Author: B. Jody Segrave-Daly, RN, IBCLC

I Dropped My Baby in a Baby-Friendly Hospital While I Was Alone Recovering from a Cesarean Section

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Step 7 of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) policy requires parents to room in with their baby 24 hours a day immediately after delivery.

Mothers are commonly sleep-deprived and profoundly exhausted after labor and delivery, some laboring for > 24 hours, some recovering from major surgery. They are required to nurse and care for a newborn almost immediately after delivery with few exceptions. Maternal exhaustion has lead to tragic and preventable accidental newborn falls from bed and suffocation from falling asleep while breastfeeding in bed. These accidents have resulted in brain injury, severe disability, and rare deaths in previously healthy infants. The elimination of newborn nurseries by hospitals has increased as a result of the Baby-Friendly policy. These tragic events received the attention of pediatricians and the Neonatology Section of the American Academy of Pediatrics who has published their concerns in the medical journals of JAMA and JAMA Pediatrics and Pediatrics.

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The Letter Not Only Protected Me; It Protected The Nurses Too

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The Letter was from my psychiatrist. It was our way of beating a system that neither of us agreed with, or believed was good for my mental health. It provided protection for me to make decisions that went against the Baby-Friendly Hospital mandates. 

The amount of stuff a pregnant woman brings to the hospital for delivery gets progressively smaller, the more children she has. With my first child, I brought three bags; I ended up ignoring 90% of the contents and gave my husband fits when he loaded the car for the ride home. By the time I packed the hospital bag for my third child, everything fit neatly into a small duffel. Even then, I felt like I was overpacking. As long as I had a phone charger, some lip balm, and the Letter, I knew I’d be fine. 

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I Had Asymmetric Tubular Breasts; My Breastfeeding Story

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Written By Rachel

 As a young girl, I knew something was wrong with my breasts when they began to develop.   I had asymmetric tubular breasts, and it quickly became my biggest insecurity. At the age of 20, I saw a doctor who told me a breast augmentation would “fix” them. Trusting her medical opinion I had breast augmentation surgery. Now they were double the size and sagging from the weight of the implants. It was worse than what they originally were, making my anxiety and insecurities heightened. After a few years, I decided to get them removed by another doctor who specializes in reconstruction surgeries. I got the implants taken out, a lift of the skin and fat removed from my stomach to fill the empty pouches. With two surgeries comes many scars and of course trauma to the breast tissue. 

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Our Close Call with Our Baby’s Life While Exclusively Breastfeeding Haunts Us

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Written By Ansley T.

When my baby was 5 days old, I got a call from the pediatrician we chose before birth. As soon as I answered, she started speaking very fast and explained that Northside Hospital had notified her that one of our son’s Newborn Screening Test results had come back with an abnormal reading;  he needed to be evaluated by a doctor urgently, but in the meantime, I needed to be sure to feed him every two hours. I couldn’t even compute all she said, but I explained that we were already in the NICU at Children’s Hospital because of his low body temperature on the first night home from the hospital.  We found out that day our son has medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD).

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Is My Baby’s Weight Loss Normal Or Excessive?

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The Newborn Weight Loss Tool can provide an answer.

Parents are taught that it’s normal for babies to lose 7–10% of their body weight in the first few days after birth, but is this true? Well, that depends. According to the AAP, a baby who loses more than 7% of his body weight may be losing excessive weight and requires a comprehensive lactation evaluation to rule out delayed onset of copious milk production, primary lactation failure, and/or infant oral anomalies that prevent adequate colostrum/milk transfer.

From the American Academy of Pediatrics HealthyChildren.org website. Breastfed newborns should lose no more than 7 percent of birth weight in the first few days after birth before starting to gain weight again. (Accessed July 16, 2020)

Weight loss has typically been assessed using simple percentages, but now there is a much more precise and accurate way to track excessive weight loss in newborns and many hospitals, pediatricians, and lactation consultants are adopting this method for greater accuracy in making clinical recommendations. The Newborn Weight Tool, or NEWT, is an online tool, the first of its kind, to help pediatricians determine whether exclusively breastfed newborns have lost too much weight in the first days of life. The tool was developed at Penn State College of Medicine through research conducted jointly with University of California, San Francisco. It was developed using a research sample of hourly birth weights from more than 100,000 breastfed newborns. For a quick synopsis of this tool from the lead investigator and one of developers of the tool, Dr. Ian Paul, watch the video below.

Source: Penn State Health News

In this video, Dr. Ian Paul, professor of pediatrics and public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine and pediatrician at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, talks about how NEWT fills an important void.  Determining whether an exclusively breastfed newborn is losing excessive weight is important because higher weight loss almost always reflects suboptimal milk intake. It is also associated with increased risk of medical complications such as low blood sugar, jaundice, and dehydration, which can result in the need for medical interventions and future health and developmental problems. This weight-loss tool shows that how quickly babies lose weight is just as important as how much they lose.

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