ferrousland.com - diary archives
Saturday, September 27, 2003
the baby - 01:26 PM
our darling baby boy was born on thursday the 11th of september, 2003, at 6:50pm by caesarian section.
he was 2830 grams (about six pound three) & was born one day shy of thirty-eight weeks, although they suspect that he may have been a couple of weeks younger than that. he still had a lot of vernix on him (which usually starts to disappear at about thirty-six weeks) & he was quite small. although really, i would have been surprised if he'd been born average size. both his mum & dad are short, so to give birth to a tall baby would have been rather unlikely.
his breathing was a little bit laboured, so as they took him to do the apgar tests & give him a shot of vitamin k, they gave him some oxygen. i was told that a baby's breathing can often be affected by the drugs given to the mother for an epidural, so it wasn't necessarily anything to worry about. he was also a little bit cold, so once they'd brought him to me to meet him, they took him out to recovery & put him in a temperature & oxygen controlled crib.
our baby boy had a rather large bruise on the right side of his face from the forceps. my obstetrician apologised profusely to each of us twice, even to our baby. it didn't actually worry me as much as i thought it would when at our prenatal classes i'd first heard about possible bruises on babies from using forceps. before our prenatal classes, in fact, i had no idea that they even used forceps for caesarian deliveries.
after spending ten or fifteen minutes in recovery with him, where we could see him but not touch him since he was in the crib thing, they wheeled me off to my room, with shroom following, & took our baby to the special care nursery.
that night, they fitted a nasal gastric tube to him, a very skinny tube which is fed into one nostril, all the way down into his stomach. they would then attach a small container to the end which would be filled with formula & held up high so that it drained directly into his stomach. when i saw this the next morning i wondered why they'd done it. the paediatrician said it was because he wasn't breastfeeding. funny that, since they hadn't brought him to me the whole first night. 
.. i guess since he had to have oxygen & temperature control, it would have been impossible to breastfeed him that night.
after an attempt to breastfeed him that first morning, when he wasn't interested & just slept (perhaps he'd just had a tube feed) he was brought back to me an hour or two later. i put him to my breast & he took to it like a champion! he fed for a solid half hour until he fell asleep.
after that first feed, they wanted me to come to the special care nursery to feed him so they could observe how well he was feeding & give me any help if i needed it. they were very good with helping to get him latched on properly & answered all the questions i had. i didn't mind going to the nursery to feed him. i wanted them to call me whenever he wanted a feed since it meant i could spend more time with him.
at this stage, we still hadn't found a name for him, so the midwives had given him a name in the meantime. i was in the room to the side of the nursery, where mums & dads could come to feed their babies which were in special care & i was feeding him. it was late at night & the shift was changing over. one midwife was talking to another one, giving her a run down on what each baby was up to, "isobel had a breastfeed earlier & is due for another one soon, sarah's oxygen needs to be adjusted later," etc, etc, then she mentioned our baby, "tomato" 
.. it was a play on our last name. i called out from the feeding room, "i heard that!"
one late evening, one of the midwives phoned me in my room to come to feed him. when i arrived, he wasn't in his crib. i knew he wouldn't be far, so i looked around & saw the midwife that had called me was holding him & comforting him until i arrived. that struck a chord in me. i could already see that the special care midwives were good at their jobs & seemed to enjoy it, but when i saw that it also showed me that they genuinely adored all the babies too. i'm sure in some places they would have just left him to cry until i arrived.
the third night he was in the nursery, they told me that they would try him on demand feeding up to four hourly. that meant that they wouldn't be giving him any tube feeds & they would wait until he was hungry for a breastfeed, leaving him no longer than four hours between feeds if he didn't wake for one before then. if all went well that night with his feeds, then he could stay with me the following night & then be discharged from the special care nursery.
aside from one tube feed because the midwife said he was looking a little jaundiced, he fed really solidly on the breast. he was still very tired & i had to keep waking him when he'd fall asleep on the breast, but he did well. they said that the excessive sleepiness can also be a sign of a premmie baby.
they left his tube in for another day, just to make sure, which was just as well after we gave him his first bath. it was a very warm bath, as opposed to the lukewarm baths which some of the 'old school' midwives seem to ascribe to, & he loved it! he was so relaxed after his bath that he fell asleep as soon as he was dressed. it was time for his feed, but the midwife & i could see that nothing was going to wake this child. rather than let him sleep through, when feeding him was a priority since he was so small (one of the main reasons he was kept in special care & put on tube feeds in the first place), we gave him a tube feed. it was kind of nice that i got to give him that feed, even if all i did was hold the container up in the air until it had finished draining down through the the tube into his stomach. there's something so special about feeding a baby, no matter how it's done.
on the fourth night, he was finally allowed to stay in my room with me where i fed him on demand. it was sort of scary for me, because it was the longest time i'd spent alone with him. during that night, i wasn't sure that i was going to get any sleep at all, but after his second feed early in the morning, he slept for a number of hours.
that next morning, they discharged him from special care & took the tube out of his nose. he wasn't very happy about that at all, since the tube had to be pulled all the way out from down in his stomach. poor little bugger, must have really hurt. combined with pulling the tape off his face which had been holding the tube in place, that was the hardest i'd seen him cry since he was born.
he sleeps like a trouper our little man. especially while we were still in hospital, he was very sleepy & i struggled to keep him awake during feeds to make sure that he'd had enough. while eating breakfast one morning (with one hand) while i was feeding him, i tried many different things to try to keep him awake or wake him if it looked like he'd fallen totally asleep. there was the stroking of the head & the face, the tickling behind the hear & on the chin & the neck. those were only effective if he was beginning to doze off.
after he'd fallen totally asleep, i wondered how much noise he would sleep through, since at one stage i'd turned the hair dryer on while he was asleep & he didn't even flinch. so while i was eating my breakfast, i experimented with hitting the cutlery on the plate. first just a tap, then i fully bashed it on the plate a number of times, but not even a flicker of an eyelid. we wondered for a while if perhaps he was deaf, but no, he could hear fine, he just sleeps like the proverbial log. this is a good thing. 
the final night in hospital was his second night with me in my room. shroom came to stay that night & i realised how much more stress it put me under when i was trying to feed him quietly without waking shroom too. mind you, it was the beginning of something very new & scary for us since we would be taking him home the next day & neither of us slept very well.
the morning of my discharge, we finally chose a name for our boy, riley. after we had him packed up & ready to go, shroom went to get the car to bring it around to the side entrance. while he put riley into the baby capsule, i dashed into the special care nursery to let them know that we'd named him. the midwife on duty was very pleased & said that she'd write it in one of the books they check daily so that the other midwives would know.
once i got home, i made sure to buy a thank you card for the lovely midwives & signed it from myself, shroom & "riley, the artist formerly known as tomato."
never learn that one, corri! vaccuum around him
riley is a good name for a boy, but i'm sorry, i'm afraid that from now on i'll only be able to think of him as tomato.
it is dreadfully cute.
now i want a baby so i can call him tomato! happy sunday.Fabulous - simply fabulous, sounds like you're all doing great. Riley's definitely a better name than Tomato
i seem to remember calling him 'tomato' while you were still pregnant with him
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leave it to you to try and ease boredom by seeing how noisy you can get before you wake up your baby. i think a standard mama's adage is "don't wake a sleeping baby". but you'll probably learn this soon enough.