my then 4-​week-​old son’s (poor) latch, and really examined his tongue tie and said he wasn’t going to grow out of it, and highly recommended a frenotomy. I was LIVID that the first lc brushed off the tt because, as Lisa kindly explained to me, it’s crucial to have the baby latch well in the first two weeks of life to help mom create more prolactin receptors to make more and more milk. My son had a frenotomy at 5 weeks, and after another 10 days of getting used to a more mobile tongue, then accustomed to a fuller latch, my baby was feeding from me. However, because of that missed time window in those first couple of weeks, my supply is still on the lower side (though it has improved), so I’ve had Lisa back a few times to help with latching and each time we see her, my husband and I love the health tips she shares, and how wonderfully supportive she is. Lisa truly recognizes that every mother/​infant dyad is unique, and treats each as such, which our first lc was not doing – we were beyond the first lc’s textbook training perhaps, but I’m so grateful to Lisa for stepping in and helping to right our situation. Breastfeeding is still a work in progress, but it’s so much easier under Lisa’s supervision. Highly, highly recommend!

Lisa miraculously came into my life not a moment too soon. I was having agonizing engorgement, unable to express milk, showing red spots on both breasts and at risk of developing mastitis. My family and I had just made the very difficult decision to stop breastfeeding (this was BEFORE I met Lisa; in fact, I’m certain if we had met sooner I would still be breastfeeding today). I had been pumping around the clock and was producing about 1 feedings worth of milk on a good day — and the price of not enjoying my baby or my life and being strapped to a pump around the clock was just too great. I told Lisa of this decision and she was non-​judge mental and very sympathetic. Not only that, she told me how to relieve my engorgement and some lactation suppression techniques that even my doctor didn’t know about! Then, she followed up with me every day and demonstrated genuine concern for my well-​being. You should know, too, Lisa is a nurse and clearly has a wealth of medical knowledge related to lactation. I felt like I met her for a reason and things turned around for me and my family afterwards. I can finally enjoy my beautiful baby boy! Lisa, I cannot thank you enough!

I am so grateful for the invaluable help Lisa provided, getting us through the first month of breastfeeding of our son. She is truly wonderful, and I can’t recommend her enough. Quite simply without her my wife couldn’t have kept nursing, and looking back now with our 16 pound healthy and happy 4 months old boy it’s hard to remember all the difficulties and fears getting to the happy and easy breastfeeding place we are now in. Thank you again, Lisa.
All throughout pregnancy we looked at birth as the big challenge, what we didn’t anticipate is that caring for the newborn isn’t obvious, and that everything that can go right, or wrong, is directly related to one thing: successful nursing. So when we came back home sound and happy from Kaiser we didn’t imagine that baby wouldn’t latch, would loose a lot of weight, that pink urate crystals would start showing up in the diaper, that mastitis would complicate things further, making nursing incredibly painful, bringing a level of stress we’ve never experienced before. In the meantime we scoured the web for answers and left desperate voicemails at the Kaiser advice nurse, but all the information you can read and advice you can hear does not replace the care and observation of an experienced mother or lactation consultant.
We were lucky enough to know Lisa in our neighborhood, and she literrally rescued us. Not once, but many times over. Her presence is incredibly comforting, she is immensely knowledgeable, both from a scientific perspective and from a real life experience standpoint. She’s helped breastfeeding mothers for more than 20 years I think, and she’s seen it all. Just watching the mother attempting to breastfeed she instantly understands exactly what’s going on, and she has solutions for any issue she detects. She is warm, patient, and when we called her for help she arranged to see us within 24 hours, including evenings and on Sundays.
So back to our story. When we first called Lisa, baby had not been able to latch properly and we were trying to cope feeding him with a cup. He had not pooped in 4 days, and we noticed pink spots on diapers (the urate crystals). Lisa gave us lots of useful and comforting information, weighed our baby and watched my wife trying to nurse. She gently showed some positioning adjustments and magically, baby started to breastfeed — and instantly pooped. A few days later Lisa came back to check up on us, and after weighing baby we found that he was still losing weight, and after more nursing observation she found that the latch wasn’t good and baby wasn’t getting enough of what was coming out. She told and showed us how to facilitate and check on a better latch, and magically, baby was nursing right. My wife started showing some red patches on the breast and Lisa gave us healing methods. Unfortunately the mastitis got worse, and although baby was successfully nursing, mum was feeling excruciating pain each time. Lisa came back and gave us a nipple shield, and magically, mom was relieved and on the path to recovery. And she saved us again, by helping us diagnose a yeast infection which was also making it EXTREMELY painful for my wife to nurse (this conveniently coincided with an infection the baby came down with which required a hospital stay). Finally, whilst at the end of our straw, she made our lives much better by not only showing, but putting in practice the 5S tricks of «The Happiest Baby on the Block» (a must watch for new parents btw).
TMI I guess. Here’s the gist: Lisa is wonderful, knowledgeable, patient, she helped us overcome all of our challenges, and got us to the happy and healthy place we are today, making breastfeeding the rewarding and enjoyable experience it should be for mom.

It’s been over two months since my lactation consultation with Lisa, and I still think of her almost daily, recalling her reassurance, wisdom and advice; so I figured I’d write a review.
Like many new moms, I didn’t know exactly what I needed when I sought her out for a lactation consultation. My son was 6 weeks old; we’d seen a lactation specialist while we were still at Kaiser, which was helpful, but I continued to experience some challenges (aka pain) and I had a variety of questions falling under the «Is this normal?» umbrella.
Lisa provided a phone consult first; she assessed how things had been going, offered some wise words (which were immensely comforting and made me feel much less like a «bad mother» and a lot more like a normal one), and suggested we meet in person so she could assess my positioning and make recommendations. Scheduling with her was simple thanks to her flexibility and straightforward communication. As soon as we met, her gentle, easy energy and calm demeanor inspired total trust. Throughout the visit, she noted the things I was doing right — and remarked on my son’s developmental strengths, which really helped boost my confidence and pride as a mother.
I appreciated how well versed she was in normal infant development; she couched her responses to my questions in that context, and offered pearls from scientific research, which helped me gain a big-​picture perspective and know what to anticipate down the line. Her suggestions about positioning were just a fraction of the valuable information gleaned during that one visit. It was incredibly instructive to watch Lisa interact with my son, getting him to open his mouth just by touching her finger to his lips and at the same time opening her own mouth. He eventually copied this, allowing her to assess his gums and tongue. She answered my questions about car-​seat behavior (and strategies for dealing with it), spit-​up vs. vomit, growth spurts, etc. and all her suggestions have been put to good use and/​or informed my responses, again, helping me feel WAY more competent at this insanely difficult (who knew?) job of mothering!