Pither.com

It would appear that the sleepless nights, stress and hard work haven't taught Liz and me anything!

I'm proud (and scared, again) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our second baby around the middle of January. :-)

The first scan was a couple of weeks ago and everything seems to be fine. Although I think the baby's going to be another stubborn one. After quite a few minutes and various approaches to getting the baby into the right position to be seen, we got sent off to have some sugar and take a walk around the hospital! Thankfully that did do the trick, at least just about for long enough to get the information required!

As one would expect, shortly after Liz discovered she was pregnant, a (community) midwife was assigned to her. During the following eight(-ish) months Liz saw him (yes, not what I was expecting either) twice(!) and one of those was at the hospital after they had incorrectly told the community midwives we had already been discharged!

I think twice for any single midwife was matched by a couple of others, but stayed as the record.

Now this wouldn't be too bad if they all provided consistent advice, shared opinions on jaundice and could actually keep appointments. But it seems they can not!

Edward has had trouble putting on weight, it seems due to difficulty breast feeding. While they all seem very happy to promote breast feeding, they do not seem to be able to agree on the details - like the best positions or how long it should take or how long to spend winding, etc, etc. None of them volunteered to actually witness and check him feeding. Nor did any of them mention the option of changing to formula feeding.

They did, quite promptly, after a couple of weeks with Edward having lost so much weight and not shaken his jaundice, arrange for an appointment at the hospital for him to have a number of further tests.

They also told us that they would not discharge Edward to the health visitor until he was back to his birth weight. The trouble is that they also told us that they normally discharge people before referring them back to the hospital. And that they don't wait for birth weight, just for an improvement!

Worst still though, they didn't keep their (expected) final visit - no warning, they just didn't turn up. We had to call them to arrange another visit. At which point a midwife (who we'd seen while Liz was pregnant, but not since) turned up and said "are you able to visit the hospital today for further jaundice tests" to Liz, who was at home on her own at the time! After that fright, Liz managed to advise her that we'd already had the tests done and were just waiting for the final result. Now actually looking at our hospital notes, she changed her story too "slightly early (ie 37 week) babies often take longer to recover from jaundice, the other midwife sent you to the hospital a week too early, you really didn't need those tests"!!!

Arrgghhh!

We are now finally discharged from the midwife madness though. Our first health visitor appointment seemed to go well, but we'll have to wait and see how things last.

On Wednesday 3rd January, the morning after Edward was born, a paediatrician visited to give him an initial check up. One of the things she spotted was that he had quite severe tongue tie. This condition can affect a baby's ability to feed (especially breast feed) and later possibly affect speech. Further more, it almost always affects males and hence is most often inherited from fathers - so it's all my fault! :-(

Thankfully it's quite fixable.

The problem is that the membrane connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth extends too far towards the front of the tongue, in Edward's case, all of the way to the tip of his tongue. This limits movement (especially forwards, out of the mouth) of his tongue. The fix is "simply" to cut the membrane!

It seems that not many people/places perform this minor operation though. The hospital was good in this respect though and contacted one such person in the area and arranged for them to contact us. For a change they did this quite efficiently and the specialist got back to us while we were all still at the hospital.

We called back the specialist (who was based in Brighton) on the Monday after Edward came back from hospital and they booked us into a clinic they were holding the next day in Haywards Heath.

So Edward's first trip out of the house was a little sooner than we had expected.

It took us quite a while (perhaps an hour!) to get everything ready that we needed to take Edward out, but once that was done, the outing was really quite straight forward. Edward is generally a quiet baby and this seems to be especially so when travelling in the car.

At one week old, Edward had his first little operation. Although it was so simple it can hardly be called that. He was first checked visually and confirmed as having a 100% tongue tie. He was then taken to a second room, wrapped up so he could not struggle too much and the tie was cut with a small pair of scissors. The entire experience took no more than ten minutes and the actual operation less than one minute. He didn't seem to mind at all, only crying a little bit when he was released from the wrap afterwards.

Since then he seems to be playing with his new found tongue a little, making some strange faces. We're not entirely sure that he's quite got the hang of it yet. Certainly breast feeding doesn't seem to have got any easier yet. Perhaps that will take a few days.

This photo was taken at the hospital, just before we brought Edward home.

Liz and Edward finally returned from the hospital yesterday evening. While Edward is still a little jaundice, both are generally doing OK.

Their stay in hospital was a little longer than expected due to some bad advice, Edward being jaundice and a small dose of photo-therapy being required:

Apparently this is quite common, but we still found it to be quite a scary introduction to parenthood!

This wasn't helped by what I think was a dreadful service from East Surrey Hospital.

All of the hospital staff we met were very pleasant and helpful (with the exception of one night-shift midwife who was apparently very grumpy!). However almost everyone we spoke to had at least slightly different advice, some had totally different advice!

One of the first midwives on the ward said that we should leave Edward sleeping until he wakes up for a feed. We shouldn't worry that he's been sleeping for several hours already. Later advice was that we should have woken him after a maximum of 5 or 6 hours, probably earlier. Apparently if we had, it may have prevented his jaundice from being bad enough to require photo-therapy!

Beyond bad advice, we also regularly suffered no advice/attention/help/anything!

The maternity ward was already busy when we arrived, and shortly afterwards it was completely full. Not once during the four day stay on the ward did they have enough staff. They are apparently supposed to have 3 midwives on duty during the day, however most of the time had only 1. Even when they did have more, it clearly wasn't enough for a full ward - the bedside alarms would often be going for several minutes before anyone responded!

On the second day in hospital, Liz was seen by a midwife in the morning who said that she should be discharged that day. Soon after I arrived (partners can visit from 10am), a paediatrician visited Edward for his initial check. She gave him the all clear, although did spot that he had a tongue tie (more on that in another post). We then didn't see another member of staff until the evening when I went and found one to remind them that we were supposed to be going home.

Even more time passed and eventually a midwife came to do some final checks. However (after they'd actually completed most of the discharge paper work, including arranging for a community midwife to visit the following day!) they decided that they hadn't witnessed Edward feeding, and at this point told us that we definitely shouldn't just let him sleep, but should wake him every 3-4 hours to encourage feeding! So, they couldn't discharge them yet. This midwife also spotted that Edward was looking a little yellow and suggested that he may be suffering from jaundice. So the conclusion was that Liz and Edward must stay another night, for him to be checked for jaundice and to be witnessed being fed.

Several paediatricians and many more midwives (I'm not sure I ever actually saw the same one more than twice in the entire 4 days) later and the following day Edward was given some little sun glasses and put under a big blue light.

Thankfully he responded well to the photo-therapy and was taken off it after about 20 hours. He was still very jaundice, but out of danger. We've been told that the remaining jaundice should clear up on it's own over the next week or so.

Now, finally, Edward is home. :-)

Liz and I are very proud to announce that on the 2nd of January we had a lovely baby boy. He was 8lb 2oz and delivered after a 6 hour labour, which Liz did without any pain relief (she's especially proud of that bit!). :-)

Lots more details and some photos will follow at some point soon I hope!

As we're now just over 22 weeks in, we got to visit the hospital again for our second scheduled ultrasound. Here's the proof:

Unfortunatley none of the pictures from this scan seemed to be nearly as clear as the last one. The equipment was just the same, although the baby was being very awkward and not moving into any helpful positions! I guess it must be harder to get good images now that the baby is larger too.

Photos aside, everything is going well. The baby is roughly the right size and we could see two leg, two arms, a spine, brain, intestines and heart. Only another 4 months to go!