Reply to Why don’t U.S. hospitals let women sleep quietly for the night in the hospital after giving birth?

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Reply to "Why don’t U.S. hospitals let women sleep quietly for the night in the hospital after giving birth?"

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[quote=Anonymous]My kids are 4 and 8 and I'm still mad about this, TBH. When I had my oldest, the hospital was chasing the Baby Friendly designation.

I was in labor for 30 hours and had been awake for 40 by the time my son was born. We'd been in the hospital for 20 of those, so my husband wasn't doing so hot either. First time parents, deliriously tired.

I planned to breastfeed, and that went pretty great right off the bat. But baby would not sleep in the hospital bassinett so one of us had to be always holding him for the other to have any chance at rest. We both fell asleep holding him at various points, and were chided by nurses.

I asked multiple times for baby to be taken to the nursery, even just for a couple of hours and was refused everytime.  The reason given was because he was breastfeeding on demand. Only formula fed babies could go. I should have fought harder, but I was too out of it from sleep deprivation to recognize this plus as naive FTM, definitely internalizing the shame from the nurses for having even asked.

Our early days at home were rough. Baby continued to be a crap sleeper and I never really recovered in terms of the sleep deprivation. I eventually ended up in full scale PPA with SI, which was really fun to fight through without meds because I was too convinced I had to breastfeed at all costs.

Fastforward to my daughter's birth.  Same hospital, but she briefly had respiratory failure so spent our whole stay in NICU as a precaution. No parent wants their child to experience a medical emergency, of course, but her not rooming in was honestly glorious for me. When she needed to be breastfed, or if I wanted to do skin to skin, I just walked right from my L&D room around the corridor to the NICU. Then I went back and SLEPT. And recovered from birthing a human. It was amazing.

Certainly it also had to do with now being experienced parents, but starting off back at home rested made all the difference and it was a MUCH smoother postpartum experience for the whole family.[/quote]

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