The Stephens: Doing much better...

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Doing much better...

Levi, William and I are doing much better after today. We had an eventful morning that I talked about in our previous post, but really we have come full circle in just a few hours.

This morning Levi had another "choking" episode which resulted in the nursery staff deciding to suction him. While obviously this type of intervention is a last step sort of thing, sometimes it is necessary. Levi needed a little extra help getting rid of that junk. Since then, no choking has occurred, so we are hoping the problem has been fixed. I still plan on propping him up tonight so that I can feel more relaxed sleeping with him.

He continued to be uninterested in feeding, so we called in the lactation consultant. As an SLP I have a TON of respect for the profession of LC's and couldn't wait to hear her input and advice. She listened to our story, assessed our feeding and quickly came up with a plan for us. First thing she noticed was Levi's inability to wake up to feed. So we immediately took his blood sugar to see if that was what was causing it. His blood sugar was very normal... thank the Lord! She also noticed that we were having a horrible time latching. Levi is a big kid and so we had to change up our positioning and mindset about nursing. The third thing she noticed was Levi's suck/swallow reflex was a little uncoordinated and he wasn't using nutritive sucking. There are a few ways to change this, but she thought maybe his biggest issue was that he would be more successful with a greater flow of milk (something my body can't yet provide). She tested her theory with a little tube and some water... and sure enough, he sucked the whole syringe dry without a single mL pushed in by her. So our solution, until my body is producing more milk is to finger feed Levi after attempting a breast feed. This allows us to work on our latch issues, get Levi fed (and keep up his interest in feeding and his energy level) and gives me time to pump to stimulate my production for future breast feeding. We also avoid nipple confusion by giving him the finger instead of a bottle. Plus William gets to be involved.