I got to hold my baby girl for a glorious four hours before they took her to the nursery. They had told me about two hours, so I was thrilled to pieces. We'd been told by several staff that it was very busy that weekend; it had taken quite some time of laboring in triage before I'd gotten a delivery room, and now they were waiting for a recovery room to be made ready. She was born at 12:57 and they took her from me at 5:00PM, after placenta delivery, stitching up, checking her APGAR (9 and 9!), and then several hours of cooing relatives after the room and myself had been cleaned up. (I never saw the crime scene that was described to me - ninjas must have cleaned up before I sat up!) My wife went to the nursery with Ellis because I was determined that she not be out of our sight for even a minute.
When they first took her, I ordered food since I hadn't eaten anything but a cup of blueberries at 11PM the night before. I ate and just tried to get myself together and absorb what had happened and that I had a BABY, and was fine for a while...but then it started to feel like a really long time without her. I'd never been separated from her before, and it ended up being an hour and a half that she was in the nursery. No one was talking to me OR my wife about what was taking so long, and I was getting really antsy! I finally got my baby and my recovery room.
The weekend was really rough. We were there from the wee hours Friday until Sunday night. Every day and night was full of interruptions, and we got far less sleep and recovery than we would have at home.
We finally learned that the reason Ellis had been in the nursery so long was that she had a periurethral cyst, and no one seemed to know what it was or how serious and hadn't seen it on a baby. They were all looking at it and calling in other people to look at it. When we finally saw the pediatric urologist late the next night, he reassured us that he'd seen it a million times and they almost always disappear on their own. But everyone before him that rotated in and out of the room had made us anxious. The first we even knew of this was when an adult urologist came in to look at it. We'd been asked frequently whether she was wetting diapers but had no idea this was why they wanted to know. We had to strip the baby down and take off her diaper for the doctor to look at it, and she said we needed to track the wet diapers to make sure the cyst wasn't blocking the urethra or making it painful to urinate so that the baby was holding her urine and damaging her kidneys. We were told she would need a sonogram to make sure of this also.
We finally got the crying baby swaddled (with the help of a kind and patient nurse - ours were never snug enough) and back to sleep, and then another woman came in, introduced herself as a resident, and asked to check out the cyst. I am normally pretty passive and afraid to say no to people who seem in authority, but the mama bear in me flared up. Babies sleep about 22 hours their first day of life, giving both baby and mother time to recuperate from birth, and no one was letting the poor girl rest! (They also frequently interrupted us while breastfeeding.) I said, "Someone just looked at it." She said, "yes, but I need to call the pediatric urologist about a sonogram and describe it to them." I said, "We just got her calmed and back to sleep again. I don't want to unswaddle her and strip her down again. Ask the last doctor about it." She said, "I really need to be able to see it for myself so I can describe it in detail." I said, "Then you should have come in with the last doctor and looked together. Have her call it in since she saw it. I'm not waking the baby again." She said she would check with the other doctor, and I never saw her again.
Meanwhile, they also kept unswaddling her to prick her heel to test her blood sugar. I know this goes with the territory of gestational diabetes, but I had kept to the diet so well so I knew she wasn't overproducing insulin (and sure enough she tested normal each time) so it was really frustrating to see them needlessly waking her so often. Then they would do weight checks after midnight. I was hooked up to a catheter and an IV after my blood pressure situation, and they kept coming to monitor me too. Neither of us got much sleep even when we could and should have! I remember clearly one time when a nurse came to do all this and left the light on. It was the one light not controlled by my remote, and I was bed-bound because of being hooked up to so much on both sides of me. I rang the call button three times in 45 minutes pleading for someone to just come in and turn the light back off - 45 minutes!! The sun was coming up some after 5:00 by the time someone came to turn it off, and I was near tears begging in that last call. It was the only thing I needed to try to finally get some shuteye and was such a stupid barrier to getting rest!!
Our stream of visitors was absolutely perfect. Only people close to us came by, and they kept their visits short and sweet. It was just enough to help us feel supported and not lonely or bored, but not so much that we would feel overwhelmed or stressed. I felt surprisingly comfortable nursing with people around and just assumed they would leave if THEY felt uncomfortable. (That has remained true.) My mother stayed with me the entire day so that my wife could rush out to feed the cats, get a change of clothes, etc. without me ever being left alone.
There was one morning they both were going to go somewhere, but Mom said she would stay with me while my wife went. I encouraged them to both go because I had the help of nurses and would have to practice being on my own a little bit with Ellis anyway. It was a terrifying hour or so!! She started crying and I couldn't figure out how to help her. When I tried nursing her, she would try to latch but just couldn't. I knew she knew how, so I didn't understand why she wasn't doing it. She would act hungry (they eat CONSTANTLY in the beginning) but would get so frustrated and angry. She would be at my breast with her mouth around my nipple but not closing on it and shake her head violently with frustration and scream. I felt lost without my wife who would pace the room and comfort the baby while I could barely stand even after being unhooked from the machines. I felt panicked at my lack of instincts in how to help her and comfort her. I felt so responsible for her distress and so helpless!
I called for a lactation consultant, and she didn't come for almost an hour which felt like torture. She was very reassuring, though, and said that something was distracting Ellis from being able to latch. We checked her diaper and she did "bicycle legs" in case she had gas and rocked her around and then we tried again, and she latched. She said that you may never know what it was that worked, but just keep trying different things and then offering the breast. I soon learned that Ellis wouldn't eat (would WANT to, but couldn't focus enough to be able to, thus the frustration) if she had anything else wrong, so I had to check everything and just keep trying. When my mother and wife returned, I burst into tears, so grateful for their return, which probably confused them because we appeared to be calmly and successfully nursing!
The sonogram experience was terrible. We'd been seen by the pediatric urologist finally (Saturday night) who was surprised that it hadn't already been done that day, but said he didn't even think it was necessary. What he saw was so commonplace and benign that he wasn't worried, but he said to go through with the sonogram since it had already been ordered and it would put our minds at ease. (The cyst was gone by the time her pediatrician saw her that Tuesday.) We were told discharge would be around lunchtime Sunday, but by 5:00PM they still hadn't seen her for the sonogram! I was so tired and annoyed by then. Every nerve was frayed from lack of sleep and the anxiety of all that was happening nonstop at the hospital all weekend. I just wanted to get home! We were told that the sonograms were backed up because it was a holiday weekend (Memorial Day) and they would get to us soon.
When they finally came for us, they put her in this rolling incubator type thing that enclosed her completely. The place we had to go was so far from where we were, and walking behind her hearing her muffled wails was absolutely heartbreaking. It took forever to get there, and as soon as we did, I asked to hold her until they had the equipment ready so I could comfort her a little. Then the sonogram itself seemed to take forever, and back into the incubator she went. It was absolute torment, seeing her left alone in there, separated from all caregiving adults by plastic, not being held or even touched, no one responding to her desperate cries. She had to be so scared and lonely. What a traumatic early experience! And knowing the sonogram probably wasn't even really necessary just made it all seem that much worse. I couldn't bear it.
We then had to wait for the results to be reviewed and discussed with the pediatrician before we could get cleared for discharge. It was 9:00PM before that happened. We were all absolutely exhausted, and also disappointed that our homecoming would be nothing like we had imagined. When we finally received approval for discharge, my wife went to get the car and my mother and I put Ellis into her coming home outfit (anticlimactic so late at night). We were then told that no one was yet available for "patient transport" (to roll me in a wheelchair downstairs) and they couldn't tell us when they'd be ready. So I sat down to feed my always hungry newborn. While she was still eating, patient transport suddenly arrived. I explained that she would probably be done eating soon, and I didn't want to unlatch her and leave her hungry when she'd been interrupted from sleeping and eating all weekend (SINCE BIRTH). They said they couldn't wait and we had to leave now. So I unlatched my two-day old infant from my breast and buckled her screaming into the carseat. She screamed and cried hysterically all the way home, where I rushed her to the couch to feed her again.
All in all, it was a terrible experience. We were already anxious new parents trying to figure out our newborn who was terrified at this new world, and with having not slept in about two days, and on top of that we had staff constantly interrupting the baby's breastfeeding and sleeping. She'd be crying endlessly, and we'd be trying desperately to soothe her, with no sleep and no experience and no energy left, and finally would have her settled nursing or swaddled and sleeping, and someone would come in and wake her up and then leave us to have to settle her again. I felt like I would go crazy.
The second we got into our house, I felt such relief. We were in OUR space, with our baby in her own clothes and with her own things around her, and suddenly I could really connect with her. Suddenly it wasn't just about soothing this screaming creature that was dependent on us and for whom we were responsible, but it was about us being a family with our daughter and beginning the process of raising her. And I immediately understood why many women choose to give birth at home!
