What’s that smell? Episode 4

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It’s 11pm on a Tuesday evening in April 2016. I’m sat in my car – suddenly overcome by emotion and exhaustion. I’ve just moved it to free up a parking space outside the house for the midwife who is now tending to my wife. My wife who, to varying level of intensity, has been having contractions for just over a day now. With hindsight, I realise now that 24 hours of varying contractions is not that unusual but back then I had no idea what to expect… In about 6 hours, Piglet will announce himself to the world in a birthing pool situated just next to where the dinning table usually stands. My super-human wife will deliver him virtually unassisted and without pain-relief while her blubbering wreck of a husband kneels helplessly by the side of the pool. Pretty much the only useful thing I can claim to have achieved is creating the playlist that sets the tone in the candle-lit background. The only snippet of humour in an otherwise very serious day will be that Piglet’s umbilical cord was so short that he was dragged around in the pool as my wife turned around repeatedly trying to find him after he’d arrived.

The first week was hard. Really hard. I had been told many, many times that the early days would be exhausting. What nobody had mentioned is that we’d be starting on the back foot by the time Piglet even arrived from dealing with about 48 hours of contractions, labour and birth (poor me, right?). Piglet was born fairly small at 6lb 8oz. Although I shouldn’t have been surprised at that considering I was only just over 4lb when I was born! Unfortunately Piglet decided to get smaller rather than bigger…

Most babies lose weight in the first few days – eating into the fat reserves before they’ve fully started to digest milk and put weight on from that. Unfortunately, and this will surprise anyone that has seem him eat as a toddler, Piglet struggled to really get any milk in those first few days. We learnt on day 2 that the reason was a tongue-tie; effectively a small bit of tissue in the mouth that connects the tongue to the base of the mouth. It’s meant to grow out and disappear by the time you’ve left the womb but fairly commonly it doesn’t fully separate.

Midwives are not allowed to ‘diagnose’ a tongue-tie in the UK, but ours was kind enough to suggest that we should at least get it looked at and it turned out Piglet had a pretty-much 100% tie (i.e. as bad as it gets). By sheer luck, our local breastfeeding clinic which meets weekly were open later that day and we were able to get it checked and cut (a very minor operation not requiring anaesthetic) later that afternoon. We were given the option of paying £100 (I think) to have it done privately at that clinic or join a waiting list to have it done at the hospital. I dread to think how the next few days would have gone if we hadn’t had it done then and there but it seems crazy that we got that privilege simply because we could afford it.

Poor Piglet, however, now had free use of his tongue for the first time in his life and, as a result, was not very good at using it. And in retrospect, we were probably slightly blasé about the signs that Piglet wasn’t putting on enough weight or dirtying enough nappies. He simply wasn’t getting enough milk and, without knowing what to expect or seeing how successful he was being at taking it, we didn’t know.

By the time we got to our 5-day check with the midwives, Piglet had lost 24% of his original birth weight. Well, that was what we were told. I worked out at a later date that the midwife got the denominator and numerator the wrong way round and in the confusion worked out that he needed to put 24% of his new weight back on to get back to his original weight which actually meant he’d lost 19%. But either way, if you’ve lost enough weight that the difference is material; you’ve lost too much weight! We were sent straight to hospital and booked into a neo-natal ward for a baby never born in a hospital in the first place.

What followed was probably the toughest 24 hours of our lives: Guilt at not having realised how little he’d become, frustration at not being able to feed our child naturally, irritation at the bureaucratic contradictions of a variety of health professionals trying to solve multiple problems with incompatible requests and suggestions. Piglet was effectively put on a strict feeding plan that involved 3-hour cycles of breastfeeding, pumping and then topping up with formula for any shortfall in volume consumed. It’s hard to portray quite how tough this was on my wife. Breastfeeding for 30 minutes. Topping up with expressed breast or formula milk for another 15 minutes. Pumping then took the best part of another 30 minutes but worst of all, the richness of the formula milk would knock him out so badly that waking him for the next 3-hourly round of milk took up to 30 minutes too. There was barely any time at any point in the cycle to get any sleep – and this lasted for 3 days! 3 days until we went back to the breastfeeding clinic and were told categorically that we were martyring ourselves trying to keep it up and to try something less drastic. In short, this meant feeding him when he was awake and having lots and lots of skin-to-skin contact… If I regret anything in that first 24 hours after he was born it’s not telling virtually everyone give us more space so the three of us could just get into bed to feed and sleep. Not that family were demanding, most were very careful not to over impose, but I was so keen to show that we could cope and function normally from day one.

Breastfeeding was still difficult and Piglet really struggled to latch on. My wife deserves a medal for persevering, such was her single mindedness to want to breastfeed her son. In the end a combination of nipple shields, perseverance and developed tongue strength got us to the point where he could be fed without formula being required. I just want to say that while my wife used a lot of effort to get back to breastfeeding; I know that it doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t just come down to effort. We experienced a lot of pressure to top up with formula but also to breastfeed and at such a fragile and suggestible time I think this could have been really damaging. In the end, a lot of our decision was driven by just not liking what the formula (cow’s milk!) did to him in knocking him out. Nobody should be made to feel bad for feeding their child the way that feels most right for them.

I’ll let you in on a little secret here: Piglet’s inability to latch on was the reason we call him ‘Piglet’ in the first place. In those early days, he used to snuggle up to his mummy and snuffle at the milk he so desperately wanted. All inwards breaths and no sucking. (There you go, Rachel, you finally get to know!) It would have been cute if it wasn’t so sad. He used to feed for such long times too. Exhausting himself trying to get the milk in the first place. I think he once fed for 2.5 hours without stopping! But he did eventually get there. We were even able to drop the nipple shields eventually. And once he got the hang of it he started growing rapidly! Milk was only the beginning and he certainly developed a healthy appetite as he was expressing a desire to eat our food well before we started weaning him. But that’s getting into next week’s post!

Toodle pips!

x

Episode 5 ->