Failure To Thrive

Mei Xi at her thinnest :(

We brought Mei Xi for her first pediatrics visit at Curtis V. Cooper Clinic today. It was quite exciting bringing her out for the first time, and it was also the first time post-delivery that I’m going out. It’s our first real family outing!

But my upbeat mood didn’t persist. The visit to the clinic was sobering – in fact, it was a big set-back for me to learn that Mei Xi has lost 10oz since birth, and that she is jaundiced. With hindsight, when I thought that she didn’t look cute and attributed it to my mixed feelings about motherhood, what I had been seeing was that she was looking pinched and yellow and unhappy. And my gut feel that she didn’t seem to be sucking much milk whenever I feed her was not off the mark. Dr Zaer (an Indian who has been in the US for more than 10 years), the paediatrician, performed other checks on Mei Xi and, thankfully, she was alert, active, vigorous and otherwise normal. It’s only that she hasn’t been eating well and was still hungry even after a feed. On hindsight, it was ill-advised to set up an artificial schedule that spaced out her feedings 3 hours apart – that probably didn’t help to stimulate the production of an adequate supply. A bottle-fed baby is different from a breastfed baby. No doubt I was in pain and tired with the frequent breastfeeding sessions, but if I had known the consequences then, I would have persisted a couple more days for the longer-term good. And hunger might have been one of the reasons why it was difficult for me to calm Mei Xi down when she’s crying=(