It took a few days for the both of us to recover from the c-section. The night of the 19th was pretty tough. I remember not being able to feel much of anything from the face down for a couple hours, which made initial breastfeeding super tough since I couldn’t even tell where my hands were, much less where my daughter’s mouth was. Most of the time that I was in the hospital after the surgery was pretty crappy. Everything felt incredibly itchy since I was coming off the drugs and I was in a lot of pain from the surgery. Moira was whisked away in the early hours to the NICU because she was not latching on well and her blood sugars were low. They put her on an IV with glucose and her tiny left arm was bundled up. The NICU nurses had to prick her tiny heels after every feeding to check her sugars. Luckily, the NICU wasn’t that far from my room, so the Husband was able to wheel me over pretty often so that I could bond with her and attempt to breastfeed.
Nursing has gone decently so far, despite the rough start.
Lactation consultants in the hospital are the absolute worst. As I was trying to nurse my daughter for the first few days, most would barge in, put a cold hand on my newborn daughter and grab at my breast. I hated getting lectured on how to feed my daughter properly and got frazzled whenever I saw a new person come in to give their opinion.
Every consultant had different ways to do it, but almost every one had an unparalleled level of condescension that I haven’t seen in a medical professional in…well, EVER. UGH. One in particular didn’t even watch me breastfeed, but just told me that I needed to use the breast pump every two hours or my milk wasn’t going to come in. WHAT? Yeah, the husband and I told the NICU nurses that and they all said,”we’re just going to pretend like she didn’t say that”. Luckily, this was on day three, so that evening my milk came in like crazy and it wasn’t just the yellow colostrum.
Moira also had a slight case of jaundice, so she got put under these special photo lights for a day. It was distressing to have her under those lights because she could only be out of them for a half an hour at a time, so I couldn’t just sit in the NICU and hold her. I think the combination of seeing her under these lights and being on a tiny IV was the most upsetting for me, but I was grateful that it was only for a few days of her life and that her issues weren’t actually that serious.
On Monday, November 23rd, we were both discharged from the hospital.
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