If it is night-time, fathers are then sent home–no dads are allowed on the ward at night. This is why you want your partner there as much as possible during the day. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the first hours alone with the baby,’ says Sara, mother of Tom, nine months. ‘He was born in the early hours of the morning, and my partner and mum didn’t pitch up again at hospital until the afternoon, which really upset me. I’d say company and support on day one is of paramount importance.’ You may be discharged as little as six hours after an uncomplicated birth, but most of us leave hospital about twenty-four hours after giving birth vaginally and three to five days after a Caesarean. If there are any complications, you may have to stay longer.
YOU MIGHT WANT TO:
Bring earplugs. Wards are noisy, and you can use them when your partner has the baby to get some uninterrupted sleep.
Ask for what you need, no matter how frantic, brusque or irritated the midwives seem.
Investigate the possibility of a single room: it costs anything from £30-£500 depending on your hospital, but having one means you get peace and quiet–and your partner can stay too.
Prepare yourself to be really assertive when you need help from the midwife–at the very least with establishing feeding or if you think something may be wrong.
Work out in advance who will visit you in hospital. You may not feel like greeting six of your work colleagues after a forty-eight-hour labour when you are attempting your first nappy change.
Dads, meanwhile, are left in an elated, buzzing state of limbo–and probably exhaustion. The really key thing to do, if you possibly can, is wind down a bit.
Dads: what else should you be doing?
When you are sent home, once you have stopped sobbing you could:
Email family and friends: have a ‘group’ set up, and just fire off the baby-arrival message.
Sleep–it’s your one chance. There will be little of it when your baby gets home.
Tidy up, so your partner does not come back to a bomb site.
Fit the baby seat in the car and understand how to clip it in and out and buckle it up efficiently.
Go to the shops: get basic supplies for home like bread and milk, and also the biggest bunch of blooms you can get your hands on (take to the hospital!) Hospital food is gruesome so take her some food too–a few treats, healthy snacks and even simple meals (fibre-rich foods like dried or soft fruit is good).
Zoom back to the hospital–don’t leave her alone with the baby for longer than absolutely necessary.
‘And, most importantly, tell her–repeatedly and grovellingly- how proud you are of what she’s just done.’
Back in the hospital, don’t be afraid to take photos and video footage–these will be precious one day. And, most importantly, tell her–repeatedly and grovellingly–how proud you are of what she’s just done. Whatever happened in that labour room–a planned Caesarean, drugs, tongs, suction devices, ten hours of her yelling abuse and battering you–at this point she needs to know you think she’s amazing and that you love her more than ever before. Make this your fallback position for the coming months.
Special care
The best place to get more information and support on SCBU is the charity BLISS–see Contacts for details.
If your baby needs to go to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU), perhaps because she is born early, is ill or has some health problem, it can be scary and upsetting to say the least. One in ten babies need special care at birth, and the vast majority are fine (forty per cent of twins and over ninety-seven per cent of triplets spend some time in special care). Many of these babies need to be in an incubator and fed through a tube until they’re well enough to do it by themselves. There are a number of reasons why your baby might need special care:
BORN EARLY
Babies born before thirty-seven weeks’ gestation are considered ‘premature’. Some premature babies are fine, but if your baby is born at less than thirty-four weeks, she will almost certainly need to go to special care. Possible difficulties include not sucking properly, poor temperature control and immature lungs.
Babies born early haven’t had time to put on weight like term babies, so can look a bit different. They may have loose, wrinkled, red skin, be covered in downy hair (‘lanugo’), have a very big-looking head and skinny little body, have uneven or heavy breathing, and they might move very jerkily.
‘It’s important to remember that even though they look really scary, attached to wires, probes, drips and drains, they are still your little baby,’ says Lisa Hynes. Her first baby, Milo (now six), spent several weeks in SCBU, and her third baby, Lara (now eighteen months), spent six months in SCBU. ‘With Milo I was so scared of touching him–he would ping if moved–that I had to be encouraged to hold him as he seemed such a scary medical bundle. With Lara I was no longer scared of it all as I had seen it before and I understood the machinery. That made a big difference.’
LOW BIRTH WEIGHT
Some babies born after thirty-seven weeks are smaller than they should be and so have fewer fat stores. Your baby may be able to stay with you in the postnatal ward, but the doctors will probably need to do regular blood-sugar checks to monitor her progress. Possible difficulties include poor temperature control and trouble controlling the glucose supply in the blood.
INFECTION
Infections in newborn babies have numerous causes and often very non-specific symptoms, which is why paediatricians tend to prescribe antibiotics just in case. Usually it takes about forty-eight hours to get test results to show what, if anything, is causing any infection.
OTHER HEALTH RISKS
A baby who had difficulties breathing at birth or has a known birth defect, like a ‘hole in the heart’, or who is jaundiced (see here) may need special care.
Ways to cope with SCBU
Ask for information, no matter how busy and cross the staff look.
Take breaks. Getting away for a walk or a bite to eat with your partner is crucial: SCBU is emotionally draining.
Remember it’s your baby. You can help care for her through this–ask staff to show you what you can do.
Don’t give up on bonding. Staff can show you how to touch and comfort your baby even when she’s in an incubator (she’ll recognise your voice and smell). Any skin-to-skin contact you can have is very valuable.
Understand the monitors: they are very sensitive and alarms tend to go off regularly. If you understand what they mean, you’ll feel less stressed.
Get clear feedback. If your baby has a setback, ask your doctor to rate it on a scale of one to ten. This will help you get a handle on how serious it is.
Be sensitive to others. Babies arrive all the time, so try to give other families privacy and train your visitors