You Want Breastmilk With That?

There has been a big gap in my postings. As you might have noticed from one of my previous missives, it’s because I became a new father on May 3rd.

There hasn’t been much on my radar lately except for feeding, burping, holding, and changing the diapers of two little girls. The first ten days were stressful because both girls remained in the extended care nursery at UNM Hospital. Vivian came home on May 13th and then the stress multiplied even more because in addition to caring for her, we needed to shuttle back and forth between home and the hospital to see Eleanor.

Eleanor entered her fourth week at UNM with signs of great progress and then setbacks in terms of how much she’d eat at mealtimes. The hospital policy is not to discharge unless the baby can eat a certain volume over a nursing shift for four consecutive shifts. Eleanor kept missing the targets for one out of four 12-hour shifts, essentially restarting the clock. We’d get a phone call telling us to plan on picking her up the “day after next” and then a call that day telling us we’d have to wait.

Finally, we had enough. I think the conversation consisted of telling the charge nurse, “Shift minimums be damned and go shove hospital policy. We’re taking our daughter home.” Never forget who's in charge of the discharge of the child, the P-A-R-E-N-T.

That day, June 3, we brought Eleanor home and naturally she’s now making all of her “shift” minimums.

A couple of lessons here:

First, babies are not machines. Just because there is a chart or a policy that says a baby at such and such weight/age, etc. needs to eat such and such amount doesn’t mean that every individual baby will do so. It’s foolish to blindly apply averages to individuals.

Second, parents sometimes need to assert themselves in order to take primary responsibility for their children. It’s so easy to abdicate a child’s care when one assumes that doctors or nurses “knows best.” This is not always the case. Quite often those hard-working medical professionals are simply following whatever rule, chart, policy, etc. governs the situation; i.e. and not looking at the individual child and her needs.

Who better indeed than the parents of a child to perform that necessary activity?