My NICU baby & Cosleeping
“Were they connected? I guess we’ll never really know. But I do know. Ya know?”
My son Charlie was born unexpectedly at 33 weeks. He was my first baby and the whole experience was overwhelming and insane and absolutely nothing I was prepared to handle. However, as I’ve come to learn through motherhood, almost nothing is as you expect, and yet, you rise to the occasion and you figure it out. And so we did.
We still don’t know why he came so early. There was no medical indication (with him or with me) that explains it. It was precipitous preterm birth, meaning everything developed as expected, except it was at 33 weeks. I’ll write his birth story in another blog post, but this one will focus on Charlie’s sleep once we got home from the NICU. His little body was strong, but aet 33 weeks, the lungs still have some development to do, as do many of the reflexes associated with feeding. So for Charlie, the NICU was about breathing regulation and stabilization, temperature regulation, and learning to eat. He was fed through an NG feeding tube (in his nose) and we practiced bottle and breastfeeding. I pumped every 3 hours to keep my supply established and we worked so hard at it. After 4 weeks, we were discharged. He was still only able to bottle feed, his latch wasn’t great, and he could only feed on the breast for short bursts.
I was instructed to wake him at night every 3 hours to eat, which obviously makes sense because of his low birth weight. And, being that he was only 37 weeks adjusted, he still basically just slept around the clock. I was exhausted triple feeding (latching to breastfeed, bottle feeding to finish, and then pumping). BUT he was so sleepy, he just went back to sleep after all that with very little effort on my part.
Around 8 weeks he fully got the hang of breastfeeding!!!!!!!! I was so proud. And then he never took a bottle again (more on that at another time). At this time, he was also starting to be more alert and we experienced that all too common “baby won’t sleep in the bassinet, what do I do?!”. I was warned repeatedly in the NICU about cosleeping/bedsharing deaths, in detail. To the point that I would not even consider bringing him into bed- until I did. And when I did, it was in the most unsafe ways. Things like falling asleep in a nursing chair, in a curved lounge chair, sitting upright in bed, with him swaddled on my chest. If you know about bedsharing, all of these scenarios are magnitudes more unsafe than sleeping horizontal on the same surface with your baby. There is A LOT of nuance within the safe bedsharing guidelines (and we’ll get to that), but curled around your baby, with blankets and pillows away from baby, and cracks/crevices blocked is one of the safest ways to bedshare. Again, there is WAY more that needs to be said about safety guidelines, but you get my point. Not only was I not given this information, I was strictly warned against it, given only fear and horrible stories in its place. And as a result, I only began to bedshare safely when I came across safety information on Instagram. And all of that has led me here, so that I can help you support your baby to sleep in one of the oldest, most natural, most biologically and evolutionarily proven ways. And by proven, I mean the proof is that we, as a human race, survived.
Now, how does this pertain to the NICU? Well, even experts in the field, like James McKenna, recommend against bedsharing with a premature baby (from his book Safe Infant Sleep). However, MY INTERPRETATION of this guidance is due to a lack of evidence that it is safe for premature babies. But there is actually some research showing that premature babies sleeping next to a teddy bear equipped with a breathing cadence similar to that of a sleeping adult actually had significantly less apnea events (less times when they stopped breathing) than babies who were not in the presence of the teddy bear (The Breathing Bear, 1994). We also know that sleeping close to mom helps babies regulate temperature, heart rate, breathing rate. So, it could be argued that because premature babies overwhelmingly have trouble regulating these very things on their own, that they would actually benefit MOST from cosleeping with mom. Now, I’m not going against the experts here. I am not recommending that you coseleep with your premature infant. But what I am saying is that this is a grey area, at best. And parents of NICU babies deserve more than being told what they mustn’t do, under any circumstances- because that isn’t life. Life is messy and things don’t go according to plan. And when they don’t, they should be equipped with the knowledge and the tools to cosleep safely (if that’s what they choose).
I’d also like to point out that one of the things that my NICU (and most) focus on is skin to skin. Because Charlie was my first child, I spent every waking hour with him, only went home at night to sleep. It was also still under Covid protocols (Feb 2021), so I could only come in and leave once. Once I left, I couldn’t come back in until the next day. So unless I was practicing feeding him, or I was pumping, eating, or in the bathroom- we were doing skin to skin. Although this is only anecdotal, many of the nurses thought he gained weight faster and was able to be discharged sooner than he otherwise might have been, had I not been able to do as much skin to skin. And I agree! And while sleeping is obviously different than skin to skin in the sense that the mother is also sleeping- for the baby, all of those same *magical, wonderful, beautiful* things that coregulate their little systems are still going on. It’s a perfectly designed system by which the baby essentially continues a small aspect of their gestation, using their mother’s body as the scaffolding on which they build their own regulatory systems of heat and breath and life.
I continued to cosleep with Charlie until he was 2. He was a challenging sleeper and his journey brought me to my knees many times (and brought me to tears, and rage, and anger too). And now, looking back, I wonder if part of that need for closeness was due to his birth. He was immediately taken from me, brought to the NICU, intubated, hooked up to an IV, and given pain medication. Now, all of these things saved his life, don’t get me wrong. But once we were reconnected 6 hours after his birth, maybe he didn’t want to let me go. And as he grew older and more aware and more in tune with his own view of the world, that became more and more what he needed- to be close, to connect. And you know what, he’s now a 3 year old who falls asleep on his own, sleeps through the night 98% of the time, and still takes a nap. So did I create bad habits and forever damage his ability to have a healthy relationship with sleep? Or did I foster his independence by first allowing him to depend on me? To know that I would always come to him when he needed? So then he felt confident enough to sleep alone, because I was always just a wall away?
I guess we’ll never *really* know. But I do know. Ya know?
