Yikes!! That gives me the willies - and I must say, of all the crazy or
"we've always done it this way" things "my" former hospital used to do, this
was not among them. Pretty scary - or maybe I missed the nursing school
lectures about how dangerous the content of a NB's stomach is. But while
we're on the subject of suctioning...When I first started working on the OB
unit, oral and/or nasopharyngeal suctioning of NB's was almost routine. The
old Delee aspirator was in every crib, and we nurses would suction at the
drop of a hat (or less). It was also almost routine that babies would have,
at some point during their 3-5 day stays, a major episode of "choking",
turning blue, stopping breathing and needing "emergency rescusitation"; I
swear, it happened several times a shift. Needless to say, this was
upsetting to one and all, and served as the basis for a lot of other stupid
hospital rules (like "no sleeping with the baby in the room, because the
baby might stop breathing and you wouldn't notice", and "no babies in the
rooms with mom with the light off", and "no discharge to home without the
blue suction-aspirator, and instructions to the parents about how to use it"
and lots of others). It certainly left new parents (and new nurses, for that
matter) with some very alarming ideas about caring for new babies - I
wouldn't want the responsibility for taking one of those darned babies home
either, if I thought it was going to turn blue and stop breathing and perish
that easily. God forbid you should take your eyes from the thing for a
second!
Anyway, eventually we stopped all that gratuitous suctioning of NB's, and
not only were they considerably more willing to go to breast and nurse
without all those nasty oral associations, but guess what? You got it -
suddenly they were no longer turning blue and needing to be rushed back to
the nursery for resuscitation constantly! WOW, human evolution sure took a
giant leap forward in our little community - all of a sudden, human newborns
simultaneously blurped out their own "secretions" (there's a nursey word for
ya!) AND proved able to survive their first few days of life without CPR!
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