davidhillfive1
New member
Things have stabilized enough for me to write this out, in case any of you find it helpful. Excuse the lack of formatting. I'm not on mobile, im just lazy. Bold stuff is the actual tips, the rest is detail you may or may not want.
We were scheduled for induction at week 37. Initially it was week 39 due to type 1 diabetes and fear of having too large of a child. The doctors all said "we dont want your first child to be a c-section birth" and we just kind of went with it. Dont get bullied into a natural birth just because you feel like it is something you are expected to try. Week 39 became week 38 when wife's BP kept going high, then it became week 37 when it got into pre-eclampsia levels.
5AM we had to call L&D to see if they had a bed available. If not, every 2 hours after that. They did so everything was fine and we drove in at 7am. They started pitocin and slowly ramped it up by 2 until the contractions started happening normally. This took until saturday early AM. dont let them just blast you with pitocin. it is supposed to be slowly and steadily ramped up every 30-60 minutes to get contractions up to a desirable speed, about every couple of minutes apart.
At night it started getting painful so we tried NO2. It helped a teeny tiny bit for the early contractions. Then it stopped helping almost entirely. We tried soaking in the tub. That didnt really do anything either. She had her first major contraction and immediately was like "oh fuck that, i want the epidural". it takes time for the doctor to be available for the epidural. Dont wait till the last minute. Our doctor was in a c-section delivery so it took a while before he could show up.
When he did the epidural, he mentioned he saw some spinal fluid leak into the catheter. He said "spinal headache" is a possibility. Turns out my wife had a couple vertebrae compressing where they shouldnt, and thats what caused this. She had a SPLITTING headache. This gets fixed with a "blood patch" or it goes away by itself in 7-10 days. Considering we ended up with a c-section and my wife was sobbing from the headache and puking hard enough to be in danger of blowing her stitches out, we opted for the blood patch. They use x-ray to figure out where the issue is and put the patch in place. Laying flat on her back made the headache go away. standing up brought it back full force. We opted for the blood patch instead of laying around like an invalid for 2 weeks. The danger is that it could simply make things worse or not work, as it is essentially an epidural in which they use your own blood to create a scab over the puncture instead of using anesthetic.
Anyways, now the real pushing started. we were up at about 13 units of anesthetic for epidural and hovered around 12-13 for the remainder of the time. Wife figured out how to push. I was standing there watching the whole time. They broke the amniotic sack, shit got real pretty quick. There was no calming music, no incense burners, no essential oil bullshit. just the doctor, nurses, myself, and my wife. I watched her efforts, saw her pushing, saw everythign coming out (a lot of amniotic fluid, a LOT of blood). i was able to coach her on the entire process.
She pushed like that for 4 fucking hours, every 2-3 minutes. we got the head about 1cm away from coming out. The doctor at this point was gently trying to tell us a c-section was highly likely.
Wife wanted a natural birth, but i told her that she's pushing as much as she can. The head keeps going back in. something or the other is stuck, and i think it is smart at this point to go for the c-section. She reluctantly agreed.
I watched them do the c-section. Dont do this if you have a weak stomach or if you couldnt stomach watching the birth. I didnt see them make the initial incision, but i saw them yank her uterus out of her stomach which was a lake of blood at this point. Saw them cut it open and yank the baby out. She had pushed so hard that the baby had become lodged in there. took 2 people to pull her out of there. Then i watched them sew her back shut.
We did not get to do skin to skin or the first initial breast feed. Ideally, you should wipe off the entire baby except 1 arm. Then place the baby immediately on the moms stomach. The baby should crawl its way up her stomach, find the nipple, and start nursing. This did not happen for us. I did get to do skin to skin, as did she, however. The c-section was so painless for her that she fell asleep in the middle of it from exhaustion. Wife is now 100% on board for c-section delivery to begin with for our second because of how much simpler and easier everything was.
After stuff was done, the baby had to go to the NICU. she had low blood sugar (diabetes side effect from the wife). That sort of evened out in the next 12 or so hours. ideally, the baby should spent the first 24 hours in the same room as the mother. We got her late that night, both of us were completely exhausted. The baby started crying and the nurse offered for us to get sleep that night and she'll take care of the baby for the night.
When we woke up the next morning, baby was back in the NICU due to jaundice. They also noticed when they fed her formula breast milk takes a LONG time to come in that she'd forget to breath.
So then we spent the next full week at the hospital.
important
I want to take this moment to talk about lactation consultants. Think of them as car salesmen. You dont go to a car salesman to ask if commuting via bus or bike is the right choice. You go there to buy a car, they exist to sell you a car. Lactation consultants are the same way. They WILL NOT concede to formula or pumped milk. their entire job is to teach you how to stick a baby to a tit and keep it from dying. DO NOT LET THEM GUILT YOU INTO BREASTFEEDING. It will not work for everyone. thats just life.
\important
So now our baby is jaundiced. She has to spend all her time under UV lights. the way to get rid of it is to kill it on the skin via UV. The bacteria gets absorbed into blood stream, then gets pooped out. So eating a large amount is absolutely critical. We spent FUCKING DAYS with this kid screaming at her tits unable to feed because she was producing practically 0 colostrum, let alone milk. It took like 3 days for any action to really happen. We could have saved ourselves a lot of time, effort, and frustration by just pumping every 3 hours (you MUST pump regularly if you want the milk flow to start, its a supply/demand reaction in the body) and feeding formula in the mean time.
We eventually started getting .3-.5ml of colostrum. we got it into a syringe and fed it to the baby. day after day the milk production increased. Its been about 1.5 weeks since birth and now wife produces about 100ml per pumping. we still pump every 3 hours. it takes a LOT of massaging initially. You feel for hard lumps by sliding your fingers HARD from bone to nipple all around the tit. when you feel a lump, it hurts like fuck, like massaging a bruise. you have to essentially force new milk flow pathways to form. Now wife can massage herself easily and theres never hard lumps, it just straight leaks out.
baby was eating healthy, wife eventually got discharged after her insulin pump was recalibrated to post-pregnancy settings, baby was still in NICU. They feed her and change her there. But we were new parents and felt bad about leaving her there, we wanted to stay with her. NICU doesnt support overnight "visitors". So we had to have her transported to pediatrics. This was a fucking mistake. if baby is in the nicu, do yourselves a favor and let her stay there. Go home at night to sleep, come back during the day. or just leave your kid there till they're OK.. We couldnt hold her because she had to be under the light. we couldnt do anything. It was a mistake to try staying there to feeding and changing her. I understand why we made that choice, but it was not the right choice, i think. The baby has no feelings or emotions. It really doesnt care if you exist or not at this point, it cant see you, it cant hear you, it cant do anything.
We got home and then started paying attention to the baby's needs. She fell into a 3 hour cycle. we used Baby Tracker Android App to monitor when/how much she eats, how much we pumped, how much inventory we have. It tracks more stuff too, definitely check it out. Glow Baby app was trying too hard to be a social network, we didnt like it. we just wanted a no BS baby tracker.
Wife still needed to pump. This shit is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT and you need to time it correctly. Baby will wake you up at 00:00 with crying to feed. Feed baby, 15-20 minutes with bottle including warm up time. Another 10 minutes for a diaper change. you'll go through like 3-5 diapers per change because babies just poop for like 20 minutes at a time. Clean them off, apply desitin if needed, put on the clean diaper. repeat till the baby stops pooping. eventually you'll realize to just wait 20-45 minutes after the first poop before even attempting a change. Then the baby falls asleep, now wife can pump. That takes another like 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes of setup/cleanup if you're real efficient about it. Baby will wake up 3 hours after she finishes feeding. So realistically, you got maybe an hour of sleep, MAYBE 2. not even enough time to get into deep sleep. Its just enough time to get to where it is the single worst period of time to wake a person up, so you keep waking up groggier and groggier than before.
With 2 people, we can manage it. This is why a nanny or something is absolutely fucking critical. Wife pumps, i feed/change, and we knock out the entire thing in about 20 minutes and get back into bed and get a full 3 hour sleep cycle in.
6 hours of this is enough to function the next day. 9 hours of this is way better.
Babies get gas really bad. Doc Brown bottles help with alleviating the burp stuff. baby gas drops help with the stuff in the stomach. Leg exercises (bicycle, knee to chest, toes to head, and tummy time) help with the down-low gas.
We meal prep a lot, so for dinner all i really have to do is heat stuff up. I'm not talking /r/mealprep style. I mean we have ingredients on hand, we have emergency frozen dinner type stuff on hand, we cook a single dinner to purposely make at least 1 extra meal worth of leftovers.
We got the stroller and car seat to fit, we take her shopping with us just to get out of the house. Its good to expose them to the world a bit to start creating their internal bacterial resistances.
If anyone needs help or tips with breastfeeding, labor, etc, dont hesitate to ask.
We were scheduled for induction at week 37. Initially it was week 39 due to type 1 diabetes and fear of having too large of a child. The doctors all said "we dont want your first child to be a c-section birth" and we just kind of went with it. Dont get bullied into a natural birth just because you feel like it is something you are expected to try. Week 39 became week 38 when wife's BP kept going high, then it became week 37 when it got into pre-eclampsia levels.
5AM we had to call L&D to see if they had a bed available. If not, every 2 hours after that. They did so everything was fine and we drove in at 7am. They started pitocin and slowly ramped it up by 2 until the contractions started happening normally. This took until saturday early AM. dont let them just blast you with pitocin. it is supposed to be slowly and steadily ramped up every 30-60 minutes to get contractions up to a desirable speed, about every couple of minutes apart.
At night it started getting painful so we tried NO2. It helped a teeny tiny bit for the early contractions. Then it stopped helping almost entirely. We tried soaking in the tub. That didnt really do anything either. She had her first major contraction and immediately was like "oh fuck that, i want the epidural". it takes time for the doctor to be available for the epidural. Dont wait till the last minute. Our doctor was in a c-section delivery so it took a while before he could show up.
When he did the epidural, he mentioned he saw some spinal fluid leak into the catheter. He said "spinal headache" is a possibility. Turns out my wife had a couple vertebrae compressing where they shouldnt, and thats what caused this. She had a SPLITTING headache. This gets fixed with a "blood patch" or it goes away by itself in 7-10 days. Considering we ended up with a c-section and my wife was sobbing from the headache and puking hard enough to be in danger of blowing her stitches out, we opted for the blood patch. They use x-ray to figure out where the issue is and put the patch in place. Laying flat on her back made the headache go away. standing up brought it back full force. We opted for the blood patch instead of laying around like an invalid for 2 weeks. The danger is that it could simply make things worse or not work, as it is essentially an epidural in which they use your own blood to create a scab over the puncture instead of using anesthetic.
Anyways, now the real pushing started. we were up at about 13 units of anesthetic for epidural and hovered around 12-13 for the remainder of the time. Wife figured out how to push. I was standing there watching the whole time. They broke the amniotic sack, shit got real pretty quick. There was no calming music, no incense burners, no essential oil bullshit. just the doctor, nurses, myself, and my wife. I watched her efforts, saw her pushing, saw everythign coming out (a lot of amniotic fluid, a LOT of blood). i was able to coach her on the entire process.
She pushed like that for 4 fucking hours, every 2-3 minutes. we got the head about 1cm away from coming out. The doctor at this point was gently trying to tell us a c-section was highly likely.
Wife wanted a natural birth, but i told her that she's pushing as much as she can. The head keeps going back in. something or the other is stuck, and i think it is smart at this point to go for the c-section. She reluctantly agreed.
I watched them do the c-section. Dont do this if you have a weak stomach or if you couldnt stomach watching the birth. I didnt see them make the initial incision, but i saw them yank her uterus out of her stomach which was a lake of blood at this point. Saw them cut it open and yank the baby out. She had pushed so hard that the baby had become lodged in there. took 2 people to pull her out of there. Then i watched them sew her back shut.
We did not get to do skin to skin or the first initial breast feed. Ideally, you should wipe off the entire baby except 1 arm. Then place the baby immediately on the moms stomach. The baby should crawl its way up her stomach, find the nipple, and start nursing. This did not happen for us. I did get to do skin to skin, as did she, however. The c-section was so painless for her that she fell asleep in the middle of it from exhaustion. Wife is now 100% on board for c-section delivery to begin with for our second because of how much simpler and easier everything was.
After stuff was done, the baby had to go to the NICU. she had low blood sugar (diabetes side effect from the wife). That sort of evened out in the next 12 or so hours. ideally, the baby should spent the first 24 hours in the same room as the mother. We got her late that night, both of us were completely exhausted. The baby started crying and the nurse offered for us to get sleep that night and she'll take care of the baby for the night.
When we woke up the next morning, baby was back in the NICU due to jaundice. They also noticed when they fed her formula breast milk takes a LONG time to come in that she'd forget to breath.
So then we spent the next full week at the hospital.
important
I want to take this moment to talk about lactation consultants. Think of them as car salesmen. You dont go to a car salesman to ask if commuting via bus or bike is the right choice. You go there to buy a car, they exist to sell you a car. Lactation consultants are the same way. They WILL NOT concede to formula or pumped milk. their entire job is to teach you how to stick a baby to a tit and keep it from dying. DO NOT LET THEM GUILT YOU INTO BREASTFEEDING. It will not work for everyone. thats just life.
\important
So now our baby is jaundiced. She has to spend all her time under UV lights. the way to get rid of it is to kill it on the skin via UV. The bacteria gets absorbed into blood stream, then gets pooped out. So eating a large amount is absolutely critical. We spent FUCKING DAYS with this kid screaming at her tits unable to feed because she was producing practically 0 colostrum, let alone milk. It took like 3 days for any action to really happen. We could have saved ourselves a lot of time, effort, and frustration by just pumping every 3 hours (you MUST pump regularly if you want the milk flow to start, its a supply/demand reaction in the body) and feeding formula in the mean time.
We eventually started getting .3-.5ml of colostrum. we got it into a syringe and fed it to the baby. day after day the milk production increased. Its been about 1.5 weeks since birth and now wife produces about 100ml per pumping. we still pump every 3 hours. it takes a LOT of massaging initially. You feel for hard lumps by sliding your fingers HARD from bone to nipple all around the tit. when you feel a lump, it hurts like fuck, like massaging a bruise. you have to essentially force new milk flow pathways to form. Now wife can massage herself easily and theres never hard lumps, it just straight leaks out.
baby was eating healthy, wife eventually got discharged after her insulin pump was recalibrated to post-pregnancy settings, baby was still in NICU. They feed her and change her there. But we were new parents and felt bad about leaving her there, we wanted to stay with her. NICU doesnt support overnight "visitors". So we had to have her transported to pediatrics. This was a fucking mistake. if baby is in the nicu, do yourselves a favor and let her stay there. Go home at night to sleep, come back during the day. or just leave your kid there till they're OK.. We couldnt hold her because she had to be under the light. we couldnt do anything. It was a mistake to try staying there to feeding and changing her. I understand why we made that choice, but it was not the right choice, i think. The baby has no feelings or emotions. It really doesnt care if you exist or not at this point, it cant see you, it cant hear you, it cant do anything.
We got home and then started paying attention to the baby's needs. She fell into a 3 hour cycle. we used Baby Tracker Android App to monitor when/how much she eats, how much we pumped, how much inventory we have. It tracks more stuff too, definitely check it out. Glow Baby app was trying too hard to be a social network, we didnt like it. we just wanted a no BS baby tracker.
Wife still needed to pump. This shit is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT and you need to time it correctly. Baby will wake you up at 00:00 with crying to feed. Feed baby, 15-20 minutes with bottle including warm up time. Another 10 minutes for a diaper change. you'll go through like 3-5 diapers per change because babies just poop for like 20 minutes at a time. Clean them off, apply desitin if needed, put on the clean diaper. repeat till the baby stops pooping. eventually you'll realize to just wait 20-45 minutes after the first poop before even attempting a change. Then the baby falls asleep, now wife can pump. That takes another like 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes of setup/cleanup if you're real efficient about it. Baby will wake up 3 hours after she finishes feeding. So realistically, you got maybe an hour of sleep, MAYBE 2. not even enough time to get into deep sleep. Its just enough time to get to where it is the single worst period of time to wake a person up, so you keep waking up groggier and groggier than before.
With 2 people, we can manage it. This is why a nanny or something is absolutely fucking critical. Wife pumps, i feed/change, and we knock out the entire thing in about 20 minutes and get back into bed and get a full 3 hour sleep cycle in.
6 hours of this is enough to function the next day. 9 hours of this is way better.
Babies get gas really bad. Doc Brown bottles help with alleviating the burp stuff. baby gas drops help with the stuff in the stomach. Leg exercises (bicycle, knee to chest, toes to head, and tummy time) help with the down-low gas.
We meal prep a lot, so for dinner all i really have to do is heat stuff up. I'm not talking /r/mealprep style. I mean we have ingredients on hand, we have emergency frozen dinner type stuff on hand, we cook a single dinner to purposely make at least 1 extra meal worth of leftovers.
We got the stroller and car seat to fit, we take her shopping with us just to get out of the house. Its good to expose them to the world a bit to start creating their internal bacterial resistances.
If anyone needs help or tips with breastfeeding, labor, etc, dont hesitate to ask.