There and back again
You’ve brought the baby home and somehow made it through the hospital experience. After all the time planning the nursery, buying new baby-sized furniture and imagining your offspring situated in your home, it’s all really happening.
The last thing you want, then, is to end up back at the hospital again just a couple of days later. This is what happened to us.
I won’t lie: the first few days were pretty horrendous. A healthy baby’s needs are pretty basic and easy to attend to: feed them, change them, comfort them. What’s difficult, though, is finding the energy and alertness to do this every couple of hours, while in between trying to take care of your own (very similar) needs. It can feel relentless and oppressive – in the first day or so at home I remember lying on my bed alone during a brief moment of escape, fighting back tears and thinking “I can’t do this, it’s just too difficult. We’ll have to hire someone to come and live with us and look after him while we catch up on sleep”. It feels melodramatic and ridiculous now, four weeks later, but at the time I remember feeling overwhelmed at the sheer scale of the task ahead of us.
Sleep is the killer, though. Everyone talks about this before parenthood, and all the jokes to new/impending parents are about sleep and your lack of it. I can safely say now that I didn’t know what being tired really felt like until having a child. A friend from NCT compared it to the experience of waking up super early for a flight and feeling like crap for most of the day until your body gets used to it… but doing so every day of the week. For me the most difficult part in those early days was not knowing when the next rest was coming. Before we established any kind of routine, it just felt like we were shuffling from one task (feed, change, inspect, cuddle) to one chore (wash clothes, dishes, cook, empty bins, try to sleep), on repeat.
Perhaps because of this sleep deficit and the stress/anxiety-laden comedown of the birth (for Maddy), we struggled with feeding Ted. He latched on well at the hospital initially, but later he’d just fall asleep at the breast and barely feed. When he later woke, he’d be grouchy to the point of being inconsolable, crying and rocking and refusing to feed in his frustration. Of course, this then impacts on the mother, who feels like a failure. This vicious circle repeats, until, in our case, we got to the crucial day five milestone where the midwife team visit, and discovered that Ted had lost 15% of his birth weight.
It’s normal—expected, even—for newborn babies to lose some of this weight (I think up to 8% is considered normal), but in this case it was a sign that he wasn’t getting enough nourishment and could be at risk. At 8pm we got a phone call from the hospital saying the midwife had referred us, and by 10pm they called to say we had to come into the transitional care ward for a couple of nights. We exhaustedly packed our hospital bags all over again and went back to the ward.
When we got there, they took Ted into the neonatal intensive care unit (ICU). This is not a place you want to be with your newborn child – unlike the postnatal wards, it’s full of babies with serious issues, sleeping in incubators, apart from their parents. It’s staffed by doctors rather than midwives and there are mandatory industrial handwash stations when you enter.
We waited there until around 4am while they tested Ted’s blood to ensure his sodium levels weren’t drastically wrong, and confirmed that his “offensive”-smelling umbilical cord was just normal rather than infected (which turned out to be the case, thankfully). By this point we’d barely slept for 24 hours and were exhausted with worry, stress and tension. Maddy unloaded a full-throated rant for a minute or two at an unlucky doctor, frustrated that not only us, but several of our NCT friends, had ended up back at this hospital after being discharged, due to our children being underweight or otherwise unable to feed properly. She was angry about the frustrating mixture of advice and suggestions we’d been given by the dozens of different medical professionals who’d spoken to us in the past week, and the fact that our son was now hooked up to a cannula and on a course of antibiotics that he may not have needed.
Eventually we left the ICU for the relative comfort of the transitional care ward. Unlike the postnatal ward (where you’re sent immediately after birth), partners are allowed to stay overnight, sleeping on handy fold-out chair/beds. A wonderful midwife there could see how absolutely spent we both were, and she told us to sleep while she cared for Ted during the night, administering (formula) feeds to him while we gratefully caught up on sleep.
The next few days saw the midwife team there drum a schedule into us: every three hours we’d feed him at the breast as long as possible, then give him a bottle of formula (which we’d avoided until this stage due to the associated stigma), while Maddy expressed more milk for later. In between, we slept, tried to eat, and were supported by my mum who was an absolute angel and came as soon as we called her to buy us feeding bottles (we’d left ours at home), sort our house out while we were away, and generally keep us buoyed up and positive as things started to improve.
Over 36 hours on the ward, Ted put back on most of the weight. Several midwives sat in for hours with us, helping Maddy learn to feed and encouraging her to keep going even when Ted didn’t play ball. Maddy asked if he might be suffering from tongue-tie (an issue often preventing newborns from successfully breastfeeding) but we were told he definitely wasn’t affected.
Best of all, after the first day, the staff offered us a “side” (eg. private) room on the ward, rather than being crammed into a communal one and being kept awake by everyone else. This made an enormous difference: the private room was much bigger, quieter, cooler and just all-around better. Apparently some of these rooms are available to rent: if we had our time again I’d have paid for it in a heartbeat as it made all the difference.
After arriving on Monday night, by Wednesday afternoon we were told we could go home again now that Ted was on the mend and we had a proper structure/schedule. With a little trepidation after the bumpy first attempt, we headed home. I remember being unable to sleep despite feeling exhausted: lying in bed, my mind racing, worrying it was all going to happen again.
Things improved, of course. I don’t think it’s really possible to get through that first week without feeling like you’re unable to meet the challenge of parenthood; without feeling a despair-like sense that you’ll never feel rested again; or as a man, without feeling powerless and frustrated as you’re unable to do anything of practical value to help your breastfeeding partner. But it quickly got better: much better. I’m typing this feeling rested and content – chores done, baby sleeping by my feet, dram of whiskey by my side and Nick Drake on the speakers.
If you’re in that dark place and wondering how you’ll ever get through this: know that you will. Your partner is almost certainly struggling more than you’ll ever be able to comprehend, so as hard as you, new dad, are finding this – be there for them, battle through this. We didn’t want to go back to the hospital, but it was the right thing for all of us in the end.