I put him to breast at 3 and he took 20. That’s better than yesterday so more progress. He was awake and alert, chewing on his hands so that was a much better start than yesterday. But by the time we got to the bottle he was pretty tired. He took another 20 mls for me from the bottle and she pushed the last 10 in his tube. (When it’s not very much they just push the milk into his tube with a syringe instead of hooking it up to the pump.)
He woke up at 5:45 so we started his bottle early so I could do it. He did okay. Took about 15 mls for me in the few minutes we had to work on it. The nurse took over and fed the rest (they close the NICU from 6-8 every evening for shift change so I had to leave.). She went back to the faster flow nipple cause she wasn’t convinced the slow one was that great at his 3 pm feeding. But today milk was dribbling out the sides of his mouth and he’s never had that happen before. Maybe we are just confusing him by switching the nipples back and forth. I don’t know. I watched her feed him for a little bit and she wasn’t giving him any chin/cheek support. She was pacing him but she was pacing him by pulling the bottle up instead of holding Tate and the bottle back and then bringing them both up together like speech showed us to do. I went to the store today and bought bottles the nurse recommended and both slow and fast nipples to go with them. She wants us to start using those and maybe we’ll have better luck. They want us to use the kind we’ll have at home for awhile to get used to them and make sure we don’t have any problems with them. Speech should be back tomorrow so hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk to them and get their opinion on everything that’s been going on.
Jamie went back up for the evening shift and he tried using the new bottles with the slow nipple. Tate only took half. He tried again at midnight and Tate still didn’t finish it. They gavaged him at 3 am and he took bottle for nurse at 6. He only did 3 full bottles today. He seems very disorganized while he’s trying to eat. I think we are just confusing him with all the changes we are trying to make and pushing him too hard. Plus I think the bad chokes he had scared him so we are going to have to work back up to where we were before.
Tate weighs 5 pounds, 14 ounces today. More than three pounds over his birth weight now and so close to being a 6 pounder!
Another baby died today. This baby was in the other pod from Tate so I don’t know much about him. I had talked to the mom a few times when I saw her in the lactation room. She had twin boys. Since he was in the other pod they didn’t make visitors leave from Tate’s pod when it happened but I was in the lactation room (pumping) and the mom came in. The lactation room has 3 curtained areas and I was in one pumping when she came in crying. Immediately someone else came in and asked her if there was anything they could do for her. Then they both started crying and talking about planning the funeral and how unfair it was, that they never got to celebrate his birth and now he was gone, etc. It was awful to be sitting right there next to them listening. I packed up my pumping ‘gear’ and left so that they could have some privacy. I came back in and stood at Tate’s bed just looking at him and said a prayer for the family and for Tate. We are so blessed that Tate is so healthy. No matter how frustrating this whole bottle feeding is, I keep having to remind myself how much worse it could be and that this is trivial compared to what could be.
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