035/365-2013 – Transitional Care Day 2

Our first night back in hospital was beyond tough, I had been told to set an alarm to feed him expressed breast milk every 3 hours throughout the night. What this meant was giving him the bottle, winding him, then expressing milk ready for the next feed. Sounds quite simple really but in reality, he drank the expressed milk so fast from a bottle that he ended up projectile vomiting the entire feed all over me, my bed, his crib, his bandaged arm and the floor. This happened at each feed until at 4am I broke down, I had a raging migraine but because I hadn’t been readmitted myself, the hospital couldn’t give me any medication. I had been awake from 12am until 4am and just couldn’t cope any longer so I pressed the bell to call the Midwife. She walked into my room, took one look at me and told me to get into bed and sleep whilst she took care of Jelly Bean for me. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and stirred only when Jelly Bean was brought back to me at 6.30am. We both then slept until 8.30am when I awoke to the sounds of him fussing for a feed. Today was a new day, today was the day that I would nail breastfeeding with Jelly Bean. I asked for the Breastfeeding Consultant to come and help me to get Jelly Bean latched on properly.

Within 5 minutes she was in my room telling me there was no way in the world that Jelly Bean would be able to latch on as my boobs were too engorged with milk and so we turned once more to the breast shields. It took a few attempts but finally we had him latched on properly and although it was still painful for me thanks to the damaged caused to my nipples in the past few days, Jelly Bean fed well from both breasts and then spent a very relaxed 40-50 minutes just looking around and staring out of the window.

As the day wore on I made sure that I only ever let him feed if he was latched on properly and each time we perfected the latch more and more. I also took the opportunity to sleep whenever he did and so by the evening when our visitors arrived I was feeling much brighter and confident and Jelly Bean was doing much better too.