Help!!!! - if you have to be admitted to hospital and you are bf...

[CheesyFeet]

... should you be able to take your baby with you?

My friend needs to be admitted for a few days, she has a 7mo dd who is almost exclusively breastfed.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that if you are bf they have to let you take your baby with you, is that right?

I wouldn't take anyone to hospital who didn't need to be there. Its full of sick people, is she going to a private ward?

Not sure about rules and regs, she should ask her GP or admissions office at the hospital she is going to.
bump for you.

YES and they give you a side room!!!

But they won't care for or feed your baby and they aren't tactful e.g. they put me and my 3 month old in a gynae ward full of women who had just had abortions!

It also took 6 hours to find a cot so best to let them know in advance.

tinkerbellhadpiles thats awful, how terrible.

tinkerbell

I don't think she feels she has any choice but to take her, as she is bf and can be difficult wrt taking a bottle

Also she has a morbid fear of hospitals and I think having her dd there would help her enormously.

I don't think she is too ill to care for her dd herself, she is having a load of tests done.

I went into hospital unexpectedly for a week when ds2 was 5 months old. He was exclusively bf. They provided me with a breast pump so I was able to express and stored the milk for me for my dh to pick up when he visited twice a day. I found it very hard and missed him but I was able to feed him during those two visits and give the expressed milk to dh to do bottle feeds at home. Think this would be easier than taking baby with you.

i was in this position, but admitted as an emergency in the summer. dd2 had just started taking solids, but other than that was excl b/f. the hospital didn't know what to do with me and put up as many obstacles as possible to ensure that baby wouldn't stay with me, in the end they said that they MIGHT be able to find me a side room somewhere in the hosptial but that my dh would have to stay with me because they might need to work on me during the night (was seriosuly ill at the time) but we had other dd and it was simply impossible. i felt like i was torn in 2 the night my dh wheeled her away from me. hosptial also tried (unsuccessfully) during fortnight stay in hospital to convince me that my dd2 had no need to be b/f anymore. having said all that we did manage to continue feeding despite illness (i was paralysed), time in icu and lots of other barriers that kept being put up. so, if your friend cant have baby in there with her (i would be careful because of infection control anyway in hindsight) tell her it is possible to keep going with it and it will be a joy for her and her baby when they can be togheter for visiting times.

bump, anyone else any experiences of this?

thanks to everyone who has replied so far, it will mean a lot to my friend