You and Your New Baby. Anna McGrail
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of the responsibility for day-to-day care is taken out of your hands, especially if she needs to be looked after in the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU).
If your baby is in an incubator, it can be a very scary experience. Kay found it hard to relate to her premature baby at first: ‘I gave birth under anaesthetic on the Monday afternoon at 2.34pm when he was at 32 weeks’ gestation, and he was taken straight off to the SCBU. A few hours later, when I was coming round, the nurses gave me a Polaroid of him. I thought, “Oh, well, they’re looking after him there much better than I ever could here.” And I wanted to go back to sleep. My throat was very sore – they say that sometimes happens after a general anaesthetic – and all I could think about was having drinks of cool water to try to stop it burning. The rest of the time, I was very fuzzy. By Tuesday lunchtime, the catheter had been removed and, with the aid of the wonderful suppositories that they used for pain relief, I was able to shuffle down, very slow and careful, to see him. He looked very odd, all old and just-born at the same time, very cross and very winkled and slightly bluey-pink. After three days, they put some clothes on him. At one-week-old he moved into a cot with a lid. Then they started talking about when I could take him home and I started to panic. I still didn’t feel like he was my baby, and we still didn’t have a name for him.’
Susanne wasn’t sure throughout her pregnancy how well her baby would be: ‘Perhaps because there had been bleeding in the pregnancy, I had kept my emotional distance from this baby. I wasn’t going to believe the trouble was over till it was over. Even when she was born, I still found it hard to let myself get close to her. She was being looked after by so many different people and they all seemed to know much better than I did how she was doing from day to day.’
Your baby may need to go into special care if she is:
Premature – usually if she has arrived before 34 weeks
Small – weighing under 41b
Having breathing difficulties or has other medical problems.
IT MAY BE impossible at first for medical staff to answer questions on quite what is the matter with your baby if he’s been whisked off to the SCBU. All they may be able to say is that he’s not breathing well, or had the umbilical cord around his neck, but they’ll let you know – trust them. Whether your baby is admitted to the SCBU for treatment or simply for observation, you will be kept informed of progress and developments every step of the way.
It can be very comforting, if your baby is taken to the SCBU immediately after delivery, for your birth partner to go up to the Unit to see your baby settled and report back to you in detail. You will be able to visit as soon as your own physical care has been sorted out.
Kangaroo care for premature babies
THE REASON THAT premature babies are looked after in incubators is that early babies are often unable to maintain a steady body temperature. An incubator provides an environment where the temperature can be kept stable easily. Now, a new method of caring, called kangaroo care, is being tried out by some neonatal units.
Babies are placed in skin-to-skin contact with their mother, against their mother’s chest, and covered with a blanket. The baby is thus close to her parent, and the mother, it has been found, is so in tune with her infant that her own skin temperature rises and falls to keep the baby’s stable. Another advantage of this form of care is that breastfeeding is easier and it encourages more women to breastfeed successfully. So, if your baby needs special care, perhaps it is worth asking the staff if anyone with an interest in kangaroo care would be willing to let you have a go. While it isn’t something that everyone will want to try, as some mothers feel much happier if their infant remains in the care of technology, for some mothers – and indeed fathers – it will be a golden opportunity to get closer to their baby sooner than they could otherwise have hoped for.
Special babies
SOMETIMES, either immediately at the birth, or in the first few days after the birth, some parents are faced with the devastating news that their child isn’t the 100% healthy being they had hoped for. There may be an illness, a disability or a learning disorder, something that won’t just disappear in a few days.
Bridget’s daughter, Lois, had a cleft lip and palate: ‘It sounds awful, but I didn’t even know what this was. I’d never seen it before. John hadn’t, either, so we thought it was something dreadful, and that she’d never be normal.’
PART OF THE insidious nature of many genetically transmitted diseases, like cystic fibrosis (CF), is that one or both parents can be a carrier of the disease and not know it. It can pass undetected from generation to generation, and only when two carriers of the defective gene have a child does the disease come to light. Vicky’s son, Anthony, was diagnosed at birth: ‘I was lucky in a way because Anthony was born with a bowel blockage, which is one of the indications of CF, so he was diagnosed early. We knew what we were dealing with right from the start.’
FOR OTHER parents, the illness or the diagnosis are more uncertain.
The doctors didn’t diagnose Mary’s daughter Katie at first: ‘They went out and told Michael, who was waiting in the corridor, that we had a little girl and everything was fine, so of course, he couldn’t wait, didn’t even wait for me to come out of theatre, he went off and called his mum and my mum, and other people who had been waiting to hear the news, and it was only the next day that they came back to us and said things weren’t so good after all. Well, we’d already suspected – nothing definite, but there was something … And then when they came hack and said she had Down’s, well, we had her by then, and we loved her, so the worst thing was Michael having to go and phone everyone back again and tell them that things weren’t quite so wonderful after all. But we knew her then, so it was different.’
Stephen’s reaction seems dramatic, but is quite typical: ‘I didn’t want to touch her, I didn’t want to pick her up. All I could think of was that there was something wrong with her heart, and I felt like she was made of glass. She wasn’t mine. That’s all I could think. She wasn’t the baby I expected to have.’
IF YOUR BABY has been born with a disability, then you may well feel confused and resentful. More: you may feel angry, bitter, cheated. You may not even know how you feel except that you don’t feel right.
During this sad time, there is no right or wrong way to feel. Allow yourself time to come to terms with your feelings, and don’t think that this will happen overnight.
One of the main things you need, if you are struggling to come to terms with the child you have rather than the child you thought you were going to have, is information. The Directory at the end of this book gives details of many organisations who are there to offer you advice and support, and will help you through any difficulties, often by putting you in touch with other parents who have been through similar experiences. Other parents are often all too willing to help; they know what it is like. They know, better than anyone else, what you are going through. Make the most of them. But take it slowly …
Mary and Vicky express their inability to see beyond their own grief and shock: ‘Yes, we needed a lot of information, but there was also so much going on, every day, that we couldn’t take all the information in.’
‘I wasn’t coping on any level – physically, spiritually, emotionally. And I couldn’t read a Factsheet, the words didn’t make sense.’
Remember: Everyone needs to take the time they need. You know your needs. Take your time.
Learning to adjust to the reality of your baby’s condition also takes time, as Stephen and Bridget discovered: ‘Sometimes I felt really protective towards her, other times, if someone had come in and asked me if I wanted her taken away, I’d have said yes. And I’d have never looked back. But they didn’t come in. And then she was mine.’
BABIES WITH DISABILITIES
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