1/9/98

We are on the way to interview the pediatrician.

Circumcision

Preemie – What do you do different?  More visits?

Breastfeeding

Emergency – how many doctors on call?

Visit in hospital prior to him coming?  Who lets her know?

We liked Dr. E. – so she will be T1’s pediatrician.  His first visit will be about a week after he comes home.

We went and fed T1 his 11:30 feeding.  He ate 28 ml, almost an ounce.  He slept through a good portion of it.

The babies all got moved to CHOC in the afternoon.  They are doing construction under the St. Jo’s nursery.  T1’s nurse said he didn’t like being transferred.  That he cried a lot.  That tired him out.  When Rob and I went to feed him at night he was very tired and didn’t eat as much.

(I will add this story though it was from when I was still in the hospital.

There was an evening when Rob and I went to the NICU to feed T1 and it was a busy night there.  I fed him his bottle and then we left.  Later when we called down to check on him the nurse YELLED at me saying that I fed him too much and he threw up a lot of it and that I shouldn’t have done that.  I was devastated.  I felt like I didn’t even know how to take care of my baby and that I was a bad mom.  But in reality, I didn’t know not to feed him the whole bottle.  How was I supposed to know that?

This is one of my first personal experiences where I can say how important the words we use as we work with moms is.  The words this nurse used made me feel inadequate and scared to take care of my baby.  She could have just as easily told me kindly, “I am sorry I didn’t tell you to only give him half the bottle.  He ate too much and threw up most of it.”

Also in retrospect I don’t even understand why he was being given bottles at all.  It was clear I wanted to breastfeed and I was never encouraged to try to do so.  So here it was 7 days after he was born and he had never latched on.  I was pumping, but that was it.)