So I think it's a sign that it's time to share my Failure to Thrive story.
This is a doosy, so bear with me. I've decided to break it into parts to make it more readable.
Let's start off in the beginning of the beginning. Somewhere along the line in the dizzyingly constant barrage of prenatal testing, I failed the Blood Glucose Tolerance Test. Before I go off onto a lengthy tangent about my feelings and experience with that one, let me just stop myself and sum it all up: GD went unchecked for a month, it took a few weeks to get under control, my morning fasting sugars were always high, I was put on insulin because diet alone wasn't doing it.
Lukas was born weighing 8lbs, 2oz at 38 weeks, 3 days gestation. His father and I were both born at 7lbs, 13oz. I'm inclined to believe that his weight at birth was higher than it would have been had my body not been pumping extra sugar his way for at least a month and a half. He then proceded to lose exactly 10% of his body weight after birth.
I was lucky enough to have had an unmedicated, vaginal birth. I attempted to put him to my breast within the first hour, but couldn't get him to latch. I was told I had flat nipples so he couldn't tell as easily when he'd made it to the nipple to start sucking. Over the next 24 hours, I think I was shown every trick in the book to get a baby to latch on to flat nipples. Nothing worked. Every time he was awake, I paged for help latching him on. It took them so long to respond that he would fall asleep before help arrived every time. He'd been born at 9:04pm on Thursday. The hospital ran out of space for laboring mothers and discharged us at 10:00pm on Friday night, nipple shield and formula samples in hand, without Lukas having ever latched onto my breast.
Because it was the weekend, and the Lactation Consultant with the hospital wouldn't be able to see me at home until Monday and Lukas still hadn't nursed successfully, we were told to come back to the hospital on Sunday to have his biliruben and weight checked and get some lactation help.
While at home, I had some luck getting him to latch with the nipple shield. I could tell he was getting something because I felt my uterus contracting, there would be droplets of colostrum left in the nipple shield as evidence after a feeding, and he had plenty of wet diapers. By Sunday he was looking a little yellow and I still couldn't feed him without the shield. My milk hadn't come in yet and I wasn't sure how to use my pump.
As we prepared to go in for the hospital check-up, I naively debated whether or not to bring my pump in so the Lactation Consultant, who I was told would be there, could show me how to use it while we were there. In the end, I left it at home figuring I could just ask questions. She'd be coming to see us at home on Monday anyway. By then my milk should have come in and everything would be better anyway.
However, when we got to the hospital, there were only two nurses on shift. Neither of them had been there when we delivered and no one seemed to know why we were there. We could see our names written down on the calendar on their desk. What was the problem? Finally, they decided to take us back to the lactation room (basically a closet in the corner in the back of the maternity wing with a chair and a scale in it--nothing else would have fit). We were left there to wait.
For the next 45 minutes, we were left alone to wait in that tiny, hot little "room." Lukas started fussing almost immediately. I couldn't latch him on without enduring 10 minutes of screaming at minimum, so I elected to try and wait to feed him since someone was surely going to be with us soon. My husband went and searched out a nurse. Twice. As we were about to just leave, someone came in and checked his biliruben with a little wand thing they pressed against his forehead. She thought it looked high and checked again. Yep, high. Out she went. She rushed in and out, telling us very little and asking us a lot.
She told me that the Lactation Consultant would just weigh Lukas and check his biliruben levels tomorrow like she just had, so did we want her to cancel the appointment for us. Shocked, tired, hot, sore, hormonal, and 3 days post-partum, I asked "That's all she does at the home visits?" The nurse affirmed and asked us again if we wanted to cancel. Heartbroken that the savior I'd been waiting for didn't exist, I begrudgingly agreed to let her cancel the appointment.
She then wanted to have Lukas's blood tested because that'd be a more accurate reading. We'd been waiting so long that Out Patient was closed for the day. So they sent us down to the ER to get Lukas's blood drawn to check for jaundice. A mere 4 hours later, we returned home. Exhausted, beaten, and overwhelmed.
We didn't have an official pediatrician set up yet at birth because when I'd called my doctor's office asking about it, I'd been told they didn't set that sort of thing up until 2 weeks after the baby was born. Being a naive first-time mom, I didn't realize how silly that was and believed what I was told. So the hospital's pediatrician, Dr. M, saw Lukas at the hospital on Friday morning and was the one on file to follow up with the jaundice. On Monday, when my doctor's office opened, I called to set up the doctor I wanted for Lukas. All day Monday, I fielded calls from both offices. Both wanted me to set up appointments. Dr. M couldn't seem to understand that Dr. F was supposed to be Lukas's doctor. She told me I might have to drive out to her other office 45 minutes away. She told me to give him nursery water and to nurse him every 2 hours. I'd never even heard of nursery water and assumed she meant formula (I later learned that nursery water does exist and is not, in fact, formula, but special water to be used for such things as mixing formula.). I told her that I was nursing on demand. Dr. F scheduled us to come in early in the afternoon on Monday.
While we were waiting in his office, my milk finally came in. I was afraid to try and feed Lukas because that meant at least 10 minutes of Lukas screaming in a public place where everyone could hear me failing. Dr. F explained that Lukas's biliruben level was at 17 and that at 20, they had to start worrying about brain damage. He told me to express my milk and bottle feed him for the time being and gave us the choice of taking Lukas back to the hospital to be put under the bili lights or to use a bili blanket at home. We chose the blanket. We also needed to take him in to the hospital's Out Patient lab to have his blood drawn daily to check his biliruben levels.
When we got home, I pumped while my husband fed Lukas his first bottle of formula. At some point, while Lukas and I were napping, the Lactation Consultant called to check up on us because we'd cancelled our appointment and she was worried. My husband explained what was going on and she expressed concern about the bottle feeding. I was so tired, overwhelmed, and frustrated with our situation that I just assumed she was of the "formula is the devil" crowd and instantly wrote her off. She clearly hadn't wanted to help us anyway.
For the next 6 days, Lukas sat in his bouncer wrapped in the bili blanket unless he was eating or getting his diaper changed. It didn't take long for me to give up on trying to feed him without the nipple shield. It clearly wasn't going to happen. So he ate with the shield and we supplemented with expressed milk to make sure he was getting more than enough. We went to the hospital every day to have his labs drawn and followed up with doctor visits and phone calls.
On Saturday, we went in to get the lab drawn, knowing they would be closed on Sunday. We reminded them that they needed to page Dr. F with the results because his office would be closed in the afternoon. They assured us they would. We could tell he was no longer jaundiced and his numbers had been going down for the last few days, so we opted not to keep him under the lights unless we were called and told his numbers were bad. We got no call, so we assumed he was healthy.
Monday morning brought an angry phone call from the doctor's office wanting to know why we'd skipped the lab draw on Saturday. My husband fielded that call as well and explained that we hadn't skipped the draw, the hospital must not have paged the doctor with the results. The doctor's office called us back a little while later to let us know that we didn't need to worry about the jaundice anymore.
At Lukas's 2 week appointment he'd returned to a healthy 7lbs, 14oz. Still not back to his birth weight, but Dr. F agreed that his birth weight was probably inflated because of my GD. We were set free into the world with our baby and told we didn't have to make another appointment until he was 2 months old. We both breathed a happy sigh of relief. The horror was over. We could finally relax and enjoy our baby.
Let's start off in the beginning of the beginning. Somewhere along the line in the dizzyingly constant barrage of prenatal testing, I failed the Blood Glucose Tolerance Test. Before I go off onto a lengthy tangent about my feelings and experience with that one, let me just stop myself and sum it all up: GD went unchecked for a month, it took a few weeks to get under control, my morning fasting sugars were always high, I was put on insulin because diet alone wasn't doing it.
Lukas was born weighing 8lbs, 2oz at 38 weeks, 3 days gestation. His father and I were both born at 7lbs, 13oz. I'm inclined to believe that his weight at birth was higher than it would have been had my body not been pumping extra sugar his way for at least a month and a half. He then proceded to lose exactly 10% of his body weight after birth.
I was lucky enough to have had an unmedicated, vaginal birth. I attempted to put him to my breast within the first hour, but couldn't get him to latch. I was told I had flat nipples so he couldn't tell as easily when he'd made it to the nipple to start sucking. Over the next 24 hours, I think I was shown every trick in the book to get a baby to latch on to flat nipples. Nothing worked. Every time he was awake, I paged for help latching him on. It took them so long to respond that he would fall asleep before help arrived every time. He'd been born at 9:04pm on Thursday. The hospital ran out of space for laboring mothers and discharged us at 10:00pm on Friday night, nipple shield and formula samples in hand, without Lukas having ever latched onto my breast.
Because it was the weekend, and the Lactation Consultant with the hospital wouldn't be able to see me at home until Monday and Lukas still hadn't nursed successfully, we were told to come back to the hospital on Sunday to have his biliruben and weight checked and get some lactation help.
While at home, I had some luck getting him to latch with the nipple shield. I could tell he was getting something because I felt my uterus contracting, there would be droplets of colostrum left in the nipple shield as evidence after a feeding, and he had plenty of wet diapers. By Sunday he was looking a little yellow and I still couldn't feed him without the shield. My milk hadn't come in yet and I wasn't sure how to use my pump.
As we prepared to go in for the hospital check-up, I naively debated whether or not to bring my pump in so the Lactation Consultant, who I was told would be there, could show me how to use it while we were there. In the end, I left it at home figuring I could just ask questions. She'd be coming to see us at home on Monday anyway. By then my milk should have come in and everything would be better anyway.
However, when we got to the hospital, there were only two nurses on shift. Neither of them had been there when we delivered and no one seemed to know why we were there. We could see our names written down on the calendar on their desk. What was the problem? Finally, they decided to take us back to the lactation room (basically a closet in the corner in the back of the maternity wing with a chair and a scale in it--nothing else would have fit). We were left there to wait.
For the next 45 minutes, we were left alone to wait in that tiny, hot little "room." Lukas started fussing almost immediately. I couldn't latch him on without enduring 10 minutes of screaming at minimum, so I elected to try and wait to feed him since someone was surely going to be with us soon. My husband went and searched out a nurse. Twice. As we were about to just leave, someone came in and checked his biliruben with a little wand thing they pressed against his forehead. She thought it looked high and checked again. Yep, high. Out she went. She rushed in and out, telling us very little and asking us a lot.
She told me that the Lactation Consultant would just weigh Lukas and check his biliruben levels tomorrow like she just had, so did we want her to cancel the appointment for us. Shocked, tired, hot, sore, hormonal, and 3 days post-partum, I asked "That's all she does at the home visits?" The nurse affirmed and asked us again if we wanted to cancel. Heartbroken that the savior I'd been waiting for didn't exist, I begrudgingly agreed to let her cancel the appointment.
She then wanted to have Lukas's blood tested because that'd be a more accurate reading. We'd been waiting so long that Out Patient was closed for the day. So they sent us down to the ER to get Lukas's blood drawn to check for jaundice. A mere 4 hours later, we returned home. Exhausted, beaten, and overwhelmed.
We didn't have an official pediatrician set up yet at birth because when I'd called my doctor's office asking about it, I'd been told they didn't set that sort of thing up until 2 weeks after the baby was born. Being a naive first-time mom, I didn't realize how silly that was and believed what I was told. So the hospital's pediatrician, Dr. M, saw Lukas at the hospital on Friday morning and was the one on file to follow up with the jaundice. On Monday, when my doctor's office opened, I called to set up the doctor I wanted for Lukas. All day Monday, I fielded calls from both offices. Both wanted me to set up appointments. Dr. M couldn't seem to understand that Dr. F was supposed to be Lukas's doctor. She told me I might have to drive out to her other office 45 minutes away. She told me to give him nursery water and to nurse him every 2 hours. I'd never even heard of nursery water and assumed she meant formula (I later learned that nursery water does exist and is not, in fact, formula, but special water to be used for such things as mixing formula.). I told her that I was nursing on demand. Dr. F scheduled us to come in early in the afternoon on Monday.
While we were waiting in his office, my milk finally came in. I was afraid to try and feed Lukas because that meant at least 10 minutes of Lukas screaming in a public place where everyone could hear me failing. Dr. F explained that Lukas's biliruben level was at 17 and that at 20, they had to start worrying about brain damage. He told me to express my milk and bottle feed him for the time being and gave us the choice of taking Lukas back to the hospital to be put under the bili lights or to use a bili blanket at home. We chose the blanket. We also needed to take him in to the hospital's Out Patient lab to have his blood drawn daily to check his biliruben levels.
When we got home, I pumped while my husband fed Lukas his first bottle of formula. At some point, while Lukas and I were napping, the Lactation Consultant called to check up on us because we'd cancelled our appointment and she was worried. My husband explained what was going on and she expressed concern about the bottle feeding. I was so tired, overwhelmed, and frustrated with our situation that I just assumed she was of the "formula is the devil" crowd and instantly wrote her off. She clearly hadn't wanted to help us anyway.
For the next 6 days, Lukas sat in his bouncer wrapped in the bili blanket unless he was eating or getting his diaper changed. It didn't take long for me to give up on trying to feed him without the nipple shield. It clearly wasn't going to happen. So he ate with the shield and we supplemented with expressed milk to make sure he was getting more than enough. We went to the hospital every day to have his labs drawn and followed up with doctor visits and phone calls.
On Saturday, we went in to get the lab drawn, knowing they would be closed on Sunday. We reminded them that they needed to page Dr. F with the results because his office would be closed in the afternoon. They assured us they would. We could tell he was no longer jaundiced and his numbers had been going down for the last few days, so we opted not to keep him under the lights unless we were called and told his numbers were bad. We got no call, so we assumed he was healthy.
Monday morning brought an angry phone call from the doctor's office wanting to know why we'd skipped the lab draw on Saturday. My husband fielded that call as well and explained that we hadn't skipped the draw, the hospital must not have paged the doctor with the results. The doctor's office called us back a little while later to let us know that we didn't need to worry about the jaundice anymore.
At Lukas's 2 week appointment he'd returned to a healthy 7lbs, 14oz. Still not back to his birth weight, but Dr. F agreed that his birth weight was probably inflated because of my GD. We were set free into the world with our baby and told we didn't have to make another appointment until he was 2 months old. We both breathed a happy sigh of relief. The horror was over. We could finally relax and enjoy our baby.
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