Losing my mind on postnatal ward

[newmum0604]

Had my first baby Tuesday evening, over the moon, she is perfect but I'm scared for my mental health right now. I have slept a total of 1.5 hours since Sunday night.

They won't 'let' me leave til they see her feeding well, without someone helping me. I understand where they are coming from but I'm finding it pretty fucking impossible to establish breastfeeding in this environment. I want to be at home, in my own bed, quiet and relaxed.

The issue is she seems to latch on OK but won't keep going for more than a few seconds, stop start like this for maybe 10/15 minutes every 4ish hours. She is sleeping a lot, I could be sleeping too if it weren't for the background noise. But this means I can't think straight about the situation. Every time I started to feed in the first 24 hours someone would appear and take over, so even though she seems content they won't class it as me having actually done anything/being capable. Have expressed into syringes a couple of times, not going to let her starve ffs.

AIBU to switch to formula purely so I can leave in the morning before I completely go over the edge? I know that sounds incredibly dramatic but I genuinely feel on the edge

Are you in the UK, OP? I had a C-section and the only thing they were interested in was my blood results & wee to discharge me. I left within 24 hours and BF was nowhere near established. They asked if I had formula & bottle just in case and off we went...

@DarkMatterA2Z

What's also shocking is that women are expected not only to look after themselves in these conditions but also to care for helpless newborn babies. I've heard some horror stories about babies being dropped because exhausted, drugged up mothers can't stay awake and no one comes to take the baby when they ring the bell.

And that breastfeeding is all or nothing.

OP you are essentially me five years ago. Being on postnatal for a week felt like being in prison and I’m still quite traumatised by it all and by how callously I was treated by some staff. I barely slept for a week and Bf support involved an annoyed looking healthcare assistant telling me ‘keep doing what you’re already doing’ as i and my baby sobbed over his total failure to even latch for a second. Do whatever you need to to get the hell out of there - if that means formula, do it. You can always access BF support once home in a relaxed environment if that’s what you want. Feel free to PM me if you want

I hope you are ok OP I’m so sorry for the state of things on postnatal wards - I’ve had two babies and can totally relate to all these stories. I’m due to go in for my third shortly. I will be self-discharging if the experience is as poor as it was previously.

Never had a baby but am a maternity nurse.

1- leave without saying you’re swapping to formula . You’re within your rights to discharge
2- Swap to formula then leave
3- leave and book a lactation consultant, either in person or over zoom

One client of mine went private for her third purely because the maternity ward made her lose her sanity she said.

I am pretty certain you can insist on leaving.

OP I hope you are okay I had this with both of my children. First time around I switched to formula so we could leave, I still feel a bit teary over five years on thinking about how desperately I wanted to get home. Second time around I was much better advocating for myself, I was told I couldn’t leave without establishing breastfeeding - when I shrugged and told them to give me formula then, this mysteriously changed and they were happy for me to leave without establishing feeding. The cynic in me thinks they were trying to improve their stats on babies discharged breastfeeding.

Do what is best for you and your baby. Don’t be afraid to be assertive. I hope you’re home now!

Like @CalicoKate, I had a similar experience on a postnatal ward 16 years ago. My son absolutely refused to breast-feed past the initial delivery room feed. I can't say that I blame him, actually, as I'd been pumped full of antibiotics due to being a Group'B' Strep carrier - and it would have tainted my milk. Anyone with half a mind would have understood this to be the case - and whilst I'd wanted to breast-feed him... I wasn't particularly bothered about him being fed formula milk instead. In fact, once we worked out why he was turning his face away from the breast (literally), I suggested this to the midwife "in charge" of us.

You would have thought I'd suggested feeding my newborn (he was maybe 4 or 5 hours old here) shit on a stick, the way she behaved when I said I was okay with bottle feeding him, instead.

I was lectured on how "breast is best" (not in all cases it isn't!), did I want to have no bond with my baby (err....?!), how I was such a young mother with a first baby and didn't know what I was talking about (I was almost 30 and had successfully managed to keep his older sister alive for 8 years at this point), and did I want social services to take him away from me because I wasn't putting his best interests first.

I discharged myself and him when he was 10 hours old, lodged a complaint about her attitude... went home and cried. A lot. Whilst bottle feeding him formula. He thrived, I survived, and as time moved on, I'd hoped that the "breast is best"/"you're an evil mother if you want to bottle feed your newborn!" brigade had ceased over the years. Sadly, it would seem not.

@newmum0604, discharge yourself and your baby, citing the reasons you've laid out above. Stress that it's better for your baby if her mum isn't sleep deprived to the point of torture due to excess ward noise, that you're going to bottle feed her (maybe suggest you'll keep trying to breast feed her, in case she gets the hang of it - but be prepared for her to maybe not want to know), and if you have any problems, you'll communicate them to your community midwife team/GP.

Good luck. And congratulations on your baby.

I desperately hope the OP isn't replying because she's gone home and is asleep! I wish I could go back in time and read this thread just before entering the postnatal ward first time.

I am so saddened and appalled by the OP's experience and the experiences of lots of other posters. What has shocked me is that there have been women sharing similar experiences from when they gave birth over 20 years ago. How is it that we have seen no improvements in the way we manage post-natal care in the UK? Particularly in the actual environment women receive their care in?
I have sent this thread to Liz Truss with an accompanying email expressing my outrage that women are STILL having to put up with horrible post-natal experiences due to outdated use of communal wards at a time when what they need is peace and quiet to physically and emotionally recover from labour and to bond with baby and establish breastfeeding if that is what they want to do. If every poster on here did the same and shared their outrage and the link to this thread with Liz Truss then surely she would have to take notice and do something to bring about improvements for women in this area?

Wishing you all the best OP and hope you are home very soon

Yep, just give baby a bottle and get yourself home. You can do lots of skin to skin at home and get BF going there. Post natal ward is like a war zone, no place for a mum or a baby!!! Discharge yourself, get your partner to pick you up ASAP!

Many congrats!!!

Making when the 'new' hospital opened up in Glasgow a few years ago, all the units were private en suite rooms bar ICUs and guess which other one? Yep, another ward for post-natal.

Please go home. I think post natal wards make mothers lives hell from the start. I got them to discharge me as I said if I stayed any longer my baby was likely to die. They were so short staffed they kept sticking the baby in the bed with me at night when he was crying and I was so convinced that after 4 days with no sleep I was going to crush him that I had to stay awake to make sure I didn't and I was almost hallucinating. It was horrific.
I did manage to bf exclusively, but I wouldn't have if I'd stayed another minute in that place. It was one of the reasons I didn't want to get pregnant again.

The ward was full of poorly trained lactation consultants during the day and 2 midwives for about 10 wards at night. I had to constantly go and get the baby out of the cot for the woman opposite me who'd had an emergency c section because noone else would come when she rang the bell.
My bedside didn't work so was permanently up so I had to scooch out every time despite having multiple stitches after an emergency forceps. I never got given any sort of painkillers, not even paracetemol despite asking. The toilet was full of jugs of piss from women who had to prove they had peed after birth but noone checked or collected them. I could go on.

Oh OP, your situation is so similar to what I experienced 10 years ago. It's made me a bit upset tbh to think of it all again and I can totally feel how you are feeling now.
I switched to ready made formula cartons to show she was feeding and then discharged myself. I was in for a week in total, in a side room, and it was miserable. They started having concerns about my mental health but it was being made worse by being in there for so long. Once I was home, everything was better and it will be for you too. You can then reestablish breastfeeding or stick with formula... it will be your choice.
I hope things get better for you OP.

Well done at @makingnumber2, this thread and what to do about it has been bothering me all morning if I'm honest. The whole poatnatal setup is so badly designed for the purpose it should be serving, it really needs urgent attention. I don't know what the answers are but we can't go on treating women and babies like this, especially FTM. Not saying subsequent births are less important but I think people are far more likely to be able to advocate for themselves and get what they need if they've experienced the nightmare before. Reflecting on my own experience it seems I got off lightly as at least everyone was kind and helpful!

It's difficult to choose YABU or YANBU as you're definitely not being unreasonable to feel shitty and desperate in that situation. It sounds so frustrating and ironically they push breastfeeding but are creating a terrible environment for it. However, if you still want to do breastfeeding then I wouldn't switch to formula just to appease people at the hospital.

This is how I felt and is the exact situation I was in when my little girl was born. We started pumping to get out of hospital. Ended up exclusively pumping for a year!

Please tell them you are going home. I was so meek when I had my first baby. The second and third, I told them what I was doing and how I was doing it and no-one batted an eyelid. I think we develop a "Don't mess with me" expression.
You will be so much better cared for and relaxed at home.
Congratulations.

Mumsnet did a campaign on postnatal care in 2017/2018: www.mumsnet.com/campaigns/better-postnatal-care

One of the batshit things I remember from my first postpartum experience was I found out after several days that they deliberately put women flagged up for past mental health issues on a ward even when they have private rooms available so they "can bond and feel supported". Are they INSANE?! The woman opposite kept buzzing every hour telling the midwives she was still bleeding and concerned about it and they basically told her to lie down and stop complaining. The woman next to me was barely conscious and her baby was HOWLING 24/7 and her husband was walking it up and down shushing it all effing night but of course it kept crying.

So the "care plan" is to deliberately deprive women of sleep and privacy at a vulnerable time by billeting them with total strangers in order to HELP their mental health?

@DarkMatterA2Z they made it very clear when I was on a postnatal ward (for a week) that they weren't there to help look after the baby! I got told off for leaving mine, safely asleep in the trolley thing, by my bed whilst I went to have a shower. I assumed someone would go to him if necessary, in the few minutes I was away from my bed. Obviously I was expected to take him to the shower with me.

These wards are like prisons. They wouldn't let me leave as my baby was under SCBU care (but not actually in the unit). I asked if I could go for a walk round the hospital/outside - they wouldn't let me take the baby and told me I could only leave the ward by myself if the nurses agreed to look after him, which they obviously weren't going to do.

This thread is making me feel simultaneously less alone and furious that so many of us have had these experiences. It’s just not good enough that so many of us have felt so alone, unsupported, stressed, and pressurised at a time when we’re at our most vulnerable.

Has your milk come in ? Mine took a hellish 4 days
When it does you’ll know it
This might be issue ?

Hopefully the no reply means OP is at home and enjoying a well deserved sleep. Otherwise I echo everyone else and go ASAP. Don't wait for forms if they are delaying. Give baby a couple of formula top ups for now to give yourself a break from worrying and then re establish once you've had a decent sleep and meal in your own home.

Oh god, absolute solidarity. Five nights on a postnatal ward were worse than my hellish labour/elective C section. I have no idea how on earth anyone could design such a hellish set-up. There were four women in my room, and one of the babies was not well, so doctors and nurses basically there all the time (doing an amazing job) and I felt as if I was hallucinating with tiredness. I'd walk out tbh. Getting back to my quiet, cool (baby was born into a heatwave), not brightly lit bedroom was honestly one of the best moments of my life. Get home and then work out what to do re breastfeeding.

Emergency C-section, I mean!

Probably time for a follow-up campaign then @mumsnetHQ

I do hope the OP is either asleep or happily feeding, wherever she is at the moment.