Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Mar
20
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“You Don’t Understand How Hard It Is To Have Your Parents Hold You When You Would Rather Sleep.”
“You don’t understand how hard it is to have your parents hold you when you would rather sleep.” -Nursery nurse to mother who hadn’t held her newborn until a day after her birth and didn’t want to put her back down.
There are 30 comments to this post.
The Deranged Housewife had this to say,
Mar 20, 2010 @ 5:45 am (Quote)
This has to be one of the most contrived, stupid comments I’ve heard on here – sometimes I wonder if these people will say anything, *anything* to get people to do what they want them to do. It must be a real pain to this nurse to not have ‘all present and accounted for’ in the nursery and know that so and so’s baby is with the mother. WTH?
I can remember the nurses telling me to put the baby in the nursery so I could get some rest. I wanted to laugh in her face and say, “You really think i can rest with you running in here hourly to check my blood pressure, the door slamming all night long and the nurses talking about Lord of the Rings at the nurses’ station until 3 a.m.?” I think at one point I did say, “Well, he’ll be up all night at home, so I might as well get used to it.”
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Jane Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 10:30 am (Quote)
For my first hospital birth, which was a nightmare, the nurse came in at 10pm and INSISTED that the baby should be in the nursery. She badgered me and insisted I needed to get my sleep and they’d bring the baby if he got hungry and that I would NEVER get any rest if he were in the room with me. My mother agreed that I needed my sleep, so I let her take him.
I had an awful nightmare.
At one AM, the same nurse came in, WOKE ME UP, and said the baby needed to be fed. The baby was sound asleep, but she woke him up too and put him in my arms and then left. I couldn’t get the baby to latch on, so I pushed the nurse call button, figuring that somethign was wrong since a medical professional said the baby had to feed but he wasn’t feeding. (I mean, she woke me up after all that noise about how valuable my sleep was, right?)
(I just was too new a mom to go with my instinct: that the baby was sleeping because he was sleepy, not because he was starving to death. I should have just tucked him beside my bed or in my bed and gone back to sleep.)
The nurse who answered the button through the intercom said she’d be there in five minutes. Ten minutes later I pushed it again. “Five minutes!” Ten minutes later: “Five minutes!” Ten minutes after that, I got up and pushed the baby in the little cart down the hall to the nurse’s station.
I said to the nurses chatting away over coffee, “When are you coming to help?”
THe nurse looked up and said, “Who are you?”
I said, “You mean you had no INTENTION of coming?”
The nurse said, “Look we have a LOT of paperwork we’re LEGALLY required to do during shift change! You just go back and wait!”
Ten minutes after that, she came to my room and said, “You know, you’re suffering from postpartum depression.”
For all future births, that baby NEVER left my room. Never left my sight. I didn’t care what nasty things they said to me, I never let that baby leave me.
Oh, and when I did develop PPD and told the therapist recommended by the hospital that I had thoughts of putting the baby in the oven, the therapist said, “Those are called egodystonic thoughts, and they’re quite normal.”
So yes, nurses who are uninterested in doing their jobs will say anything in order to get what they want, to shut you up, and to make you go away.
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This comment really got me angry. This woman obviously does not belong in this field, and can’t possibly be a mother, or if she is I feel sorry for her own children that can’t possibly be loved enough with this attitude. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure most babies fall asleep beautifully in the arms of their parents as opposed to alone in a hard plastic box.
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The Deranged Housewife: This has to be one of the most contrived, stupid comments I’ve heard on here – sometimes I wonder if these people will say anything, *anything* to get people to do what they want them to do. It must be a real pain to this nurse to not have ‘all present and accounted for’ in the nursery and know that so and so’s baby is with the mother. WTH?I can remember the nurses telling me to put the baby in the nursery so I could get some rest. I wanted to laugh in her face and say, “You really think i can rest with you running in here hourly to check my blood pressure, the door slamming all night long and the nurses talking about Lord of the Rings at the nurses’ station until 3 a.m.?” I think at one point I did say, “Well, he’ll be up all night at home, so I might as well get used to it.”
So true!!! I also would not have been able to sleep worrying about what they might be doing to/feeding my child.
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Becky Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 8:15 am (Quote)
I agree with everyone. I kept my baby in my arms pretty much the whole time I was in the hospital. They would come in during the middle of the night, take her out of my arms and put her back in the bassinet next to my bed. Due to my unexpected c-section I could not get to her myself, so I had to have my husband stay with me 24/7 so that he could get her back for me every time they took her. They thought that I had just fallen asleep with her while nursing her. The truth was, as soon as they left the room, my husband would get her back for me so I could sleep with her on my chest.
I can’t believe that someone would actually say something like that!
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Michelle Potter Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 12:30 pm (Quote)
It REALLY ticks me off how they ignore that post c-section mothers cannot just pick up / put down their babies at will. With my first baby, the nurses convinced me that it was dangerous to sleep with the baby in the bed (because hospital beds are “too high and narrow” and “he’ll fall on the floor and be killed.”) Then they proceeded to ignore me for 45 minutes while I sobbed and called for help over and over because I was exhausted and terrified that I would drop my baby if I fell asleep. (Thankfully by my second c-section I had learned that it was perfectly safe to just sleep with my baby on my chest, so there was no issue.)
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The Deranged Housewife Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 7:23 pm (Quote)
With my second (a VBAC) I tottered into the nursery and they’re like, “Do you want us to feed her?” I’m like, “Um, no,” like ‘I thought we’ve already been through this before.’ After being put on the end of a hallway for two out of three hospital stays, being bugged endlessly to check my blood pressure, and hearing the nurses talk all night long, as well as hearing my IV pump beep because the nurse kept ignoring the fact that I wasn’t really getting an pain relief, how is you taking my baby and feeding her for me going to give me “rest”?!
How can anyone sleep in the hospital, period? Gack.
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Liz Chalmers had this to say,
Mar 20, 2010 @ 8:31 am (Quote)
Yeah, just imagine how EXHAUSTED babies must be at birth having spent 9 months unable to sleep because of that pesky uninterrupted contact with mom….
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Sherrie williams had this to say,
Mar 20, 2010 @ 8:40 am (Quote)
Oh My! this nurse needs to find a new department if she doesn’t think that babys need and want to be held. i agree with all of you there would have been no way i would have been calm and restfull if they had taken my son to the nursery. lukly the hospital i delivered at didn’t use their nursery. but we did keep hearing from the nursers how Dad shouldn’t hold the baby and sleep they never said it to me cause i’d wake up as soon as the door would open. but honestly my son never spent more than a few minutes in that stupid plastic bed and always only while they were examining them
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Michelle Potter had this to say,
Mar 20, 2010 @ 12:33 pm (Quote)
That’s why primates in the wild have been observed pushing their babies around in small containers…so they can sleep!
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attached2mykids had this to say,
Mar 20, 2010 @ 6:09 pm (Quote)
Sounds like the hospital from my first birth. For the second birth we went to a different hospital (same chain, different location) and the nurses actually didn’t like the moms who DIDN’T room in with baby!
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The Deranged Housewife Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 7:26 pm (Quote)
Can’t win either way, huh? LOL It probably means more work for them, so they want the baby in the room with you. LOL
I honestly had no idea that I could come and get my baby from the nursery anytime I wanted when I had my first. Once I realized this I felt like such a bad mother. They basically told me nothing when I was there and it was not a very good experience, in hindsight. However, after my VBAC I was treated very differently, ironically (same hospital).
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Yeah, we got this same spiel from our hospital. They would say, “The baby needs to get used to sleeping on his own. YOu dont want to have to hold him to get him to go to sleep his whole life.”
And there were signs ALL over the room saying, “Be sure to put baby in the bed if you feel drowsy or tired. Cosleeping can endanger your child’s life.”
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Lilly Reply:
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:16 pm (Quote)
Then again, if you don’t wrap your baby in a bubble and never touch them, it’s dangerous. Makes me wonder why we have kids if everything we do as parents is harmful *rolls eyes*
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Kat Reply:
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:22 pm (Quote)
Hmm… these babies sure must be odd creatures, to be so easily frozen in their infant stage by the actions of their parents! Let’s see how it sounds when we apply this advice to other areas of development:
“Be sure to give your child solid foods from the moment they’re born… you don’t want them to be stuck on a liquid diet their whole life!”
“Be sure to never carry your child anywhere! They must learn to get around, or you’ll be carrying them their whole life!”
“Be sure not to react to your child until they can speak in full sentences. You don’t want them to be non-verbal their whole life.”
The concept that caring for an infant in an age-appropriate manner will cause them to cease development and be stuck in an infantile stage of development permanently is absurd. And yet these absurdities are spoken with such conviction and authority that many parents are frightened and bullied into following them.
For the record:
If you respond quickly to your newborn’s cries, she will learn that you care, and she can trust you to hear her communication of needs.
If you hold your child often, or wear him, he will take comfort in your presence, and will be secure and confident as he grows and begins to explore the world on his own.
If you hold your child while she sleeps, your body rhythms will help her regulate hers, and you will create many beautiful memories that will live in your heart even when she is much too big to sleep in your arms, and prefers to put herself to bed when she feels tired, in her very own “big girl bed.”
If you feed your child milk (human milk when possible, or formula when necessary), his digestion will thrive, his body will grow, and once his teeth are coming in and his physical development is ready, he will start to eat solid foods. If you wait until he is ready and interested, trying new flavors and textures will be a fun adventure, and not a battle as you fight the natural gag reflex of a baby whose body isn’t ready for digesting anything but liquids yet.
These are lessons I learned in my journey from a very inexperienced and insecure young mommy (who sadly listened to too many pseudo-experts along the way), to a mature very experienced parent of 5.
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This is actually what the nurse told me! I had a version at 37 weeks for my daughter being Frank Breech, and they tore part of her placenta in the process so she was born via emergency cesarean. Turned out to be too early to be born so needed high levels of oxygen. I couldn’t hold her until she was 24 hours old, and when I could, after about an hour the nurse told me I was tiring her and she didn’t like me holding her. The next night she was transfered to the NICU and I became terrified of holding her for fear of tiring her out. I wish I could just punch this nurse for the terror she caused me. I was so scared of hurting my child, I didn’t really hold her until she was 5 days old and we finally breastfed.
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Stacie Hogan had this to say,
Feb 8, 2011 @ 5:32 pm (Quote)
My first was a similar experience. they told me nothing, didn’t let me know that i could go get her whenever i wanted. And I didn’t get to really hold her for the first time until she was 7 hours old cause she had to be on the machines. I had to go and look at her through the window. After I got home i was talking to a friend who is a nurse at another hospital and she said, “why didn’t you just go get her” and i felt horrible for letting them hold her hostage because of my ignorance. My second baby i learned. I told them I want her with me always. Either she was in my arms or she was sleeping in the bassinet next to my bed. The only time she left my side was for about an hour to do tests. Other than that she was with me. My baby, not theirs.
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Comments like this make me want to grab the nearest baseball bat. I had nurses all over me trying to separate my baby from me for reasons that never made sense. If babies much preferred to sleep in cribs rather than in arms, would there be so many sleep-training books out on the shelves? Would parents argue over “crying it out” if babies were much more inclined to sleep in cribs? No?
Then what was that nurse’s problem? When did she forget that it was the mother’s baby and not the hospital’s baby that they were generously lending this woman?
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