Our hospital experience, pt 2

You would think that in the maternity ward, at least, a baby losing consciousness would bring some attention, but at ValleyValley Reminiscence Hospital, you need to go that extra mile to alert anyone of consequence. Our child, once resuscitated, was taken to the NICU for a check-up by the pediatrician, and returned to us in about 10 minutes. I don't know in what world anything thorough happens in 10 minutes, but I can damn sure tell you that checking out a baby's health should take a lot longer than that. A very shaken TBO and I spent the rest of the night and the next morning wondering what on earth was going on, but no one other than the nurses on the floor bothered to check up on us, and most of them had no idea anything had happened. No doctors, no specialists, nobody who knew anything. In fact, if we hadn't spoken up, I have no doubt that nothing else would have ever been done to make sure Owen was actually ok, or even to simply reassure us that he was currently fine.
Once a baby is delivered, for the most part, the OB/GYN's job is done, except for some follow-up check-ins with the mom (made more frequently for C-Section moms, of course). The newborn baby then becomes the pediatrician's patient, although in most cases, I assume the two doctors work fairly closely together, at least while the new mother and child are still in the hospital. During the next OB/GYN visit, we asked our doc if he knew what had happened to Owen and what we were supposed to do. He didn't have a clue what we were talking about--clearly no one had bothered to write anything down on TBO/Owen's chart, or even mention it to him in passing. He asked if the pediatrician had come to see us--which one would think might be advised when the baby has nearly died--and we told him no, we hadn't heard from anybody.
We will always be grateful to TBO's OB/GYN doc for what happened next, even though it put into motion some of the worst examples of VVR's incompetence. This doc obviously cared about us, and just as obviously had some pull at VVR, because not 15 minutes after he left our room, who should show up but the pediatrician? This doctor, on the other hand, was a useless piece of jet trash. She spent a grand total of 15 minutes with us in 3 separate visits over the course of the entire 5 days we spent at VVR, and even those 15 minutes were perfunctory at best. Her first action when she showed up was to ask for "our side" of Owen's going blue, replying, "Gee, that's not the story I got" by means of explaining her total lack of professional concern for our well being.
The deeper issue her statement revealed, though, was one of communications breaking down at VVR. Why did the ped doc get a "different story" than a recitation of what actually happened? I can think of one answer--the nurses were covering their asses. I'm sure a baby turning blue while they were actually present in the freaking room probably wouldn't look too good on their next performance evaluations, right? The other, more pernicious, possibility was that both the nurses and the ped doc were lying to each other and us, because, if you'll remember, the ped doc supposedly checked Owen out the night before in the NICU. So, did she actually check Owen out the night before, as was reported to us? Was she even notified at any point? What did the nurses say to her had happened if she was notified? Who knows? All we know is that it took us telling our OB/GYN that we were worried to get any kind of response, professional or otherwise, from either the ped doc or VVR at all. Owen was taken up to the NICU for an extended series of tests over the next few days after this.
During the first 18-24 hours Owen was with us in the room, TBO had no problem (as soon as we could escape the nurses insistence on TBO's using the dreaded side lying position, that is) feeding the boy from her breasts. He latched on properly (which apparently is the major issue with breastfeeding), sucked with vigor, and did everything well, as far as we could tell. When he was taken to the NICU, however, we no longer had control over his feeding, and even though we were relieved to get some actual oversight to his breathing and some tests run to see if there was a medical cause for his episode, this added another layer of potential miscommunication between us and our taking care of our new child. Not only did we have a large handful of nurses and lactation consultants on the regular ward to deal with, we now had the NICU director and the nurses upstairs to decode as well. (Oh yeah, we had a pediatrician supposedly in the mix also, but I think we can be forgiven for not counting her among the people interested in Owen's health.)
Over the next day or so, we were bombarded with examples of how poorly VVR's employees communicated with each other and with us. TBO was placed on a regimented diet after her surgery. At first, she was only allowed ice chips, and then, after some gastrointestinal activity could be proved, she moved on to clear liquids and finally real food after her digestive tract showed complete functionality. In TBO's case, these stages flew by--she was on solid food after a little more than a day, but you couldn't prove it by how some of the nurses behaved. Somewhere, somebody knew what was happening, and must have written something down on something, because when TBO passed each stage of digestive function, her next meal was correctly prepared and delivered. On the other hand, after TBO had moved on from perhaps needing help along those lines, at least one nurse was out of the loop, because for two days, one of them would ask TBO if she was still prescribed milk of magnesia. Helpful? No, infuriating--TBO had never been prescribed milk of magnesia, and she had moved past that stage anyway! While one instance of such behavior might be humorous, this was but the tip of the iceberg.
Next: The iceberg.