So I had this lovely little guy, about 3700 grams, term, some meconium staining at birth, otherwise completely boring pregnancy and lady partsl delivery. He had some low blood sugars (which we call chemstrips or chems where I work), so they followed their protocal (the chem was still like in the 40's) and put the baby to breast and rechecked, well, turns out the average woman cannot really produce enough milk at hours after birth to raise that kind of blood sugar (sarcasm intended). So they followed their protocol and gave him formula, by cup, because we don't want nipple confusion. Problem is you can only really cup feed so much so he was getting about 20-30mls per feed.
I can understand this if it's like a one time event and gets the kid over the hump, but he had recurring low chems and when he finally dipped under 35 he bought himself a gavage feed and an admission to NICU. Of course we NICU folks aren't quite as concerned about nipple confusion as we are about say; brain damage so we proceeded to bottle feed the kid. So his lowest blood sugar during his entire admission was 63. He wolfs down 60-90 mls of either formula or breastmilk (turns out his mom's milk came in pretty early and abundant). We have had several admissions to our unit that could have been prevented had our General Nursery been permitted to use a bottle (cup feeding only used for babies that moms state want to breastfeed).
So to prevent the threat of nipple confusion this kid had to spend hours separated from his mother until we established that his blood sugars were stable whereupon we started having her breastfeed followed by a pc bottle. He will be going home a day late due to this silliness.
I am so frustrated with cup feeding !!!!!! We are getting frequent admissions of kids who develop tachypnea or resp distress after cup feeding (can you say aspiration?). I know I've ranted about this before, but here I go again.
