And…my faith in humanity is temporarily restored once again.
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Yeah, it’s truly incredible how far medicine has come. It’s also heartbreaking how much we know and just haven’t yet been able to or cared enough to implement. For instance, when my first kids (the twins) were born 12 years ago at a state of the art birthing facility, there was a dedicated lactation consultant from La Leche League who came by to help with initial latching and also offered classes weekly. The new kid was born 1.5 years ago at a different, even newer facility, and the entire nursing staff were trained in modern lactation practice. Every single time they came into the room they really thoroughly checked on frequency, latching, whether the baby was actually getting any milk, etc. The latch is difficult to not only get, but get right. They corrected issues that I know were a major cause of problems with the twins just a decade earlier.
And then I think of my mother who was ridiculed by her (male) doctor for not giving me formula…
Edited because I remembered that the original lactation consultant was not an employee, but a consultant from LLL.
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We went through a “Birth Center” staffed by midwives: mostly to be able to do a water birth, which was a great thing for us. Now (thanks to the midwives at that facility) our hospital offers them as well, and if they had, we’d probably have gone with them, at least for the birth (all the other services at the birth center were well worth signing up for).
The main thing was that the midwives were kind of nazis about “childbirth is a natural process, not a medical condition!”, and my wife was sent home the same day, while at a hospital she probably would have been kept under observation for a couple of days. However, we did luck out and their lactation consultant was able to a house call the second day and was confirm that our child wasn’t actually feeding at the breast, and when she couldn’t figure out how to make him she asked, “So, do you have any formula?”, which was an incredibly helpful admission for us to hear.
Later we went to another consultant. As usually goes with that thing we always got a perfect latch and successful feeding (weighed the baby before and after) – in the office. But almost never at home, and not without huge amounts more stress.
Of course, my wife was a “geriatric” mother…35.
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Don’t worry, we’re working hard to fix that.
What a nice, normal, natural thing for one mom to do for another. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t make the news.
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