THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 19, 1995 TAG: 9509180227
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
WHEN NORMA ANDES was growing up, women breast-fed in the back room, as if doing something to be ashamed of. Something dirty.
So when she became pregnant with her son, Donnie, now 2, Andes turned to books and magazine articles for information. She also attended a couple of breast-feeding support-group meetings before he was born, trying to educate herself.
But none of her homework prepared the Norfolk woman for coping with a baby born a month early, or hospitals that were all too eager to stick a bottle in Donnie's mouth when he didn't gain enough weight, or maintaining her milk supply when Donnie was in intensive care hooked up to tubes and wires.
Andes' story is the story of how a never-say-can't desire to breast-feed your baby can help overcome nearly every obstacle a breast-feeding mother could encounter.
Because Donnie was born prematurely, Andes never got to take the hospital-sponsored breast-feeding class she'd signed up for.
Although he was premature, Donnie left the hospital with his mom after only 1 1/2 days. He had a touch of jaundice but nothing serious enough to keep him hospitalized. Once home, he slept nearly around the clock, barely waking to feed. Andes thought that was wonderful, but it was dangerous.
Four days later, Donnie was back in the hospital, yellow as a banana, suffering from extremely high levels of ``bilirubin,'' a substance the liver usually clears from the blood. If those levels didn't come down, he could have been permanently brain-damaged.
At the hospital, Sentara Bayside, she was told Donnie's jaundice was exacerbated by her breast-feeding and that she had to stop nursing temporarily. That was fine with her, as long as no one gave Donnie a bottle. Sucking a rubber nipple could, she knew, confuse his sucking, and he could have problems latching on to her breast later.
She knew babies could be fed with eyedroppers or special cups, and she sent the nurses looking for someone else who knew about them. Finally, they found a nurse who knew about cup feeding. She taught the emergency-room nurses how to do it.
``If I had wavered, I don't think I would have gotten that support,'' Andes said.
(A Sentara spokeswoman says she doesn't know what might have happened that night but that each Sentara women's health center has a lactation consultation.
(``And all our emergency rooms know what sources we have available,'' she says.)
Jaundice wasn't Donnie's only problem. Because he hadn't been nursing enough, he was also dehydrated. So he was rushed to Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters and fed formula through a tube. Meanwhile, Andes struggled with a hand pump to express her milk, exhausted, worried, refusing to leave her baby's bedside.
When she could finally try breast-feeding again, Donnie refused to latch on.
Some nurses told her to go home and sleep, that it was OK to use bottles, Andes says. But one nurse took her aside in the crowded, noisy pediatric intensive-care unit. She screened off a corner of the room, pulled up a rocking chair and a footstool, and told her to just keep trying until Donnie got it.
``I was tempted to quit,'' Andes remembers. ``It would have been easier to quit. But I was more determined after he got sick that he would have breast milk.''
Even after Andes was moved to a semiprivate room, which she shared with two other mothers and babies, Donnie still wouldn't nurse. In desperation she called La Leche League, a breast-feeding support group, which recommended she take off her shirt and walk with the baby against her skin, so he would get used to skin-to-skin contact.
She couldn't do it in the crowded hospital room so she ``cried enough'' to convince her doctors to send her home, she said.
Things started to improve. At first Donnie would nurse only a few minutes before falling asleep. So Andes would hand the baby to her husband and pump out the rest of her milk, then wake Donnie up and feed him through an eyedropper.
Eventually, he caught on and began nursing like a pro. Within a few weeks, he was a happy, chubby baby, and it was nearly two years before he ever had an ear infection.
But as successful as Andes has been nursing her child, she still doesn't think women should feel guilty if they don't breast-feed. Most of the time, she said, it's not their fault if they fail.
``I don't think the medical community is supportive. Whenever you have a problem, they say to give a bottle. ``It takes determination to breast-feed and it shouldn't.
``You have to learn from someone. And now it's like a lost art; no one knows how to do it anymore.'' by CNB