The postnatal ward of the hosptial is all kinds of hell. It’s noisy, the food is bad, being bed-bound makes you feel infantalised, the midwives give different and sometimes conflicting advice, you don’t have your own stuff with you, and you kept getting visited by doctors, food service, baby photo hawkers and people taking your blood pressure and giving you injections. Also, the midwives seem to have a good cop/bad cop routine going on. One day you’d have a bitter old Nurse Ratched type who’d insist she must be present at every feed then would take 50 minutes to show up when you called for her, then the next you’d have a charming young Scottish midwife who would not only remember your name and the gender of your child, but would sneak you illicit maternity pads (you were supposed to supply your own) and pop in to see how you were going. (I’m speaking hypothetically, of course.) Chris and I also had a total of about 10 hours sleep each during the four nights we were there.
So, naturally, I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. But I wasn’t stupid enough to do so before we were sure that Tess would be okay. Tess being born premature meant she was relatively small and weak. She also wanted to be cuddled all the time – she wasn’t happy whenever you put her in the plastic hosptial crib. Completely understandable, really. You’ve been carried by your mum for nine months, and then you’re expected to sleep in a fish tank? The first few days of breastfeeding went pretty well, but on Day Three things started to go downhill once she developed jaundice. She got very tired, she wouldn’t wake for feeds, she had trouble feeding, and to make matters worse, they thought she had a breathing problem. Fortunately, she didn’t have a breathing problem, but the jaundice forced me to start feeding her expressed milk to make sure she was getting enough food.
Expressing milk has been both good and bad. It’s great knowing for sure how much she’s getting in, but in the hosptial it meant going out to get the pump machine at every feed, pumping, cleaning all the equipment afterwards, and then returning the pump. It took forever. We’re still on that routine, and I’m really hoping for a return to proper breastfeeding soon. But that’s another post.
The great thing about the hospital stay was being able to focus on Tess alone for five days. Chris stayed every night with me to help out with night shifts, but during the day he was running around looking after Rose and organising all the stuff we didn’t have time to organise before Tess arrived (like a car seat!) Every afternoon Mark would bring Rose to the hospital for a visit. It was pretty obvious that Rose was being very well taken care of, but that she was quite freaked out by seeing her mum in hospital. She would often run around distractedly, or act out, or simply just not seem like her usual self. The day I came home in the car she took one look at me and gave me the biggest smile I think I’ve ever seen.
