And so I continued, oblivious to any problems with feeding. Friday night was a struggle – my son screamed continuously from about midnight to 3am. I tried to latch him and feed as I had the night before, but he was fretting and wouldn’t latch on, or would latch for a few moments and then pull away. At any rate, given that he’d had a full feed from one side before all this had started, I didn’t really think it could be hunger, given my discussion with the breastfeeding counsellor that day, so I paced up and down the stairs, sang to him, patted and comforted him, and he eventually fell asleep on my husband’s chest as he had done the night before.
Tommy had only the tiniest pellet of (still dark) poo in his nappy on Saturday morning, and nothing since, and by Saturday evening we noticed what looked like brick dust in his nappy. Concerned, I phoned the labour ward, and was told ‘That’ll be the urates in his urine. Don’t worry, that’s perfectly normal with breastfed babies.’ Nevertheless, they offered to send a midwife out the next day to set my mind at ease. Saturday night was a similar affair to Friday, despite my having turned down the spinach and broccoli on offer for dinner in case my son with his night time screaming was already suffering from colic (!). When the midwife arrived on Sunday and I showed her his last, stained, nappy and single hard pellet of dark poo, she reassured me, ‘Don’t worry, that’s urates alright – perfectly normal in breastfed babies’. I pointed out that he had vomited what looked like blood – was there something wrong with his stomach? (He’d never, of course, brought up any milk.) ‘Not at all – most likely you’ve bled a bit when you’ve fed him and it’s that that he’s bringing up.’ Of course – my nipples were a bit sore, but I hadn’t given it much thought as I knew that was to be expected, and when I checked I saw that there had indeed been some bleeding. Finally I told her of Tommy’s late night crying sessions and, in desperation, asked whether it would be alright to give him a dummy – of course she answered that it wasn’t, not if I wanted to breastfeed. But at no point did she suggest that the crying was hunger, or that I should be feeding any more than I currently was. So on Sunday night, none the wiser, we went through the same thing again – a distressed newborn screaming from midnight until about 3am. This time, though, my husband and I had agreed (under advice from my parents, who had after all brought up three breastfed children successfully) that once Tommy did get to sleep we’d let him sleep rather than waking him for a feed that night – perhaps, they thought, all he needed was to be left to establish his own rhythms, rather than this constant waking for regular feeds. He went 5 hours between feeds that night, something I still feel terrible about given what was to come.
Monday came around. My son was one week old, and the midwife came to weigh him for the first time. Before he was weighed we went through the usual questions – ‘Plenty of wet and dirty nappies?’ – ‘Well, no soiled ones since Saturday morning, but he is passing urine – we can tell because of the urate stains.’, I breezily responded. Then she put him on the scales, got out her calculator, and my universe shattered: he had lost 12.3% of his birthweight. ‘I knew this was going to happen as soon as you told me about his nappies. Didn’t you notice him losing all that weight?’ Failure to thrive – how couldn’t I have noticed? I crumbled.
Out came a chart, with instructions for what to do if the weight loss is 10-12%, and for 12%+. As Tommy was on the border of these, the midwife went through the 10-12% regime with me: feed three-hourly and top up after every feed with 30mls of expressed milk or formula. 'Do you have a breast pump?' 'No, but I’ll get one. But what if I can’t express 30mls?’ ‘Of course you’ll manage 30mls. It’s really not that much’. And the procedure for weight loss over 12%? ‘You’d need to go back in to hospital to have your baby assessed for dehydration – I’ll have to check whether that applies in your case, as you’re just on the border.’ The call came through a couple of hours later – ‘Come in, as soon as you can, to children’s A&E – they want to do some blood tests.’
So we dragged ourselves in for what turned out to be a stressful and fairly pointless evening in A&E. On the journey there I looked out of the window to see a bright bright star next to the crescent moon, just a sliver, like I’d never seen it before. I later discover that this astronomical event is a conjunction of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter, but in my distress I fancy that the star is waiting for Tommy, my perfect little fighter, who I’ve somehow allowed to waste away. On some level, I’m convinced I’ve lost him, that I’ve messed up on my one chance with this special gift, and that I’m going to have to send him back. At the hospital, we wait and wait for the tests, and then again for them to be re-done as the nurse hadn’t managed to collect enough blood from Tommy’s heel prick first time around. My stitches are throbbing and I can’t sit on the uncomfortable plastic chair in the room they’ve left us in to feed Tommy (who’s not yet had any top ups as I haven’t had a chance to open the breast pump my parents have helpfully rushed out and bought for me). In the end I hoist myself on to the bed in the room we’re in, and feed him lying down while we wait. Eventually the tests for dehydration come back thankfully OK, and I am sent away with the 10-12% top up instructions, and information about the hospital’s feeding clinic. When we get home we’re exhausted, so I decide just to feed as best I can overnight without starting the expressed milk top-ups, and to leave the pumping for the next day (Tuesday).
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