Mother’s Experience with a Premature Baby

One mother mentioned that at one point she was left alone and that there was only one nurse in the neonatal unit to take care of six babies and the mother at some point asked the nurse to help her and the nurse told her that it was impossible and told her she had been observing her for days and that what was setting the mother back were the alarms of the monitors, not the actual expression on the baby’s face. The nurse then proceeded to disconnect the monitors and suggested the mother try to carry her baby.

The mother said that trying to take her baby out of the incubator was like knocking down a large number of walls in an instant, all related with the fear of causing her baby more harm than what she felt she had already caused the baby during the pregnancy, which in her case was pre clampsia which had occurred despite all the meticulous care she was involved in from the moment she knew she was going to have a baby.

After a little while, she was finally able to open the incubator, took the electrodes her son had stuck on his foot and abdomen, and softly held him in between her hands and placed him in the same way over her chest. She then covered him with a blanket and enjoyed his company to the full. She believes that her baby understood in his own way that something wonderful was happening. A few minutes later her baby was soundly asleep, breathing at a constant rhythm. The mother said that while she enjoyed feeling the heat of her baby’s body and breathing on her skin, she moved in closer towards the incubator, and with the same tape that he had on before placed it back on his foot, abdomen etc, and put him back into the incubator.

Although it may seem strange, the fact that your baby is in an apparently hostile environment controlled by monitors that make alarms go off when any problem or cardiac rhythm varies, respiratory function, the saturation of oxygen and arterial tension, and that can be determining a lot of your reactions. Because of this reason, if you think that all of those things condition you, ask one of the nurses that are in charge of caring for your baby if it is possible to reduce the volume of the monitors for a few moments. From then on your only objective will be to promote a positive interaction between you and your baby so don’t doubt in asking in case you believe it to be convenient. Tell the nurses that you feel inhibited and that you are trying to see if this way you will dare carry your baby without fear. The day you place your baby’s skin on your direct chest and the baby is able to grab hold of you with desperation to where you can see his hand prints on your skin, believe us, a lot of your fears will disappear magically.

One interesting fact is that during skin-to-skin contact, the mother and the baby act as a unit even to regulate corporal temperature. Besides this, many hospitals will provide you with blankets to cover the baby while you keep him or her in contact with your skin, regardless of whether it is summer or winter. In this way, when the babies are very small and the mother has not yet acquired the sufficient ability to practice this type of contact, the children a the same time feel sustained and contained and babies panic at the feeling of falling into an empty space.