Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Apr
17
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“Mom, Just Give Me A Bottle.”
“Mom, just give me a bottle.” Nurse doing an imitation of the baby in special care as a first-time mother was trying to breastfeed amongst the tubes and wires.
There are 39 comments to this post.
Here’s where pacifiers serve a double purpose.. not only can they comfort baby, but they can shut up the nurse too!
Really? No encouragement for a mommy that’s trying to do that despite the obstacles? I say good job to Mom!
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Jane Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 6:09 am (Quote)
I was thinking she should have handed the nurse the bottle and said, “Oh, go ahead and eat while we’re getting the nursing thing down. I don’t mind.”
(BTW,people who pretend to speak in the baby’s voice drive me nuts. It’s passive-aggressive and holier-than-thou, as if they are somehow bestowed with the knowledge of what the infant is thinking, and somehow they never use that tactic to say things like, “Good work, Mom. You know I love you!”)
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Cmat Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 9:07 am (Quote)
Lol I don’t think I’d offer it to her to eat though, just cram the thing down her throat and get it over with.
Adults talking in the oh-so-annoying high pitched baby voice annoy me too. I can withold the eye rolling for when they’re just doing the cutsie “you’re so cute” thing, but not when they pretend to know what my kid needs, is thinking or what they’re doing.
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Heather Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 4:08 pm (Quote)
Actually, I’m guilty of using it to try to guess what baby’s thinking and have said, “Oh, Mommy, you make me so happy!” before to friends, or “Yay! Just what I wanted!” when baby’s all excited :”> Although I don’t change the pitch of my voice, really. Never used it to discourage someone O_O
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Cmat Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 8:20 am (Quote)
I think its a little different when its family or people very close to the family. What annoys me is more the random people who walk up to me in the super market and say “Oh Mommy take me home, I’m tired!” and I want to tell them to shove it. Family probably isn’t going to use it to tell you what you should do with the baby.. and lets face it, as Mom, we can do whatever the heck we want 
.
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Jane Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 8:28 am (Quote)
My MIL used the “talking-as-the-baby” tactic to inform me that my infant thought the car seat was unnecessary and therefore I should bow to my five-month-old infant’s wisdom.
I think everyone in the building heard my response. I shouldn’t have done that. 
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Kit Reply:
April 21st, 2010 at 6:34 pm (Quote)
“Why would I want to do that?”
Seriously, why do people use babies as a PA tactic… and even if they could talk, who would listen. Its still a baby, after all. How wise can something that has not yet figured out that whole Potty v. Pants thing be?
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Jane Reply:
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:44 am (Quote)
In my case, she was making it clear that
a) I was too stupid to realize my baby was struggling and crying against the car seat because he did not want to be in it
and
b) I was being ridiculously paranoid to insist that my child be restrained in a car seat the way the law demanded and the way every expert in the universe currently recommends and it was inconveniencing everyone to have to have a seat in the car for the baby when he’d be just as safe on my lap since they weren’t going to get into an accident anyhow.
My response was NOT as polite as the etiquette-hell approved “Why would I want to do that?” no.
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Dear Nurse,
Breastmilk is best,especially for a baby in special care. Instead of trying to guilt trip this new mother why don’t you offer her some support? Just saying.
Also, please stop using the newborns as muppets in your attempts to coerce new mothers into making your job easier.
Thank you,
Everyone
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In baby voice “Mom, why don’t you tell that nurse to shut the f*** up and mind her own f***ing business?”
*hmph*
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KDB Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 8:21 am (Quote)
Hahaha!
This is awesome. This is totally something I would do! I wonder if I could make the baby sound like Yoda…Hmmm..
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The Deranged Housewife had this to say,
Apr 17, 2010 @ 8:10 am (Quote)
With people like this “supporting” the moms, it’s a wonder ANYONE leaves the hospital breastfeeding anymore. How utterly pathetic!
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Ugh, that is so frustrating and upsetting. I have been there and done that and it’s not easy but the nurses in our NICU were so helpful and encouraging and that made a huge difference in why I was successful with breastfeeding both of my preemies. I hate it when nurses are less than helpful and encouraging when mom is trying to do the best thing!
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Mommies, please remember that you can always request a new nurse. For yourselves, or for your babies. Maybe if she was replaced as primary nurse a couple of times for this kind of crap, she’d stop doing it.
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Cmat Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 12:19 pm (Quote)
Not that I didn’t know somewhere deep down that I could request someone else.. but, I don’t think a lot of us think about it. I hope someone remembers what you said though because this would have certainly been one of those situations.
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Jane Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 4:18 pm (Quote)
Whom would we ask to get a new nurse? When the only person coming into your room is the Nurse From Hell, or when pushing the call button gets no response at all, how does a patient go about requesting a new nurse?
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Sheva Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 8:10 pm (Quote)
When one nurse insisted during labor that I lie in bed a certain way, even though I told her it hurt more that way, she said that if it hurt more, it was better. ?! I sent my husband out to find someone, anyone, and switch nurses for me. I’m not sure who he spoke to, but I never saw that nurse again. The head nurse, maybe? Or the floor manager?
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Cmat Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 8:24 am (Quote)
Yep, I guess that would fall into the realm of labor coach! I only had one nurse that was kind of snippy. Luckily the rest of the nurses I encountered were fabulous.
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Jane Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 8:30 am (Quote)
I wouldn’t know what to do if I were alone. (The one who abandoned me I was glad she had, because I’d reported her terrible treatment of a friend of mine after the friend’s baby died.) I guess I could get the hospital phone and ask for the patient advocate.
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GranolaRN Reply:
April 18th, 2010 at 4:49 pm (Quote)
Exactly, send your support person to get someone else to help you. If you don’t have a support person go to the front desk yourself. Or wait until change of shift if you have no support person and can’t walk (epidural, perhaps) and then ask to speak to the charge nurse. Or refuse to let the bad nurse touch you or do anything until you speak to a charge nurse. It’s really not that hard, if you are serious about wanting a different nurse.
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How sad. NICU nurses are some of the most supportive healthcare professionals of breastfeeding I have ever met. Shame on her.
As far as requesting a new nurse…when my daughter was just a week or two old, the nurse she had this particular day yelled at me for touching her and I cried and cried for the rest of the night. That nurse didn’t care for her again for the next 3 months.
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emilee had this to say,
Apr 17, 2010 @ 1:06 pm (Quote)
Ugh I hate when people do that. Complete strangers would come up and say Mom my feet are cold and I need shoes… or Mom I need to be put in the stroller. At this rate I will never learn to walk. One time I just said very coldly to the lady, I am NOT YOUR mom. Nor are you mine. Goodbye.
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The nurses in my NICU encouraged pumping, but not breastfeeding. They also insisted on supplementing my milk. To me that’s kind of odd. I was pumping 4 times what she needed though, so I didn’t lose my supply even though they barely gave her any of my milk.
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I was thinking she should have handed the nurse the bottle and said, “Oh, go ahead and eat while we’re getting the nursing thing down. I don’t mind.”(BTW,people who pretend to speak in the baby’s voice drive me nuts. It’s passive-aggressive and holier-than-thou, as if they are somehow bestowed with the knowledge of what the infant is thinking, and somehow they never use that tactic to say things like, “Good work, Mom. You know I love you!”)
Actually, that’s exactly what the nurse that caught my cousin’s baby did…
Cousin was freaking out and crying because she was just SURE she was gonna be a lousy mom. (Holding baby, she didn’t have the sudden rush of “mommy” feelings) And the nurse looked at her and said “Oh, here, look, listen carefully…” and when Cousin put her head by the baby Nurse whispered.
“Thanks for those nice warm nine months… I wuv you Mommy”
And cracked Cousin up. I really think it helped a bit.
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The nurses in my NICU encouraged pumping, but not breastfeeding. They also insisted on supplementing my milk. To me that’s kind of odd. I was pumping 4 times what she needed though, so I didn’t lose my supply even though they barely gave her any of my milk.
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This is me. As a further explanation, my son wasn’t a preemie. After my son was born I was exhausted (32 hour NCB) so the nurse took him to nursery “so I could rest.” I barely saw him after that.
I woke up in an hour to a nurse telling me that my son had turned blue and had to be moved into special care to be put on oxygen and an IV for low blood sugar (after having perfect apgar scores). (Special care in my hospital was a step up from a regular nursery but a step down from the NICU.) I now know that kangaroo care would have done more for his vitals than being taken away from his mother hours old to be hooked up to a bunch of machines. I also know now that I could have refused care or could have asked that he be unhooked from everything sooner than they “allowed.”
They didn’t give him bottles per my request but I was forced to supplement him with formula through a finger-feeding system. (He had to have a “good feeding” every few hours to turn down the IV levels)
Every few hours (when THEY told me he was hungry) I had to go to special care, which was far from my room, and try and nurse him. I couldn’t move him very far due to the oxygen tube and the IV. He was hooked up to other indicators (heart rate, etc.) that kept beeping driving me into terror.
I was only allowed to have one person in there with me at a time. It was a small cramped room without privacy. Some of the nurses were helpful, others obviously not as much. This particular nurse (if it was in fact a nurse) was in there while I was trying to breastfeed. He was an older gentleman. He kept imitating the baby and chuckling. Here I am crying due to having difficulties getting the baby to latch. Not to mention feeling inadequate because my milk “wasn’t enough.” I only saw my son in the hospital to feed him. I didn’t get to bond or nuzzle with him the way I wanted.
I credit these experiences for contributing to my development of PPD and my struggles in breastfeeding. I never did get to stop “supplementing.” I’m still partially nursing today (10 months later) despite my many, many struggles but I regret that maybe if I would have had a better start things would have been different.
I will never, ever let someone take my baby away again. And if someone speaks like this to me again I will indeed tell them to “F@#$ off”
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Wow that is just yucky!
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