NICU staff being judgemental.

[NicuProblem]

I'm in tears. Requested my baby's medical notes after a prem birth. Found a part where apparently they started a visiting log as they felt we didn't stay on the ward long enough, that I wasn't talkative enough and that my husband "rarely visited".

I don't drive and have an older child with disabilities. My husband works and at that time was working night shifts. They KNEW this.

I feel distraught by this notion that at my most vulnerable when I was trying my best I was judged as somehow not good enough.

Yes I agree, I'll feed it back at our next ward meeting. I hope I didn't come across lacking in empathy as a poster said and that I was giving all health care professionals a bad name... Its just we are trained in a certain way and most parents don't like us doing things very much. But I will definitely mention that we should be asking the parents how they want us to do it rather than assuming that will work for them.

The staff are looking out for your child. It is/was their job to ensure your child is well looked after. It's normal safeguarding/hospital policies to follow, no one is judging its their job. You won't see the other side when things do go wrong with families.

The staff need to ensure that child is going home to a safe environment that they can thrive in. Don't forget if anything goes wrong when the baby is home they will be in trouble as they have given the go ahead. They need to tick lots of boxes and that includes your bonding/attachment with baby and your well-being too. Visiting logs are very normal with children in hospital. Lots of families will have similar in their notes. At the end of the day nothing was flagged up beyond this so concern was minimal and just following policy.

I'm sorry you didn't get more support. If they felt you were withdrawn, I'm surprised no one spoke to you and signposted help and support for you and your family. Good luck in the future.

No you didn't come across as rude or anything and I appreciate the explanation of why you have to document things.

For me I prioritised DD rather than my feelings. So yes while I would ideally have been able to care for her the reality was she was in NICU and DH had an unstable income. Therefore I had to put my personal feelings aside and get on with it in the way that would maximise our long term outcomes. If she needed something there were people who could give it her, but no one else could sort our bills or comfort DC1.

That's how I saw it and I appreciate you saying you'll feed it back because it's horrible to have people thinking you're heartless and you don't care when that absolutely isn't true.

They need to tick lots of boxes and that includes your bonding/attachment with baby

How can they tell this? Unless you're in someone's head how would you know?

MrMakers I think your contributions are v helpful but

If we don't note down that someone doesn't visit their baby and then it comes to going home and their parenting skills aren't ready then it's us that will be getting pulled into the office for not picking up on extra support being needed. If someone didn't visit and had too much going on at home and then 3 months later down the line something awful happened then it's our notes they will pull to pieces in court and they would ask why we didn't note down that the parent had only visited however many days.

I still don't quite understand why ,the above being the case,comments re lack of visiting ,mother being quiet or whatever was causing concern ,aren't updated before discharge to indicate that they were no longer concerning .

So the OP would read in her notes x y and z about rare visits from father etc but later on would read that all seemed well ,no concerns etc .

They did the same to me when DS was in NICU in 2008 for four months.

Like you I was upset and cross, I had no car, the hospital was over an hour away by bus and the buses ran one every hour(ish) and ran between 9 and 3.
I had a 16 month old DD, DH was at work and there was no bus at all on weekends. I used to get the odd lift but then NICU moaned about me bringing DD as she would get bored and whingey and I had no one to take her as everyone was at work during the hours I could get there.

Raise it with your Midwife or the ward lead. It turned out in my case that the Nurses- no doubt busy as hell- hadn't always ticked the box to say I'd been there.

And to be honest, I always felt that it was intrusive and unnecessary to even have that on the notes- in no other situation would you have that (as far as I know). I kept begging to be allowed to stay on the ward but there was only 3 beds available and they were kept for when a baby was about to come home so they could get used to looking after them.

You can request a review and a new Nurse, I didn't know that and mine turned out to be an utter knob because she was told off (not by me) for not ticking the attendance box. I had Social workers out because of her so be wary.

I would put it in writing and ask for it to be placed in the notes all of what you have said you've made them aware of so it's official.

Good luck with it all and remember to breathe! My Ds is 10 now and you'd barely know how early he was.

mrMakers just read your last post about feeding back at a ward meeting .
You sound like a lovely nurse ,to be criticised so harshly on here and instead of flaring up be so constructive .

Hope the mothers who shout at you are few and far between .

My first was in SCBU. Obviously, not nearly as bad as your experiance OP. But I can relate to a lot of what your saying.
It was shit being Seperate from DS at birth. It felt like a physical wrongness that could only be alieviated by going to SCBU and being in his presence.
But: Being in SCBU was also shit. It was boring. DS needed nothing from me and was mostly asleep.
The only opportunity to interact with him was at very regimented 4 hourly intervals. Even these "cares" felt awkward and artificial because I was doing stuff under supervision by staff, that they could easily do themselves. And in fact, I was making more work for them by my presence and consequent need to be supervised.
I remember at the time thinking it was more like playing with dollies than how I imagined parenting.
I can also relate to the goldfish bowl thing. You do feel very watched and you catch yourself "performing" parenting in order to look like a caring parent rather than because it's needed. I remember bringing in a little knitted baby blanket and thinking "this is bollocks-he already has adequate blankets here". I did it because other parents had brought in personal stuff and I thought it might look weird if I didn't.
A lot of people have commented that parents are "encouraged" to do the cares. I honestly didn't notice this. It felt more like I was getting under people's feet in their workplace.
Because of all this, I probably didn't spend as much time as people might think usual hanging around at DSs bedside. I remember feeling caught between the wrongness of seperation and the extreme awkwardness of the environment.
Once we were in transitional care, everything fell into place. We got breastfeeding started. He put on weight. I got to sniff his lovely head as often as I liked. Absolute bliss. All we needed to bond was just to be left alone in a room together.
There isn't a "right" way to parent in SCBU or NICU. And I think you should be cautious before drawing conclusions about people's parenting ability from their behaviour there.

Gin I had one nurse who was rude and unpleasant to me and DH. She spoke to me like I was an idiot and kept quizzing me about DH.

unlimited I completely agree. I felt awkward just sitting there while she slept. I read books while she was asleep and I think that's what they're complaining about reading while my baby sleeps is exactly what I do at home!

The lady caring for my little one when she was a prem in scbu was amazing, always encouraged me to do the selfcare for her and took time to show me how. When I came in at first she always encouraged me to steralise my hands and touch her wee hand for a quick second to let her feel me.
The other nurse in the other side of the ward was awful. She once screamed so loud at a parent for touching their child, I genuinly fell off my chair. It may have been they had unclean hands etc but there is a way to speak to parents. They are already in a terrifying situation. The poor woman was terrified to go near her baby after that

I get you, OP.

All parents experience guilt, I think, but preemie parents get the pleasure of constantly worrying if they're doing enough or the right thing, while our babies lay in an incubator and experience more pain and suffering than a lot of adults have ever had in their life.

We certainly don't need the added stress and guilt of our visits being logged.

I was very lucky to have supportive family around me who looked after my eldest child while I visited daily.
I'd have been constantly on edge if I knew the staff were logging my visits.

Logically I knew I was there as much as I could be, but mummy guilt, hormones after just given birth etc would have made me question myself.

If NICU staff thought there may be a problem with bonding etc, chatting to OP and offering would be a far better option than simply writing down each visit.

I don't understand the relevance of if I'm doing the 10am feed or 2pm one, basically.

And herein lies some of the problem. You don’t understand. You mightn’t see the relevance or you may not care and you don’t understand but believe you me if a feed is due at 10am and someone is running late and gets there at 10.05am and the feed has commenced there is a greater chance than not that the person will crack it like nothing else. Irrational, yep. But common. So they are not grilling you because they have it in for you, it’s not some personal quest to insult you, they just don’t want the fucking abuse that’s so common. Christ on a bike, surely this is understandable. You appear to be an outlier. So was I in this regard but surely it’s not hard to see why they want to determine this, you know to keep parent happy and save their sanity in one go!

What Hopping said. Given NurseMakers experiences of being yelled at, it's understandable that if you're calling up and a feed is due, they want to know of you intend to be there to do it. If it's a tube feed, there's always a chance those tubes are coming home with you so there's a competency level at stake, if you want to breast feed when you're there, you might be heart broken to miss it by 10 minutes of it could have waited.

But I will definitely mention that we should be asking the parents how they want us to do it rather than assuming that will work for them. I have to say our 121 care was amazing. I was en ourahed from about a week old to do cares but if we were going for food etc they'd check if they wanted us to do stuff instead or wait.
Only one nurse made me cry.
I could finally pick DS up, from an open cot woohoooooo. No wires just a feeding tube so I picked him up for a cuddle, he vomited on me and the nurse shouted at me and told me it was my fault I'd made him sick and that I shouldn't pick him up (he was about 6 weeks, 1 corrected).
I was next to the nurses station and mentioned it to one of the other nurses when we were remaking the bed as I was so angry with myself for making my baby sick. I miraculously got a new nurse for the rest of the shift and the mean nurse didn't come near me for the next 3 weeks before we transfered

@bastardkitty

The poster I was replying to said she works in NICU, her comments were personal judgement (not professional observation)

Hope this clear up what I meant?

• sorry I was essentially asking if what she said were personal judgement or professional opinion, but I obviously didn't make myself clear (one shouldn't mumsnet too early, when getting 3 kids ready in the morning )

A lot of people have commented that parents are "encouraged" to do the cares. I honestly didn't notice this. It felt more like I was getting under people's feet in their workplace.

That was very much my experience too. Ds was term, only there because the hospital seemed to value getting him out of my vagina higher than anything else (although they had to admit defeat in the end). They wanted me to express (I can't touch my nipples) or give formula and they were the ones who insisted he had a dummy because he was "bullying the premies" when I wasn't there. I had time limits on how long I could hold him for (20 minutes every 4 hours) and they commenced treatment for jaundice without discussing it with us even though his levels were below treatment level. We would have agreed to treatment in a heart beat so that's not the issue however it all added up to feel like I wasn't needed or wanted in this equation.

"bullying the preemies"?!

The mind boggles

Yo, skinny kid, you btter share what's going down you're nose tube or I'll poop so big you'll smell it til you're 5!!???

And herein lies some of the problem. You don’t understand

Well then someone should have properly explained to the OP, shouldn't they.

Sleepingstandingup

@peridito thank you!

We do get shouted at quite a lot. I remember one time a mum brought some wipes in and we advised water instead as baby was under 34 weeks, the mum said no she wanted wipes she didn't have time for water while in the nicu. So we used the wipes as per her wishes and the baby got a terrible nappy rash. The mum then said she never brought in the wipes and that I had gone and brought them from home for convenience. She made a massive complaint about me and there was no evidence that she had brought them in herself... So I now have to note down things like that too. Can't win sometimes!

MrsMakers that's awful! How horrible. That's a shame that some people are like that.

unlimiteddilutingjuice

He cried a lot but they kept sending me away because apparently I needed sleep (if only it was that easy). At the time I thought it was another sign of my failure as a mother. Was only when I had his sister and discovered babies do cry whenever you put them down whether they are in NICU or their own cot, I got over that one.

Such a stupid phrase but it really stood out at the time.

@MrMakersFartyParty that is horrendous!!

With my NICU experience it was so, so important to me that he come home fully breastfed and I remember turning up one time just prior to discharge to my child crying and hungry and the nurses were just holding him and they said to me that they’d wanted to wait for me because they knew how important it was to me. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for that.

So yes, I do feel like they are probably in a no win situation if some mothers will be like me and be absolutely devastated to miss a feed whereas others wouldn’t have wanted them to wait (so they call, and it looks like checking up on you.)

As I said before, it was my first so I was able to dedicate the time and I do appreciate that with a second it’s not the same.

that is horrendous!!
Thing is, being a preemie Mum doesn't change the fact that some people are just dicks. This is why I'm always so pissed off with the "God only gives special babies to special parents/ God only go es you what you can cope with"
If only it were that simple