Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Sep
11
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“I Am Too Busy To Keep Coming In And Checking Your Baby…”
“I am too busy to keep coming in and checking your baby. She will have to go to the nursery for monitoring. She’ll be fine. You can come see her whenever you want.” – L&D Nurse to mother who’s baby was a little bit cool. The mother was post-cesarean and not yet mobile.
There are 33 comments to this post.
Audrey had this to say,
Sep 11, 2011 @ 5:30 am (Quote)
I am sorry to the OP that this happened. I don’t know the specifics of what that nurse was dealing with so I don’t know whether what she did was right or wrong and here’s why. I am an L&D nurse and I have probably said this to a patient in a similar situation. I work in a hospital that does over 7,000 births a year. We have a labor floor where moms & babies stay for up to 2 hrs after birth, then they go upstairs. I am not a baby nurse, I am not trained to perform a full newborn assessment or to deal with abnormal baby problems myself. If I have a concern, I call peds. If a mom is post-cesarean, depending on her condition she may be in pain, neurologicically not 100% and neuromuscularly not 100%. A fully “with-it” mom after a vaginal delivery, yes I can leave baby with her with little concern because she is not distracted by pain, nausea, vomiting, or temporary numbing/paralysis. If I suspect a potential thermoregulatory problem and mom can’t do skin to skin for a medical reason and something were to happen on my time, I’d be held responsible for not putting the baby in the safest environment where it can be monitored & cared for properly. Which is in the nursery with specially trained nurses. What if this nurse were responsible for other patients with higher acuity, maybe a suspected postpartum hemorrhage? I cannot be in more than 1 place at once yet I am responsible for all my patients. If I were given cross training to do more newborn specific things, I’d need either a fewer patient load or my manager to not get on my butt for not having my patient upstairs in 2 hrs. Which she already does. The amt of work and documentation I need to do for a delivery is insane. This is just what happens when you give birth in a hospital. I’d like to have the time and resources and support to do more, but I do not. I am forced to use my own judgement to determine what I can and cannot handle at that moment. That’s my 2 cents on this.
If a patient refuses for their baby to be taken, I have to take it up the chain of command but I have NEVER taken away a baby with the mom protesting or refusing.
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Jane Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 6:55 am (Quote)
The hospital shouldn’t pass along its understaffing issues to the patients. If the hospital doesn’t have enough nurses to care for the women who give birth there, then either the hospital needs to hire more nurses or they need to stop taking so many births.
It’s not the mother’s fault that the hospital wants an insane amount of documentation. It’s not the mother’s problem that the nursing manager wants her transported to another floor two hours after the birth.
Yes, in an emergency situation that mother might have to understand that everyone is taking care of the emergency. But the callousness of the quote above implies that the nurse was just “too busy” to do her job, and she didn’t even take into account that:
1) since the mother was still immobile after the c-section, she couldn’t just go see the baby whenever she wanted
and
2) she DID want to see her baby RIGHT NOW and was being told she couldn’t
So while I feel bad for the nurses who are overburdened, it’s still rather ridiculous for a nurse to say she’s too busy doing her job to do her job. The police force also has a ridiculous amount of paperwork and are also understaffed, but they don’t tell you they’re too busy to investigate crimes. The fire departments are understaffed and have a lot of paperwork, and they don’t hang up on you when you report a fire because they’re too busy to come put out your fire.
If the hospitals really want women to believe they’re safer delivering there than elsewhere, then they need to actually make it safer. And that means hiring enough staff to keep everyone safe.
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channa leah Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 7:47 am (Quote)
sadly OFTEN the police will tell you they are too busy… ever call in a noise complaint? in NYc they will check it out within 48 HOURS! Ever had your house broken into? unless they find fingerprints and they MATCH something already in the system your case is most likely not going to be followed up on. They don’t have the manpower. I had my car stolen.. it was sitting in a no parking zone 10 blocks away from my house WITH TICKETS on it! but they never caught it. They are just over swamped.
Now is what she said NICE no… but your point that other professions don’t get “too busy to do their job” is wrong.
In my opinion THIS is why evey woman should have a doula at her birth. hospitals are swamped and we need support. It stinks but this is life. We wish they could all make us THE most important patient on their books but at the end of the day they need to keep their job
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Jane Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 8:16 am (Quote)
The hospital shouldn’t be making it a choice between doing their jobs and keeping their jobs. That’s a false dichotomy. The hospitals choose to understaff because they want to increase their profit margins.
She wasn’t asking to be the nurse’s most important patient. She wasn’t asking for a pedicure and someone to come in and play soft music on the violin. She was asking to take care of her own baby.
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Jennifer Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 12:27 pm (Quote)
I had a doula for my birth. She was amazing, but she couldn’t stay with me the whole time I was in the hospital. She was with me to help with BFing. She came back the next morning, but this happened in the middle of the night. The nurse waited until the doula went home.
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Sodayah Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 5:58 pm (Quote)
Really are you going to foot the $900 bill so I can have a doula at my birth because if it come down to being able to afford something the baby needs vs. my comfort frankly the baby wind out. I would love to have a doula but in most cases they are just to expensive and our insurance won’t cover one.
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Mama Wrench Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 8:08 am (Quote)
This.
I have a great deal of sympathy for nurses, but don’t tell me a hospital is the best place for ALL women to give birth, then tell me that your practitioners are too busy filling out paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy to tend to their patients. If hospitals are so busy dealing with the true emergency patients that routine patients are a distraction, then routine patients should not be birthing there, emergency patients should. This would not only allow women to be treated with the individual care and respect they deserve, but allow nurses and doctors to focus their care on those who need it most without sacrificing “low-priority” patients.
Yet… how many hospitals have on-site birth centers? How many insurance companies cover alternative birth locations?
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Heather Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 11:01 am (Quote)
I’m curious if you still possibly agree with the nurse after reading the OP’s post about how she was IN the postpartum ward (which had 6 rooms), wasn’t allowed to do skin to skin, had a doula and her husband there to help her and a warmer in the room and missed the first 3 hours of her baby’s life already. (although I know you said you wouldn’t take a baby from a protesting mother, so I’m SURE you’d disagree with that part!)
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Audrey Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 2:17 pm (Quote)
Yes, after reading the OP’s account, those “policies” are a bunch of bullcrap. Away from baby for 3 hours?! There’s no reason for baby to be away from mom unless there’s something wrong with the baby or mom is too impaired to be left with the baby alone. Remember, this is not home, this is a hospital, and if something happens, as her nurse I am legally responsible. As a professional with a license, I need to cover myself. If I have too much to handle, I ask my colleagues for help. If they cannot help me, I can get into dire straits. if something is “iffy” with baby and I’m not there to take its vitals every half hour and god forbid something happens because I was late doing my assessment, that’s my butt on the line. I have to do the best I can with what I’m given, which isn’t nearly as much as I need. That’s all that I was trying to communicate.
A hospital is the worst place for a healthy woman to have a baby. Fact.
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Jennifer Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 3:46 pm (Quote)
The nurse should have been kind and compassionate, period. She made my already traumatic day horrendous. Butt on the line or not she was out of line and it makes me sick that you feel the need to defend her. You must have been horrible to your patients in the past to feel that she was justified in her actions. I hope I am not ever your patient.
And I can’t have a c-section at home, so stop spouting that crap off about not going to a hospital if you don’t like the policies.
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Heather Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 5:58 pm (Quote)
And it sounds like the way your hospital is set up is horrid. I’ve never birthed in a hospital where the L&D and postpartum wards were on different floors! Much less where they would leave a woman with L&D staff postpartum. In fact, I think it was single room for both of my births–L&D and postpartum in the same room, just different nurses assigned.
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This is mine. I had planned a natural birth in a birth center. My baby was in distress, so that didn’t happen. I ended up with a c-section (which was necessary after 72 hours of labor and my daughter’s heart tones decelerating-the cord was wrapped twice around her neck which was preventing decent and also causing the decels), but completely out of the realm of the kind of birth I envisioned. My daughter was very healthy once she was out. Both of her APGARS were 9. I was still separated from her for three hours after the birth because it was policy not to allow the baby to remain with mom in recovery. I take some of the blame for this for not researching the hospital I would be transferred to more carefully. I trusted my midwives, and in this respect that was a mistake. However, I do blame the hospital for their crappy policy. They finally got me to my room and were wheeling my baby in when the lab came up wanting to do her blood work. I guess they were too busy during the three hours they had her. I guess I became a difficult patient when I told them that they needed to come back later because I had not yet gotten to hold my daughter. I had only seen her little face since they wrapped her from head to toe in the OR. I did get to hold my baby for four hours before this nurse took her away. She made an already unhappy experience much, much worse with her nasty attitude.
I was completely with it, though my ankles were numb. I had only Ibuprofen after the surgery. I had no narcotics. My husband was also in the room and was doing all of the diaper changing and other baby care. I just was holding her and nursing her. There was also a warmer in the room. The postpartum ward had 6 rooms. Maybe the nurse was busy, but there was no need for my baby to leave my arms and certainly no reason for her to tell me to come visit when I told her that I could not since I was still numb from the ankles down, still catheterized and still had those boots on that make the blood move in your legs.
She refused to let me do skin to skin. She actually said, “Well you’ve been holding her and she’s cold. She needs a warmer.” I was on my fourth night with no sleep and just couldn’t give her a good enough reason. I could not fight anymore. I just cried and that’s when she scoffed at me, “Oh she’ll be fine. You can come see her whenever you want.” When I told her I could actually not just get up and walk down the hall, she just said she was too busy to keep checking on everyone’s babies so they were just better off in the nursery.
She also gave her a bath which I had told them not to do because I wanted to give her the first bath.
She was back in just over a hour, but the whole experience just devastated me. Forgive me PP for not being sympathetic to the nurse as I had a traumatic experience where everything just spiraled out of my control. All I wanted to do was hold my baby and it seemed like everyone was fighting against that very reasonable desire.
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road2vba2c Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 9:39 am (Quote)
The nurse was wrong. Dead wrong. She could’ve used the warmer in the room, and told dad when to take her off the warmer. As another c-section mom who had her baby taken to the nursery against her will, my heart aches for you. When this happened to me, I was ordered to “rest”. After three hours of “rest”, I wanted my baby. I paged the nurse and she said she was busy but would get my baby to me soon. “Soon” was not enough. I walked to the nursery and demanded she give me my baby. We left the next day.
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Louisa Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 6:46 pm (Quote)
I had my baby girl 15 days ago, HBAC trf that ended in CBAC. Some time during the night the nurse on duty woke me up (bub and I were both asleep, with her on my chest) after she had done the hourly obs on both of us as per policy. She told me that bub as cold (temp 35 degrees cel) and she needed to be warmed up. I was sweating as a result on the drugs from surgery and had kicked all the sheets off so we were both lying there practically naked and i said i couldn’t stand any blankets on me. The nurse said the best place for DD was on my chest, skin to skin so she got some wraps from the warmer, put them over DD and sort of tucked them under her, just enough to stop them sliding off and then pulled a light sheet over both of us and tucked us in.
Next morning I found out she had snuck into the room and pulled back the blankets, quickly checked DD temp every half hour and covered us both back up without waking me up. DD’s temp slowly rose over the next 3 hours we were both asleep so when I woke up in the morning everything was “normal”.
She was the best nurse on that first night I could have asked for.
OP sorry you had such a sucky experience. I wish you had my nurse, a totally different experience.
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Heather Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 11:04 am (Quote)
That is just absolutely awful. I remember how helpless I was after my cesarean, but no one ever tried to take my baby from me. They knew that my OB had already informed me that it was against the law (in my state at least) and they were trained to quote the law followed by “But our policy is…” So I was able to say, “Well, that’s nice, but she’s not leaving me. I’ll let you know if I need you guys.”
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Just 13 days ago I had to have a c-section (was planning a homebirth, but that’s a different story) and when the nurse came in and gave my baby a sponge bath later that night instead of taking him to the nursery for that bath or afterward, she put him on my chest, skin-to-skin to warm him up. When she came back to check him an hour or so later and his temp still wasn’t quite high enough, she just covered us with more blankets and left him with me to warm up some more. I think that’s the way to do it. And if you’re too busy to come check on the baby’s temperature every once in a while, maybe you have too many patients assigned to you?
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Jennifer Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 6:42 am (Quote)
That is so wonderful! I still cry every time I think about all the time we missed together. My daughter is almost ten months old. I don’t think I will ever get over how we were treated. I have made peace with the c-section which was not at all what I wanted. I cannot make peace with missing those hours for no reason. I just can’t.
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Tasha Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 6:46 am (Quote)
I’m so sorry for you 
I understand – with my first baby I had a vaginal hospital delivery but my baby had a slightly elevated temperature and they took him away to the nursery for 3 hours until he was stabilized. I didn’t get to hold him or touch him at all until they brought him back. It still hurts my heart 6 years later.
That was one of the things I worried about going into the hospital transfer and then when it was decided I needed a c-section. But I was so blessed to be at the hospital I was at for his birth. They were wonderful and he was never taken from me unless I requested he be taken to the nursery for awhile.
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Lisa in Texas Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 12:04 pm (Quote)
I understand the struggles with trying to make peace with missing time with your baby. I had a necessary c-section and my daughter needed to go to the NICU (and stayed there for almost 6 weeks). I was able to see her in the incubator right before they took her out of the OR. Then I was able to see her in the NICU again about 3 hours later. I had to wait before she was born a little after 5pm and the NICU closes from 6-8 every morning and night so the nurses can do the shift change; no visitors during that time. The nurse took me to the NICU right at 8pm to see her before taking me to my room. I was grateful for that but my heart still aches over the lost time. Not just the lost time that day but the lost time over the next 6 weeks. I feel like we lost something very precious that I had with my other 4 children (homebirths) and I’m working to get past it. She’s 13 months old now. I’m so sorry for you, Jennifer. I will pray for your healing as I pray for mine.
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Kat Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 11:10 am (Quote)
Two weeks ago, I had to have an emergency c-section, and my son had to go to the NICU. I had to stay in my room on medication for 24 hours and couldn’t go be with him.
Everything we went through was medically necessary, with the exception of one bottle of formula but that’s a rant for another day. Most of the nurses were very kind, helpful, and encouraging.
Still didn’t make it any easier to be the last one in my family to actually get to touch my baby. If there had not been a medical reason for it, they would have had two very angry, very outspoken parents raising heck. Politely, professionally, but with a lot of persistence.
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“Too busy” is not a good enough reason for not keeping tabs on patients.
My baby (and I) don’t HAVE to do anything.
She won’t be fine there – have you ever seen how many of those babies are crying at once, and the nurses are nowhere to be found, or sitting nearby writing something? (Those walls and windows are soundproof for a reason – one pass near there and no hospital-touring mom would choose to give birth there.)
I can’t come see her – that’s the problem. She needs to stay with me.
Nothing makes baby more consistently and more permanently warm than skin to skin.
Ok, I think I finished.
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How sad. If the mother is alert and awake, she can take care of the baby. All the baby needs is diapers, wipes, and a boob! And 2 of those things can be sitting on the bedside table within her arms reach. Oh! There’s also this neat little “nurse call” button that are on or near beds so if she’s NEEDED she can come in and visit mommy AND baby.
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Totally not judging because I know there are many reasons for dad to not be present, but what about him?? Is his temperature not also 98.6 degrees to warm up his baby? Can he walk over and pick up the baby? I know my husband didn’t want to give my girls back! LOL! So if someone in the room is ambulatory, there is no need to take the baby.
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You know what?
I don’t care about your paperwork. I don’t care about your boss. I don’t care about your policies. Frankly, I don’t even care much for the woman in the room two down from me. I care about this baby. This tiny, brand new human who needs his mother.
I am not on your payroll. Your staffing problems are your problem, or your boss’s problem, or HER boss’s problem. Frankly, I can’t imagine a parallel universe in which I cared any less.
Unless my baby is having a serious issue that requires specialized care, he should be with me. If that requires a nursing assistant to sit there and watch me and help me shift my baby around, fine. Figure out a way to bill for that. You bill for every other damned thing.
This, right here, is why I am choosing to stay in this state that we hate living in to have a second child. I can’t stand the thought of moving home and having a hospital birth, and I’m not comfortable with the homebirth midwives there.
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The irony of the post and the nastiness of it aside from removing my baby against my wishes is that the nurse was fully aware that I could not visit my daughter as I could not move. My husband did go check in on her multiple times and annoyed them to death. They didn’t like us there. All the other moms were good moms and kept their babies in the nursery the majority of the time. Very weird to me.
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Jane Reply:
September 11th, 2011 at 8:18 am (Quote)
Good grief, your husband was right there and they still wanted to take the baby away? If they were so seriously understaffed, why not show him how to position the baby on you and keep getting you warmed blankets until the baby’s temperature stabilized? Then they could go off and fill out paperwork until all the ink ran out. I’m so sorry.
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first time mommy had this to say,
Sep 11, 2011 @ 10:21 am (Quote)
I am so sorry you were treated so horribly. They had no right to take your baby away from you
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Katherine had this to say,
Sep 11, 2011 @ 10:36 am (Quote)
First of all I understand fully that nurses can be very busy. My sister is one and I have heard the stories but IMO it is all in the tone. First of all you should never look at a pt and say I’m too busy for you. You can spare 10 secs to explain what you explained to us about training with infants and what not then the mom would feel like your choice was out of concern not selfishness. Off to take her in a wheel chair to the nursery. Second this ticks me off because this was not at all my exp so I KNOW it can be done better. I had a section and my child was brought within the hour to be nursed. He temp dropped some and the gave me a warmer in my room. They spent time with us in my room. One nurse even consoled me when I was emotional over some issues going on with my child’s father. There is no reason for a mother to leave a hosp feeling this way. I’m sorry op for your neglected treatment.
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I noticed that the nurses were very busy when we had our third baby. I had not understood why I was kept in the delivery room for hours after delivering with the reasoning that the nurse wanted to make sure I really emptied my bladder. She said it very nicely, and it was really no inconvenience to us, but it was odd.
When I got to my postpartum room, I understood! The nurses there were much busier than when I had my other two children. Honestly, I didn’t blame them, but the hospital. However, if they’d been rude to me, that would have been their fault, not the hospital’s fault.
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Michelle Potter had this to say,
Sep 12, 2011 @ 3:49 pm (Quote)
This is pretty much exactly what was said to me when I gave birth to my middle son. I gave birth VBAC, and I was feeling absolutely fantastic after the birth (despite dealing with the two nurses-from-hell who had attended me), and my son was completely healthy without the slightest concern. I’d also spoken to my OB in advance to make sure I’d be able to keep my baby with me, and he’d assured me it would be fine.
But then, once he was born, suddenly I was being told that they were “too busy” to let me keep him, and he needed to be in the nursery. They actually threatened to call security to take him from me by force. (I threatened to call the cops, and they backed down. The one time in seven pregnancies that I really stood up against an @$$hat hospital policy, and I’m very proud of it!)
Of course, once I was in my room and had my baby with me, they had plenty of time to come in every five minutes and harass me, constantly inventing new reasons why he needed to go to the nursery (lies — and I caught them on it, too!), and once trying to sneak him out while I was sleeping.
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Add Your Comment.
I wonder if the hospital touts this in their advertising. “Our nurses will be too busy to do their jobs, so they’ll put your baby in the nursery where you can VISIT your own baby whenever you want.”
Because you know, that paperwork needs a *lot* of TLC. Poor little paperwork, always needing a signature here or a checkbox there.
The blame for this quote partly belongs on the hospital, though, because the hospital administration is generally the reason L&D is understaffed. If this nurse really is “too busy” to do her job, then they need to hire more nurses.
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