By Hayley Malan
Having a baby places a huge responsibility on a parent. Baby cannot eat or move without your help and completely reliant on you to survive.
It’s something that does not come naturally to everyone immediately and there are they may be some complications after the birth of your child too.
As newborns can’t speak, there may be something wrong and there is no way for them to communicate the problem to parents.
For one Mom, who prefers to be named Mandy – her son couldn’t communicate the fact that he was starving, even though she was breastfeeding him constantly.
Naturally, she was incredibly concerned when her son wasn’t putting on any weight. The Mom was at a loss as to why he was starving and it eventually took numerous visits to doctors and paediatricians to diagnose what the problem was.
When her son was born, he weighed 6lbs 5oz and from the start, breastfeeding was difficult. She had flat nipples, meaning that her son couldn’t latch on properly and as a result, he was restless and unsettled. The hospital recommended she use a shield to aid her son’s latching, which did help for a short while.
One month in and her son hadn’t gain enough weight to be deemed healthy. She wrote a blog post for charity Fed Is Best, and said: “At his 1 month appointment he only weighed 6 pounds 5.5 ounces. He had only gained ½ of an ounce and his paediatrician suggested I talk to the lactation consultant. I went the next day to a group class, but the class was so large that I felt very overwhelmed and left early. I decided to go to the class offered at the hospital where he was born, where two of the nurses we had met would be teaching the class. The first thing they had me do was weigh him, feed him, and then weigh him again. When we weighed him after his hour-long feeding, the lactation consultant told me he had only eaten 20ml!”
Read more at kidssafetynetwork.com