Half Changed World

[This post is my entry in The Zero Boss’ Blogging for Books #4 contest. The assignment is to “write about a time you were pushed to the brink of insanity (figuratively or literally), and how you lived to tell the tale.” It’s a bit more personal than my usual postings here, but regular readers will be reassured to see that I do have some policy conclusions at the end.]

You need to know that I was badly sleep deprived at the time. This all happened on Sunday evening. Wednesday night I had been having trouble falling asleep, enough that I had gone downstairs to sleep on the futon so that my tossing and turning wouldn’t keep Tony awake. I had been asleep for no more than an hour or two when I woke up to discover that my water had broken. Daniel wasn’t born for about another 25 hours, and the closest I came to sleep during that time was drifting off a little between contractions after I finally accepted an epidural and kicked in. I got a few hours of sleep Friday morning, before the nurses came into the room to try to explain to my roommate, a teenager with limited English skills, that they couldn’t release her from the hospital until she went to the bathroom and proved that everything was still working. Friday (in the hospital) and Saturday nights (at home) I had gotten almost reasonable amounts of sleep, reasonable that is for someone caring for a newborn who woke up every 2 or 3 hours and needed to be breastfed. I certainly hadn’t gotten enough sleep to make up for the previous two sleepless nights and the work involved in giving birth.

The other thing to know is that I had thought breastfeeding was going fine. Daniel had lousy initial APGARS from being so tangled in the cord, but by five minutes, he was pink and fine, and within 10 minutes I was holding him and offering him my breast. I had gone to the newborn breastfeeding class in the hospital, and the nurses had approved of Daniel’s latch. My only problem was that I seemed to require a lot of pillows, and wasn’t sure how I was going to manage this once there wasn’t someone around all the time to hold the baby while I got myself settled.

My dad and brother had driven down from New York on Friday to see the baby, but they had left on Sunday morning, needing to be back for work. So by Sunday afternoon it was just Tony and I, home with our baby, wondering if we were really ready to be parents. Sunday evening, Daniel woke up crying. I picked up him, and immediately realized he had a fever. We called our HMO’s advice line and they said to bring him in to their urgent care center, even though we had an appointment scheduled for the next morning (as recommended for babies who spend less than 48 hours in the hospital after delivery). We grabbed our newly packed diaper bag and rushed out the door.

When we got to the center, they took Daniel’s temperature, weighed him, and immediately told us that he down more than a pound from his birth weight, he was seriously dehydrated and we needed to give him a bottle right away. My milk hadn’t come in, and he wasn’t getting enough to drink. I burst into tears. My baby’s sick, he’s thirsty, of course he needs to drink. But what about nipple confusion? Does this mean that we’re never going to be able to breastfeed? And am I a terrible mother for worrying about my desire for an idealized breastfeeding relationship at the expense of my baby’s health?

So they brought us a little bottle of formula and Tony fed it to Daniel, who sucked eagerly, even desperately at it. And I sat and sobbed and tried to stop and hiccupped and cried some more. The doctor told us that she wanted to send Daniel to the hospital to rule out sepsis, and she’d do the paperwork so that it could be a direct admission and we wouldn’t have to go to the emergency room. So we were left alone, Tony feeding Daniel from the bottle, and me crying.

And then the receptionist stuck her head into the room, and told me that I had to stop crying because the baby can tell when I’m sad and it makes him worse. If I wanted him to get better, I needed to stop crying.

Almost 4 years later, my blood pressure still goes up just thinking about the stupidity of this woman. (Tony uses a different word when referring to her.) My crying wasn’t hurting anyone, and even if it had been, I can’t think of anything she could possibly have said that would make it harder for me to stop crying.

Eventually we got to the hospital and got assigned a room on the pediatrics floor, with Daniel hooked up to IV fluids. The residents were very kind and reassuring, although they looked extremely young. I was still sniffling, and I think they thought I was convinced Daniel was dying. They told us that Daniel’s fever had dropped significantly already, and that he was probably fine, but that in order to rule out sepsis, they needed to do a spinal tap, start him on antibiotics, and keep him in the hospital for at least 48 hours while they did cultures of his blood and spinal fluids.

And I lost it again. I was sorely tempted to take the baby and tell them no thank you, we’re going home. But I didn’t. Tony went with them to wait in the hall while they did the spinal tap. I called my parents and wailed at them. Between sobs, I asked them how I was supposed to be a parent when I felt like I was about 3 years old myself and wanted them to tell me that everything was going to be ok.

Once Daniel was back in the room, Tony and I decided that one of us should go home and try to get some rest, since it was about 1 am and we were both incoherent from exhaustion. As we were no longer in the maternity ward, there was only one fold-out chair for the two of us. We argued a little, each thinking that the other should leave, but I agreed to go. But I was so messed up I was scared to drive, afraid I’d kill myself on the beltway, so I went to call a cab. The cab company said it would be at least an hour and a half before one came, so I went back to the room and told Tony he had to drive home, I’d stay.

Daniel hated the hospital crib, which was a full-sized metal cage, not the plexiglass cradles they provide on the maternity ward, and refused to sleep in it. So I spent essentially the whole night sitting up, holding him, watching him sleep, nursing him when he woke, and studying his hair and ears and fingers.

After that it got better. Even though I had to go back to the maternity ward and beg for menstrual pads, since I hadn’t brought anything with me. Even though both Tony and I caught a hideous stomach virus at the hospital and were miserably sick. Even though it took another 3 days before my milk came in. Daniel was ok. And there’s nothing like actually spending several days on a children’s ward at a major hospital to make you count your blessings.

Some takeaways, since I am a policy wonk:

1) I know some people see this as a story of the consequences of a short postpartum hospital stay. I’m not convinced. With both of my babies, I was eager to get out of the hospital, which I found incredibly unrestful, and did so even though my insurance would have paid for another day. And we had a follow-up visit scheduled for the next day, which is what is recommended. I do support the idea of having nurses pay home visits to newborns. Just this morning, I read of a study which found that such visits totally eliminated ER visits within the first 10 days of life — compared to a surprising 3.5 percent of newborns in the control group. Jaundice and dehydration were the major reasons for such visits.

2) Some of the advice offered by advocates of breastfeeding was truly unhelpful. With hindsight, I really wish we had given Daniel some water or formula at home, before rushing him to the hospital. But I had been told that breastfed infants never need supplemental liquids and giving it to them will only make them less eager to nurse. And I wish that I hadn’t been so worried about nipple confusion. I don’t dispute that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies — I went to great lengths to provide it for both my children even after I returned to work. But it seems like much of the pro-breastfeeding message is totally missing the large number of women who aren’t even trying to breastfeed, and just succeding in making those who do try more anxious.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 5:14 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.