I’m a FTM with a four week old who just got out of hospital I’m not really sure how best to proceed.
We were in hospital after baby contracted a UTI and eventually sepsis.
Baby had a fever so we took him to the gp. Gp took his temperature and assessed the baby and told us that it was likely just a bug. Temperature continued to rise so we decided to take him to accident and emergency.
We spent one night under close observation at our hospital and in the morning baby was transferred to PICU at another hospital.
He was intubated, given a catheter and feeding tube. He was at this hospital just under 24 hours and we were transferred back to our home hospital and placed under observation for three more nights before being allowed to return home but continue to return to hospital for blood pressure/ heart rate monitoring and antibiotic injections for three more days.
The hospital will be running tests to see what the cause of the UTI was given how young he was to have contracted it in the first place as well as any long term damage to his kidneys. Our first test will be in about six weeks when the baby has finished the course of antibiotics and recovered.
As a ftm I have been worried about the transition back to life outside the hospital. Our only experience with our baby has been missing a medical issue that deteriorated catastrophically so the advice to newborn mums of “just keep them alive and you’ll be fine” actually feels a bit outside of my capabilities right now.
My main source of support pre birth (my mother) is unfortunately no longer speaking to us as she blames me for what happened to the baby and my mother in law unfortunately passed away a few years ago and most of my friends don’t have children, so we don’t have many people/ mothers in particular to lean on and get advice.
Because of this I decided to book a gp appointment with the view to getting some simple questions answered. Maybe if there was anything we needed to know about the after effects of being intubated, perhaps an introduction to some resources and advice about how to proceed with getting back on track after the baby lost so much weight and how we could support his development and mental health (I know he’s only little but I think he remembers more than people think- he has been having seriously adverse reactions to the sound of the rustling aprons the nurses wear for example as I think he associates it with the pain of injections/ the multiple failed attempts to insert a cannula into his teeny tiny veins). I also don’t actually still really know what happened in layman’s terms and was maybe hoping for a debrief and explanation of what the baby went through with less medical jargon which a gp might be more suited to than the consultant at the hospital.
So I was quite disappointed and distressed to find that the gp had decided to dismiss us from the very beginning of our appointment. I think, reading our notes she had assumed I wanted answers as to what happened to cause the UTI and refused to discuss this and said the consultant the hospital should be our first point of call.
After this, all of my questions were dismissed. I was told to “trust my intuition”( I don’t have one) look out for any changes to baby’s behaviour (we don’t know yet if the baby was ever actually well so that’s not helpful) was told about a website run by another county about symptoms of illness, and advised to weigh the baby once a week with the Heath visitor. Not necessarily bad advice but the curt response and generally dismissive tone really upset me. I think if the doctor had done something as small as give the baby a once over and said he was looking good I would have felt a bit better. In my frustration I did point out that if we had gone on the advice of the gp surgery then things could have been much worse, so perhaps they owed us the time of day on how to support him in the aftermath. Obviously that was a bad idea. Dismissive turned to defensive so the gp clammed up even further and there was no going back.
I am now unsure whether I have got the role of the GP completely wrong. Was I expecting too much ? Is there another branch that is better suited to give this advice? A midwife? A health visitor? The hospitals?
similarly does anyone have a similar experience and can share how they transitioned from hospital/ offer any advice and any resources they found useful?