Lactation training helps babies start on breast-feeding

By THERESA HOGUE
Gazette-Times reporter

Nursing a newborn baby may be the most natural thing in the world, but Pam Bartholomew knows it actually can take a lot of hard work.

The Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center nurse and lactation expert spends her days helping new moms learn to breast-feed, and she teaches classes at the hospital once a month for moms-to-be. On Wednesday evening, she spoke with four expectant mothers and their companions, including two husbands and a grandmother-to-be, about the joys and frustrations of breast-feeding. Men are welcome to attend. Although they often admit that they had to be dragged to class, many say they end up enjoying it.

“Who needs a class on breast-feeding?” she said people often ask. “How did the first mom do it? I think we lost a lot of babies back then.”

On nature videos, animal babies seem to find their way quickly and easily to their mother’s milk and settle in to eat. But new human mothers sometimes struggle with exactly how to get their babies in the right position to feed.

“Some people say babies are born knowing how to breast-feed, and their moms aren’t,” Bartholomew said.

Babies usually are wide awake for the first two hours after they are born, and Bartholomew said it’s crucial to take advantage of this brief period to try to start getting them to feed.

“It’s pretty easy (then) to get them on the breast, and that has a huge impact on their brain,” she said.

After that first two hours, they crash and can sleep for up to 24 hours, after which it’s often much tougher to get them to back to the breast if they haven’t already started nursing. That’s why she and four other lactation nurses visit every new mother in the hospital, coaching them on how to get the baby to begin feeding.

By the third day, most mothers have already been sent home, which is why Bartholomew and the other lactation nurses make a home visit to every new mother, to help them if they’re having trouble nursing. She said she’s been greeted at the door by desperate mothers who literally drag them inside to get help with nursing.

“When it’s 3 a.m. and you feel like you’re the only one awake in the whole world,” she told the room full of mothers-to-be, “just try to survive that night. The next morning we’ll come over and fix everything.”

Kasey Meisner’s first child is due April 6 — a girl she’s planning to name Ava. Her mother, Debbie Wilson, came to class with her and was the one who recommended that she take the class.

“She was kind of making me,” Meisner said with a giggle. Wilson found the class on the hospital’s Web site and thought it would be a good idea for her daughter to participate.

“I thought it was a good idea,” Wilson said. “They didn’t have these when I had her.”

Bartholomew said it can be discouraging, and not every mother will successfully get her child to breast-feed, but if she does, “It’s definitely worth it.”

“Stick with it,” she said. “It should be OK.”