Week 1: "Baby-Friendly" Hospital

I had an uncomplicated pregnancy and birth, but I have some notes. This is the first installment in a short series about the stuff I wish someone had told me before I had a baby.

I cannot believe how little research I did before giving birth. I went to the hospital for my scheduled induction, 40 weeks and 1 day into my pregnancy, with a suitcase full of sweaters, nightgowns, grippy socks (they give you those), and velcro swaddles that I hadn’t put through a washing machine. All of it sat unused in a pile on top of my suitcase and only served as an obstacle for cosmetics, or lozenges. All I truly needed to bring were two things: formula, and a steely resolve not to be bullied by the battle-axes in lactation.

I wish I could tell you what my first, distinct thought was when I saw my baby. I remember the sight of him. I remember his face when they put him in my arms. I remember the wave of relief that he was alive and crying. I put him right to my breast, which was covered in hydrocortisone cream from me trying to relieve an itch that covered my whole body in the weeks leading up to birth. Pregnancy had been miserable, but his birth was surprisingly okay. I was full of adrenaline, the infamous New Mom hormones, and gratitude that it seemed I was functioning as nature intended, attachment-wise.

For the first few hours postpartum, I thought breastfeeding was a success. The baby would hang out on my nipple, latched shallowly as if on a straw, and fall asleep almost instantly. But his fatigue was not a sign that he was full, I learned. I learned a lot of difficult things very quickly, from an assortment of women who all exhibited varying shades of annoyance, exasperation, and disappointment.

I am going to back up to March, about three weeks before my due date. A co-worker pulled me aside and tried to prepare me for the possibility that I may have to do something that my then-pregnant brain hadn’t yet conceptualized. She said, “Do not be afraid to supplement with formula…you’ll hear ‘breast is best’ a lot but know, there is a movement called ‘fed is best,’ too.’” She even gave me some formula samples to keep, so that I could be prepared if breastfeeding did not immediately go according to plan.

I was aware enough of the “breast is best” zealots to understand that I was intellectually, totally okay with formula. But I did not think the dreaded pivot to bottle would happen to me. I feigned acceptance at the possibility that breastfeeding would be difficult. I secretly believed that my baby would latch, that I would be full of milk, and that we would be a mother-son lactation dream team right from the start.

Forward to a few weeks later, Boy Baby (we named him on April 8th, 2 days after he was born) made his grand debut, and the dream team had not emerged. Night and day blended to one, because the baby would not sleep unless he was pressed against my husband or me. I was in a tremendous amount of pain from tearing during birth, a pain compounded by the fact that I had been constipated for about five days before having the baby. I had not pooped during birth, which is not a good sign for constipation relief, by the way. Childbirth is high up there on the list of “things that make you poop,” right by coffee, cigarettes, and being in your car a block away from your house.

The poop is gross, but it’s important. Nurses kept giving me stool softener, rolling their eyes at my assertion that I was going to need surgery on my asshole. I had googled it and was pretty certain I had an impacted stool (I did), and that I needed an enema before it got worse (I was right). My pleas for an investigation into the butt-rock resting against my newly sewn genital stitches were continuously dismissed. It hurt to sit, it hurt to lie down, it hurt to be awake. At all hours of the day and night, people were barging into our room to contort me and my newborn into all manner of shapes to try to get whatever liquid I was producing into his tiny, empty stomach. Breastfeeding was not working.

Baby was not sleeping on the boob because he was full, but because he was malnourished and jaundiced. He was too hungry to sleep anywhere but on our chests, but too sleepy to do the hard work of nursing long enough to get whatever droplets of colostrum my breasts were producing. Instead of acknowledging how difficult of a cycle this was, the lactation consultants were mean. They listened just long enough to hear what I was doing wrong so they could pounce on my error as the source of my problem. They dismissed what a very curt ENT later declared to be my baby’s “pretty significant" tongue-tie as “not that bad” and tried to divert my attention to my own shortcomings: I was not positioning him correctly, I was not sitting right (it hurt to sit or stand or truly, to exist), I was not getting my breast far enough into his mouth, and more. I was simply doing everything wrong, and they were very displeased with me.

Tears flowed freely and my voice quivered as I spoke to Juliet, the lactation consultant I dealt with the most. My fragile disposition did not dissuade her from grabbing my breast to demonstrate how I was supposed to “massage” my milk into my baby’s mouth. I was supposed to do this, she explained, while simultaneously holding my baby in a very specific position, propped up on a mountain of pillows that I never managed to engineer in a way that facilitated breastfeeding. Instead, I lustfully imagined using all of these pillows to sleep, something I did not do for at least a week after having the baby.

Hungry babies don’t sleep, they cry. They will sleep on you, but not in their bassinets. Breastfeeding fanatics will tell you that newborns only need a drop of colostrum to fill their marble-sized tummies while you wait for your breastmilk. Our baby was not even getting those drops, it seemed. If he did, he was unsatisfied, and his diapers were dry. We did not sleep. I was not recovering from birth because I was not sleeping.

I fell asleep sitting upright, holding our baby, multiple times. I asked my husband to watch me, to make sure I didn’t drop the baby or crush him while I snagged crumbs of rest here and there. These desperate 1-3 minute stints were all I got in the hospital. Being tired does strange things to your brain. All I could think of was the ways that my baby could die, and how he most certainly would. The intrusive thoughts became unbearable and lasted for a month. I scream-cried our entire car ride home from the hospital.

Very few people told me they understood this was hard. No one acknowledged I could possibly be in pain. The lactation consultants ignored me every time I said it was too painful to sit up to nurse, that my milk wasn’t even in yet, that I just wanted to get him fed to get his bilirubin levels down. No one in the hospital mentioned formula, much less suggested it as a way to clear the bilirubin from his lethargic, jaundice-ridden body while I waited for my milk to come in. It could have been the lack of sleep, but I had a strong sense that everyone was mad at me. In retrospect, it still seems as if the pediatricians and nurses in the labor and delivery unit were at best, annoyed.

Everyone hates moms. Lactation consultants hate moms. “Baby-Friendly” hospitals definitely hate moms. As I waddled into the pediatrician’s office on the Saturday after the Tuesday I gave birth, the front desk woman fawned over the baby and smiled at my husband before turning to me and removing the grace from her eyes. She asked, “Did you have a c-section?” In a tone that was meant to convey that such a procedure was the barometer for whether or not I was allowed to complain.

In summary, I had not had a c-section but had torn during the vaginal birth of my son. I was constipated before they gave me Zofran and then Vicodin. No one in labor and delivery listened to me when I said stool softener was useless for the rock already lodged at the end of my now-sewn-together anus, so I had returned to the Obstetric ED the night before we went to the pediatrician’s office to beg for relief. Ultimately, the relief came in the form of 3 extremely painful enemas. There was blood, there was shit, and there was one very nice nurse, one evil nurse, and one doctor that chided me for “waiting so long” to address the poop situation.

I’ve heard a lot of talk of how medical professionals are war veterans, how they’ve “seen everything” and are impossible to shock. All of that folklore lingering in my brain only made me feel worse about the fact that my disgusting, burdensome body seemed to give them the willies. All that being said, poopgate was a turning point in my healing process. My physical condition began to improve from there, and once I was out of panic mode, my milk finally arrived.

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