Kayla’s newborn baby
Kayla knew exactly where she wanted to have her third baby. Her first two were delivered at Hillsdale Hospital’s birthing center and she wanted the same kind of customized experience with high-quality care for her third.
“You can get one-on-one care from the team more than if you were in a bigger hospital,” Kayla explained. “They definitely take every step to make sure that you are safe and your child is safe.”
During the labor, however, her situation became more serious than expected.
“Kayla showed signs of preeclampsia with severe features,” said Hillary Zimmerman, clinical nurse manager of obstetrics. “Essentially, she had a serious condition in which she had severely high blood pressure that was causing signs of dysfunction to other major organs such as her heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. We worry about mothers having strokes and seizures when their blood pressures are as high as Kayla’s was, so we started her on a medication called magnesium sulfate.”
According to Hillary, the magnesium sulfate helped prevent Kayla from having seizures, which would be harmful to her and her unborn baby.
“Preeclampsia can be a very scary thing and I didn’t realize how scary it can be until it happened to me,” Kayla said.
From there, everything progressed quickly. Kayla’s daughter was born to her joy and relief, but the team immediately saw that she wasn’t breathing on her own. The nurses suctioned her out, helping her breathe and making sure she was okay while explaining to Kayla every step of what they were doing.
“All that communication was always there, which made me feel better. It was never like they were doing something and weren’t telling me,” Kayla reflected.
Once the baby started breathing on her own, they ran tests to ensure her safety and monitored Kayla’s condition as well. The relieved mother’s blood pressure went down and she was no longer at risk of a stroke, thanks to the devotion of the obstetrics team.
But the journey wasn’t over.
During her pregnancy, Kayla had gestational diabetes, but after her baby was born, the care team instructed her to stop taking insulin. This resulted in a difficult adjustment for her body as she processed the shock of it all. When she reached out to the obstetrics unit to address her concerns, they listened to her and brought her back in for additional testing to make sure everything was okay.
“After having a baby, they were still there for me if I needed anything,” she said. “I could not have asked for a better outcome with everything I went through.”
After a few days, Kayla started to feel better and was comforted by the reassurance the birthing center provided. While she improved, however, her infant was struggling to breastfeed. Each time she couldn’t latch, Kayla grew more frustrated and disappointed, especially since she was able to nurse her second daughter without any issues.
“I got really down in the dumps about it because I hadn’t experienced it with my second baby and I had thought it was going to be successful again,” she explained.
Eventually, she reached out to Hillary, who was adamant about getting her in for a visit that very day.
“Instead of jumping straight to formula, we worked with her and her baby,” Hillary said. “I looked at her history and birth story, assessed multiple feedings, and watched her newborn’s latch. Her history of preeclampsia and use of magnesium were a direct correlation with a slower than normal milk production and her early-term baby was having a difficult time transferring milk.”
Hillary showed Kayla different approaches to helping her baby nurse and checked for anything else that might be making the process more difficult. The infant started to latch better, but a follow-up appointment showed she wasn’t gaining enough weight.
“All they both needed was patience and time,” Hillary explained. “I worked with Kayla multiple times over the next few weeks until her baby began gaining weight properly. She knew we were a phone call away and she could always come in to be assisted.”
Once they identified the cause of the problem, Hillary helped Kayla form a plan to combine nursing with pumping to help her baby gain more weight.
“Hillary said it wasn’t like I had to stop breastfeeding. We were going to figure it out and they weren’t going to leave me with unanswered questions,” Kayla said. “She started gaining weight phenomenally. If it wasn’t for all of Hillary’s help, I probably would have given up after the first day of trying…Just the extra help and her giving me that extra boost of confidence made me feel like, yeah, I can do this.”
