Morgan's first week

[Aphie]

Morgan had a very wet, wheezy cough and kept spewing up nasty, sweet-smelling yellow stuff all day.
"Completely normal for a newborn", one of the midwives on the ward told me,"especially caesareans. They don't have it all squeezed out of their lungs during the birth process. He'll clear it out in the next few days."
But at 1am the next morning I was woken by two heads on either side of my bed. "Now don't worry!" They told me. "But we've just taken your baby to the ICU! You should try to go back to sleep now!"
Like hell.
Morgan had swallowed some of the mucus and had what they called "a dusky episode" - he'd changed colour. So they'd rushed him off, done some blood tests and found an infection. He spent the next couple of days hooked up to an IV drip and heart, breath and temperature monitors and I couldn't even hold him without trailing wires everywhere. I also wasn't told by anyone to keep putting him to the breast - it felt like I had to ask permission to even pick him up, since he was under a heat lamp as well, so I didn't hold him more than once or twice a day.

I think it may have been one of the ward midwives who told me to get him to suck at the breast, to try to stimulate my milk, at about day three (the day at which most women's milk arrives) - which meant going and telling the ICU nurses that's what I wanted to do.
It was also one of the ward nurses that told me about hand-expressing, to stimulate the breasts away from my baby. Which was embarrassing as hell - try having a perfect stranger massaging your breasts! - and didn't much improve when she showed the fairy how to do it. At first we were syringing the drops of colostrum off the breast, to be stored and fed to Morgan later, from a container, to give him a taste for it.
This midwife also suggested going in to the ICU ward every two to three hours or so, to try Morgan at the breast, as it would make my milk come in quicker - the ICU nurse on watch over him told me every four hours was sufficient, thankyou - so I ended up trekking along the corridor every four hours that day, past the open doors of rooms full of new mothers with their babies and visitors, looking tired and happy and proud and I just wanted to howl every time because I wanted to be one of them so much, I'd thought that was how it would be for me.

One of the nurses in ICU told me that Morgan's jaw was a problem for him latching on. That he didn't know how to suck properly - see! he just stopped! She told me his drip was due to come out once it had been reduced - and that he should just be fed formula to make up his liquids, since he obviously couldn't manage the breast.
Luckily, the graveyard shift that night was manned by a nurse who gave me a nipple shield, to help Morgan latch on - and told me to relax when he stopped sucking - babies apparently pause when breastfeeding, to breathe and allow the ducts to flood with milk again. And sure enough, in the space of a few deep breaths, he started to suck again. She worked with me over the next three nights, calling me every four hours on the phone in my room between 11pm and 7am each night, to try him on the breast and to then pump increasing amounts of first colostrum and then milk (which started on day four and finally came in, in force, during day five - another thing the ICU nurse had declared was "A Problem", but by this time I'd taken to consulting the ward midwives on everything, who assured me day five or even later was entirely normal for milk arriving for a woman who'd had a c-section). He was fed the stuff I pumped during the day when the formula-keen woman was on, so she had a quantifiable amount of liquids she could write down on her little sheet. He still ended up being supplemented with tiny amounts of formula because she was pushing so hard so early, but this only made me more determined to at the very least end up expressing enough that he wouldn't need it, and altogether Morgan only had maybe 40mls over the several days.
During this period another gung-ho ICU nurse tried to bully me into giving Morgan a dummy, telling me I didn't know what was best for him, and insinuating I was a terrible mother for not immediately doing what she said, and telling her I wanted to consult one of the ward midwives before making a decision. She said all this in front of both the wicked fairy and my mother, maybe thinking I'd be easier to cow and browbeat because of company I guess, but all it did was make me even more determined - and after my experiences with Formula-Woman I already felt mulish about listening to any of the nurses who tried to tell me they knew "best". Fairy's now adamantly anti-dummy for any reason and my mother actually told me "you handled her really well" - I don't remember the last time my mother praised me.
The experience made me REALLY angry. I had to bite back the words "Don't try to bully me!" like a five year old on the playground standing up to a bigger girl. By this point I felt all bullied out. I felt as if I'd been emotionally and mentally battered by some of these women when I was in a vulnerable position, and it made me resentful and cranky as all get out.

So Morgan's IV drip was reduced slowly until he came off it in the wee hours of day five, at the lovely nurse's instigation, at about 1am. I think Formula Woman was disgruntled when she came on-shift and discovered this had been done, though she didn't say anything to me.
At lunchtime that day (the morning of which they'd removed the sutures on my scar) they let me take him out to the ward - 'for 24 hours' observation' after which he'd be allowed home.

[Emily HW]

Oh, wow, Aphie. That sounds like such an emotional time. :: hugs :: It's so hard being a first time mom and bullied. The same thing happened to me when Lillers was born... and you don't know any better until you're out of the hospital! You feel so helpless, too... Lily got a little bit of formula as well because the hospital said I wasn't producing enough milk for her as she had jaundice. They also told me that my breasts were too big/ Lily's mouth too small to breastfeed. Despite these setbacks, we eventually learned.

Morgan will get it. It will take a few weeks, but eventually you guys will click. The picture makes me want to cry. He's such a beautiful child.

I found out that I am having a son as well yesterday. :-)