My dsis had her baby early on Saturday guess what she was told?

[MrsMatryoshka]

He was 6 weeks early doing really well fortunatley .
Anyway when dsis was in labour the midwife chatted to her about bf and explained all the benefits to her and she decided to do it.
Baby had to spend the weekend on special care but dsis bf him a couple of times and expressed so he could be fed it through a tube.
Today she has stopped feeding him because the nurse on SCBU told her she would get him home quicker if he was ff .

your poor sister.
I appreciate not wanting to seem like you're nagging, but I think you could say something like...
mmmm....that's sounds a bit odd, not what I've heard....why not check it out with one of the other nurses/drs?
as others have said, not too late to change her mind.
Hope it ends well.

Congratulations on the birth of your nephew.

Can you give her this to read? There's some personal stories on there and a good link off it you could maybe print out?

Please don't think of talking to her about bfing as nagging.

I would say to her "I realise you've had a shitty time of it thus far and this might be hard to hear, but I would hate you to get a year down the line and realise you'd had bad advice and been talked out of doing something you want to do, so I'm going to say it, just once, and whatever you decide is fine by me and I'll support you either way, because you're my sister and I love you."

Then talk about how important bf is, especially for prem babies, and how you know where to get help if she wants it and then offer to call a bfc for her.

Agree with the others.
I think you can say something very gently, along the lines of what Hunker says above, it needn't be nagging.
It does seem quite drastic to stop based on the comment of one nurse, when b-feeding is more important than ever with a prem baby.
Does your sister knwo about MN? She woudl get loads of support on here if she wanted to b-feed.

by the way MrsM you are a great sister!

My experience (33 weeker) was that I did feel a very strong need to get my DS home as soon as I could, and therefore have great sympathy for those who may see FF as a quicker route out of SCBU. Yes, it may only be a couple of extra days, but that can seem like a lifetime when your baby is taken away at birth and you miss those first days.
I expressed while DS was tube fed for a few weeks and then spent 48 hours in the self contained flat in SCBU to establish BF before going home. I was encouraged and helped to do so but as they are busy places, help was pretty limited.
Unfortunately I was unable to continue when I got home. I found it extremely painful, difficult and was desperately unhappy. I was just desperate to bond with and enjoy my baby having missed out on his first few weeks. When I look back I now see that I was in complete shock at what had just happened to us.
Anyway I think what I'm trying to say is that while it's great that you can be supportive and encouraging to your SIL, don't underestimate the shock and emotion that some new mums of prems are feeling and how this might affect the choices some of them may make.

Mintchocaddict am with you all the way on the shock aspect. ds was not prem but very ill after being born seemingly very well and I am still getting over the shock.

my ds still naps on my chest in the afternoon as in the early days I just could not bear to put him down so much to catch up in terms of holding close.

your post is a good balance to the ones already on here.

Thank you madmouse. Didn't know if my rambling post would make any sense! I remember thinking that I was coping with it all pretty well at the time, but when I think back there are big blanks in time that I can't account for.
I just needed to be left alone with my baby.
I think that if a nurse had told me that FF would allow me to get him home earlier, I'd have jumped at it, despite being fully aware of the many benefits of BF particularly for prems.

Mrs M

A tricky situation....given that your dsis' lo is only a few days old, her decision is not irrevocable. How would she feel about you not expressing your feelings on her decision, when she has more perspective on the whole experience? I am not saying that it is an easy discussion to have, it's just that in the days after you have a baby and they are in SCBU everything is so far from normal you just don't think straight sometimes.

I suspect that what the nurse meant may have have been that bottlefed babies go home quicker - because you can see how much they are taking and the teats used in SCBU/NICU normally don't require a baby to be sucking well. Not the same as formula fed.

However it can take time for a mildly premature baby to properly learn to feed - when that's the only thing keeping them in hospital then it's frustrating.

You could discuss things with your dsis along the lines of:

• she could continue to express so that he gets her milk fed to him via tube or bottle
• she can express and try to establish feeding but accept that it may mean a few extra days in hospital, which in the scheme of things, and with distance won't seem so much.

It is also worth pointing out that life with a low birth weight premature baby at home is demanding and can be very isolated - they tend to feed more often because they are smaller and more immature and unless the baby has ongoing medical needs you don't get any additional support from community midwives or hvs with either care or feeding. In most SCBUs you can ask, and get, help with feeding from either the neonatal nurses or the hospital infant feeding specialists.

However, I'm writing on this from the perspective of my dd having spent 8 weeks in SCBU so had accepted early on that we would be there for a long time - I think it feels very different when it's a matter of days.

How's your sister doing, MrsM?