My Breastfeeding Journey in NICU During COVID

By Kyllie Knight

I promised myself that it would be different this time - that I would be calm and allow my baby to feed wherever and whenever he needed. I would avoid all that time and stress expressing and sterilizing bottles. However, our plans rarely go according to plan.

After a scheduled Caesarean section, my baby, Ed, was taken straight to NICU because the doctors were concerned about a congenital heart defect. Once the initial checks were complete, he was bought straight to my chest for our first breastfeeding session. He latched immediately, and it was a perfect moment. My husband (the world’s biggest breastfeeding advocate) helped me position Ed, and it felt good, SO good. But this was pretty much the first and last of the perfect feeding moments for us.

Not much later, a few panic-stricken nurses rushed in and hurriedly took Ed back to NICU.  Unfortunately, they had found that his heart condition was critical, and he needed to be put straight onto medication and have multiple scans. We were then told that his chances of surviving were very low unless he had open-heart surgery. My husband and I were aware from the prenatal ultrasound scans that surgery was a possibility, but the reality of it was hard to swallow. There are enormous risks associated with these surgeries, and the statistics show that many babies don’t make it.

Still not able to move or walk after my c-section, I was not able to go to the NICU to see or feed him. I was also in a terrible mental space, and my thoughts kept returning to whether Ed would make it through surgery. The doctors quickly got me to pump as much as possible (which was not much after a scheduled 39-week cesarean) and gave me sedatives to get through the night. I was woken up to pump once the meds had worn out of my system, but I’m pretty sure the nurses must have had to supplement his feeds with formula.

The next day, I was finally allowed to go to the NICU to see and feed him. Unfortunately, because we were in the thick of the COVID pandemic, going into the NICU involved extreme safety protocols. We wore gloves, a mask, and an overall.

My husband (my breastfeeding wingman) was not allowed into the NICU with me, and I was given a plastic chair (squashed in-between beds) and handed a baby full of life-giving cords and tubes to try and breastfeed while wearing the protective gear. It wasn’t easy, to say the least, but it gave me time to bond with Ed, and that was the best it was going to get for a while.

A few days later, I was discharged, but Ed would be in the hospital for much longer as we waited for him to build up strength for his extensive surgery.

Because of COVID, I couldn’t enter and exit the NICU as and when I pleased. The visiting hours were between 3-4 in the afternoon, and only one parent would be permitted at a time, so my husband and I visited Ed for 30 minutes each. I would bring expressed milk during this time.

However, I had heard that as a breastfeeding mother, they couldn’t deny me the opportunity to feed my child when he needed to be fed, so I saw this as an opportunity for more time with Ed and explained that the doctors should call me when he woke up. I would time it right to get to the hospital and physically feed him.

This worked for a day or two until one day, I didn’t get there in time. Ed had gotten into such a state, crying for his feed, that his heart rate shot up. The doctors had to shock him to bring it down. This filled me with terrible guilt, and the nurses were instructed to bottle-feed him if it ever got to that point again.

A few days later, the day before his open-heart surgery (7 days post-birth), some routine blood work was done, and a high level of infection was picked up in his system. One of the concerns was that blood had gotten into one of his tubes due to tugging, which had caused the infection. I blamed myself for this, too, because I had often struggled to position him to feed.

This meant his surgery would be delayed by another week, and this was another week of hell waiting for answers and wondering if our baby would survive.

I decided then that I would no longer make this about me. Ed needed to make it to the surgery and be as strong as he possibly could be going into it. That was all that mattered. And so I expressed like crazy and made sure my 30 mins a day with him was perfect.

On the 28TH of September 2020, Ed had open-heart surgery. After eight excruciating hours of waiting to hear how the surgery went, we discovered his surgery had been a success. We were so relieved, but we knew that the next 48 hours were just as critical. He stayed in the cardiac ICU, and all we could do was look at him and pray that he would be ok.

During this time, he was only on fluids, which allowed me to stock up on a freezer full of breastmilk which would help him recover when he could finally feed again.

To cut a long story short, Ed eventually started drinking milk through a tube a few days post-surgery, and ten days later, he was well enough to be transferred back to the general NICU ward. The time spent in this ward was simply for him to learn how to feed again and for the doctors to ensure he was getting enough milk.

The option was to teach him to latch again, but the stress felt overwhelming, and I just wasn’t coping after what had transpired. The doctors also wanted to see that he drank 100mls of milk per feed before he could come home. I, therefore, decided to continue to express. At the time, this was the best I could do to control the situation and to measure how close I was to take my baby home. It was also incredibly frustrating to leave Ed in the NICU because he drank 90mls per feed instead of 100mls.

My doctors were unhappy with my choice to express instead of latch, as they worried my supply would not be able to match the demand when he got better. However, I assured them it would be fine (I think I felt like everything was under control because of my impressive freezer stash), but in the end, they were right. I couldn’t keep up with expressing and feeding, and eventually, after a few months, I began supplementing with formula.

I do wish I could have done things differently. Still, I’m proud of myself for doing what I could, for having the mental capacity to express milk even when I didn’t know if my baby would make it, and for those desperate times trying to feed through protective overalls.

I’ll never forget those first few beautiful, problem-free moments when he first latched before our little world crumbled.