Eric has just faked me out by waking up and screaming like he was starving to death, and then putting himself back to sleep when I set him down for a minute to get his dinner ready. Now I figure he'll wake up to eat sometime fairly soon, so I don't have the energy to go try and get settled into bed again. I'm just going to wait him out.
I told David tonight that when I can't write about things as they're happening they become much less dramatic. Our six days since Eric's birth have been a drama of him being unable to nurse (he was little and weak when he was born, and my nipple anatomy, it turns out, is less than ideal), getting jaundice which left him so lethargic we couldn't wake him up to eat, ending up staying in the hospital beyond my discharge being treated for the jaundice, etc. etc. But as it turns out, everything is fine. He recovered beautifully from the jaundice, began eating (finger-feedings of expressed breastmilk--I'm on the milking machine every 3 hours!), and tonight successfully (if briefly) nursed for the first time.
In retrospect, I am even glad we were in the hospital so long (until Tuesday night for me and until Wednesday evening for Eric). I came home feeling pretty confident about caring for him, and the extra time gave us a chance to get the finger-feeding working. He eats by sucking my finger, which has a tiny tube on it attached to a reservoir of milk. And his night in the nursery without me may be the last good night's sleep I get for a long time. I stayed in a special room they have for mothers who have been discharged ahead of their babies. It's someone's charitable contribution, and although the hospital doesn't provide services--I had to handle my own food, for instance--staying there is free. I was extremely fatigued from a long hard night and day, as Eric got sicker and sicker from the jaundice, and had trouble eating so got weaker from that. The two of us were also interrupted repeatedly throughout the night for blood tests. Both of us were having our platelets monitored, among other things, and they come in and do the tests in the wee hours so that the doctors can have the results before morning rounds. Very convenient for the doctors. The topper was the stress of being told that, while it was time for me to get out, my baby had to be put into an isolette under a special light that would break down the pigment causing the jaundice. When the nurse came to get him to take him down to the nursery, I felt like my baby was being taken away from me, and I just stood there and cried.
But that was also the day my milk came in, and by the time I stumbled to the nursery at 2 a.m. with my bottle of expressed milk in hand, I was so exhausted I could barely walk. The nurses in the nursery took the milk from me, said, "There's enough here for two feedings at least; go to sleep and don't come back until 8 a.m. We'll feed him until then." 'Will I still be a good mother?" I said. "Go away," they said. [I just need to add a note that, although I did not go into the nursery to see him during the night, I did get up and pump every three hours, to support my milk supply.]
When I reached the nursery in the morning, it was to hear that the nurses had been much more successful at feeding him than I had been until then--I might get 10 or 15 ccs into him, but they were managing closer to 30, which is what he really needed. And my feedings were taking so long that there was concern he was actually burning so many calories sucking he wasn't getting any benefit from the food! They had also re-checked his bilirubin level and it had gone way down. In fact, by morning he was visibly less yellow except for a little raccoon mask where they covered his eyes in the isolette, and under his diaper.
By the afternoon, Eric and I had had a breakthrough and figured out how to finger-feed, which made me feel much more confident about taking him home. I find that it is very good to know your baby is not starving to death. And as he had eaten, he's also started peeing and finally pooping like he should, and has become just your average healthy happy newborn infant. Especially since he nursed just a little tonight, which you may not appreciate as the amazing event it is, having not suffered with me all week through the fear that we would never figure it out.
My parents came to see the baby yesterday, bringing my 8-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew along. 90 minutes of total chaos, with the kids poking their fingers into bird cages and pulling the cats' tails. My dad said to me, "Do you know how to put the baby down to sleep?" I said, "Do we know! We have received 10,000 documents reminding us to put the baby on his back." We have a "back to sleep" refrigerator magnet, a "back to sleep" knob-tag for the door of the baby's room, we have diapers that say "back to sleep" on them in three different languages. I'm surprised they let us leave the hospital without tattooing "this side up!" on his little forehead, and "wrong way! please turn over!" on his back. Do we know how to put him down to sleep, indeed.
My stomach is big and squishy, and I have no waist. I can wear my pre-pregnancy clothes, but waistbands ride up. Yesterday I was in my rocking chair pumping milk. There I am in dirty sweatpants whose waistband is up around my ribs, shirtless, hooked up to the industrial-grade rental milking machine (this thing looks like you could use it to pump up your tires once you're done with the milking), my breasts, which are bigger than ever, sprawling everywhere. I had not managed to have a shower because the visiting nurse had come in the morning and that disrupted our routine. David came by, and I said, "Honey, is this too bovine for you? Should I make an effort to be more discreet? Will you still find me attractive?" He said, "I think it's pretty cool." We're both fascinated by the milk production process.
I'm doing well with the feeding/pumping routine. It's getting easier; now that my milk supply is in, I don't have to pump every three hours, the pumping goes faster, and Eric and I are getting better at the finger-feeding so it no longer takes an hour (usually) to feed him. There was a day in the hospital when, out of every three hours, one hour was trying to get Eric to eat, half an hour was pumping, and the other ninety minutes was mine to do with as I would. Around the clock. I said to David, "This is going to be hard," and he said, "It doesn't look hard. It just looks tedious." Strangely, that really helped. He's exactly right. I am coping by not thinking things like, "Can I do this for a week? Two weeks? Six weeks?" I just think about what's right in front of me: the next feeding, the next pumping session. And already it's getting easier, and we are making progress all the time. As Eric gets bigger and stronger, we're confident he'll manage to nurse, and in the meantime, he's eating well and pooping well. It took him a couple of days, but he's really good at being a baby now and is doing all the right baby things.
I finally decided on Thursday, though, that I need to take lactation advice only from our lactation consultant. Everyone is ready to give advice, and it all conflicts. On Friday, for instance, the visiting nurse called, and she was appalled that we were still finger-feeding. "He'll learn to like that and will never nurse." I got off the phone all worried and upset, and we tried this alternative she had suggested which just frustrated me and the baby. And then the lactation consultant called to check up on us, and I told her what we had been doing, and she said we were doing exactly right and as long as I could keep up the pumping and finger-feeding, he'd get it eventually. "I don't want to discourage you," she said, "but we had a nurse here who finger-fed for six weeks, but her baby started nursing then." I said, "That's not discouraging, it's encouraging, because it tells me there isn't some magic time by which, if he hasn't gotten it, he isn't going to."
Adrianne said she and Carla had made exactly the same decision last year with Noah, after being told by one person to let the baby nurse as long as he wanted on each side, and told by others "no more than 10 minutes per side!" Carla finally said, "I am only going to take advice from the lactation consultant we have hired to help us." I told David, from now on if someone suggests something to me that is not part of the plan we've worked out with the lactation consultant, I'm just going to say, "Thanks. I'll mention that to Sandy and see what she thinks."
People (like the nurse at the pediatrician's office, and the pediatrician herself) seem impressed that I'm willing to pump and finger-feed instead of going to formula. But it's not that bad. And it's worth it. On Eric's worst day, his most yellow and lethargic day, the day even the nurses could hardly get any formula down him (he was supplemented with formula cup-feedings for about a day and a half until I got milk), I finally pumped enough colostrum--about 5 cc--to give him. At his next feeding, it took some effort to get the colostrum down him, but then he perked up and was able to take a good amount of formula. I thought, if I needed proof that what comes out the breast is best for the baby, I have it right there.
Having to pump in addition to feeding him is more time-consuming than simply nursing would be, but the plus side is that I can get a break because there are bottles and bottles of milk in the fridge (my output is way ahead of Eric's consumption--I'm about to become eligible for federal subsidies for dairy production). David has been taking the first morning feeding, around 7 a.m., and that means I top off my nights by getting 3-4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, on top of whatever I got during the night. Last night Eric and I had a great night; he was up three or four times to eat, but he ate efficiently each time and we were both able to go cozily back to sleep in between, except for a lovely half-hour from 4:30 to 5 when he was awake and cheerful and we sat in the rocker and gazed adoringly at each other while he just gently held my finger in his mouth without sucking on it. He has these alert times almost always at night, which is too bad because David and Scott don't get to see them. But he'll have more of them as he gets older.
Eric eats about 10 times in a 24-hour period. And poops every time he eats.
Eric is sleeping beside me in a rubbermaid tub. Our arrangements are a bit ad-hoc, because he caught us off-guard. And I've already figured out one way my "best guess" about how to set things up was wrong. I had expected to have my rocker in the living room and sit in there and, for instance, watch TV while I nursed him. But when we got back from the hospital on Wednesday night, we moved the rocker into the dining room and set the pump up in there. Stevie, our Moluccan cockatoo, is always a little unsettled when I get back from being away, and we didn't want to disturb him by going into the living room and turning lights on when I had to pump and feed Eric during the night. And now I find I like my little lactation and baby feeding station in the corner of the dining room very much and would like to keep it. It's just sort of crammed in there now, but we are going to try to rearrange things so I can have my little corner and we can still use the dining room table for eating.
Stevie is taking the presence of the baby in stride. The dogs like him; they like to lie near him and pretend to guard him. KittyHawk finds him a bit alarming; it's OK when he's reclined, but if I lift him up to burp him she calls the alarm. The cats are wary but interested. Eric pays no attention to any of them, even when Stevie yells. David says it must all be familiar, and that Stevie yelling is probably the first thing Eric ever heard in the womb.
Posted by Su Penn at June 5, 2003 01:10 PM | TrackBack