Hello all!


Here is one very rare situation where test weighting was useful:
if a baby has congenital diabetes. After NICU it might be useful
to know how much baby is taking to adjust her insulin doses. At
NICU we did the usual test weighting to know how much supplementing
my daughter needed. When she came home (she was about 2,5 kg then)
after nine weeks at the hospital with severe nipple confusion after
all those bottles and only some hours breastfeeding daily I needed
to know how much she ate from the breast so I could give
her more milk and estimate how long I could let her sleep before
waking her up to feed. The insulinpump gave me little leverage
with eating but she had to eat something at some point.

If the diabetic baby is nursing well then there is no need to weight.
When baby is breastfeeding on cue, she is probably eating smaller
portions frequently and with insulinpump you can find a suitable
dosage of insulin per hour to keep bloodglucose on wanted levels.

Of course "you can not breastfeed her because we have to know how
much she eats..." But luckily her MD let me try in my own way
and when they saw how she thrived after coming home, I proved that
you can indeed breastfeed a diabetic very SGA baby. (Later there
were other medical problems but she is still nursing at two years
of age.)

Best wishes,
Pia Ruohotie
RN, breastfeeding counsellor, breastfeeding counsellor trainer,
mother-to-mother bf support group leader
Mother of two daughters
from Helsinki, Finland, (Scandinavia), Europe

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html