An Hour at a Time

 

Devki was bleeding heavily when her daughter was born. The team built the skin-to-skin care up slowly, and never pushed her.

Devki's* daughter was born at Dungarpur District Hospital on the evening of 19 July, weighing 1,900 grams. She had gone to full term. She was simply small, and small babies need watching from the first hour.

Her mother could not hold her. Devki was bleeding heavily after the delivery and was being looked after in the ward kept for mothers with serious complications. Kangaroo Mother Care asks a mother to hold her baby against her bare chest for hours at a stretch. Devki was in no state to do it. Her daughter was breastfed and monitored by the hospital team, and the team waited.

Four hours, then six

By the following afternoon Devki was well enough to try. The first session began at half past two, and across that day her daughter had four hours and three minutes of skin-to-skin care. She could not manage more than that. She was still recovering, and nobody asked her to push past what her body would take.

The next day she managed six hours and thirty-four minutes. The last session had to be dropped because the baby developed a fever, so the nurses went back to watching her. Her weight, meanwhile, was going the wrong way. It fell to 1,750 grams, 150 grams below where she started.

Going home, and the phone calls

She was discharged on 22 July, clinically stable and still a little under her birth weight. Before they left, the nurses went through feeding, burping, keeping the baby warm and the danger signs to look out for. Then they kept ringing.

 "The nurses are very good. They kept calling every four or five days. They took very good care of us. They showed us how to burp her and how to feed her." (translated from Hindi)

Devki brought her daughter back for follow-up on 18 August. She weighed 2,090 grams, 190 grams more than the day she was born.

When a mother is too unwell to hold her baby, the quickest thing to write in the record is that Kangaroo Mother Care was not given. What happened here took longer. The team waited for her, built her up an hour at a time, and stayed on the phone after she had gone home.

*Name changed to protect privacy