They were reasonable sizes, my daughter was 4lbs 10, my son was 5lbs 10. They spent four days in special care, which was horrid, actually, because it took two days to see a doctor because it was the weekend, and the doctor wasn't there, and we just thought something was wrong. And it turned out, we saw the doctor, nothing was wrong with them, it's just they were just short-staffed on the main ward and they didn't feel they could cope with small twins and support me to breastfeed, so they put me on special care. But it took two days for me to be told that.
When they were born did they not hand them to you and say, “You have two healthy babies”?
They showed them to me, they didn't hand them to me, they showed them to me and then took them away to special care, which was scary. And then I was left in a room, the recovery room place, and my husband was there as well, and the clock was wrong in the recovery room and my husband was moving chairs and standing on it to move the clock, which was by the by. But, and then I was taken up to see them, and then I was taken to the main ward. And then I was incredibly upset because everybody else had a baby and I didn't have a baby and it was just all, all came back, all over again. And then I cried so much they moved me off the main room and, and put me in my own little room by myself. This is the thing, you have to be really upset and you get your own little room. And I look back and I think, they had my notes, they could have read them, I should have been flagged up as 'major likelihood of post natal depression', 'major likelihood to be upset'. But then nobody had read the notes and that has been a recurring theme throughout everything, is nobody reads the notes. And it takes five minutes probably to get a quick overview of a patient, and sometimes they'll keep you waiting for half an hour but they still won't actually have read the notes, so. I found a, a midwife who was sympathetic, who made sure that I could get to the ward, but the thing was I'd had a section. I couldn't, it was a long way to the special care unit and I couldn't walk that far. I had to get somebody to push me in a wheelchair and I wanted to breastfeed and they were being tube-fed. And it, it just was, it was not a good experience to have them on special care. I wanted to breastfeed. Theoretically they were supportive of that, in practice they weren't, because it's not very convenient to have a mum who wants to breastfeed on the special care baby unit. It, it just, I was in the way. |
