Kangaroo Care: The Best You Can Do to Help Your Preterm Infant
304
Kangaroo Care: The Best You Can Do to Help Your Preterm Infant
304eBook
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Overview
If you have just given birth to a preterm infant, you and your baby both face special challenges. Parents long to help their baby but often feel isolated frightened by hospital procedures.
Now there is wonderful news for both babies and parents. Kangaroo Care, a technique pioneered in leading neonatal centers worldwide, gives you a unique role: a special way of holding your infant that provides crucial health benefits—including shorter hospital stays.
Based on ground-breaking research, Kangaroo Care is a step-by-step guide to bringing these benefits to your baby—even if your neonatal unit does not yet have a Kangaroo Care program. It explains:
• Why Kangaroo Care enhances your baby’s development
• How to use the technique even if your infant requires a ventilator or an incubator
• How to understand your baby’s signals of distress or comfort—and how to respond
• How you can work with the neonatal staff to provide the best for your baby between your visits
• How to involve fathers as well as mothers
• All the proven results of Kangaroo Care—including a more relaxed, healthier, and contented baby
The complete parents’ guide to the revolutionary new treatment for preterm babies: Kangaroo Care
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307813381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
Today’s Revolution in
Premature Care
A tiny premature baby was born 16 weeks early (24 weeks gestation) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, in October 1991. Steven was quite sick, and the medical staff had great difficulty keeping him alive. It appeared that all the treatments they tried were ineffective. Sadly, Steven was slipping away: his blood values were dropping, and his immature lungs were unable to provide him with enough oxygen.
Under the direction of the nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (the NICU), Steven was given to his mother, Dorothy, so she would have a chance to say good-bye. They left mother and baby alone and returned two hours later.
What a surprise awaited them upon their return! Dorothy was still holding Steven, who was still connected to all his equipment and monitors. But she had undressed him and had spontaneously placed him on her bare chest. When the nurse in charge took Steven’s vital signs for what she thought was the last time, she noticed the level of oxygen in his blood had increased, the level of carbon dioxide had dropped (as one would want it to), his blood pressure was more stable, his breathing less labored.
The nurses contacted the resident, and together they asked Dorothy to continue holding her baby throughout the night so that they could monitor his progress. Within twenty-four hours, Steven improved dramatically. When Dorothy grew tired, her husband Jack came in and took over holding their infant. Over the course of the next two days, Steven was continuously held in the intensive care nursery of this teaching hospital.
During those three days, Steven’s physiological condition reversed. The health care staff continued doing everything possible to save his life. Dorothy and Jack were exhausted from their round-the-clock vigil, and the neonatologist suggested they reduce their holding to three hours a day. In the following weeks, they alternated evenings with each other, until Steven was taken out of the incubator and placed in an open-air crib. He was discharged from the hospital at four months of age. Several months later, Steven and his parents appeared on Good Morning America—a “miracle baby” and his family.
Heartened by this success, the health staff were eager to try holding with other premature infants. Soon babies whose breathing was regulated by ventilators were being placed on their parents’ chests. By a happy accident, Dorothy and Steven had demonstrated the enormous benefits of Kangaroo Care.
WHAT IS A PREMATURE BABY?
Despite the common belief that pregnancy lasts for nine months (36 weeks), ideally a full-term baby is born at 40 weeks. Any child born between 38 and 42 weeks is considered full term. Infants born in the thirty-seventh week of gestation or earlier are considered premature or preterm. We also call them premies.
Seven percent of all babies born in the United States are premature. That’s about a quarter of a million babies a year. Although the number of preterm births has held steady for the last six years, today there are more premies than ever before in hospital neonatal intensive care units around the nation. Medical science has progressed to the point that physicians and nurses are now able to make efforts to save infants as early as 24 to 26 weeks gestational age (16 to 14 weeks early). As recently as 1986, such premature babies had little chance of survival.
Because technological advances help keep earlier and earlier deliveries alive with the increased likelihood of a quality life, many babies spend the first few weeks or months of their existence in hospital settings. One can expect a premie born at 26 weeks to be hospitalized for three months.
But hospitalization—so necessary for saving your premies life—also has its drawbacks. All of a fetus’s sensory systems are functioning, though not fully mature, from the eighteenth week of gestation. This means that from the moment of birth, your premie can see, feel, touch, smell, taste, and sense movement. In fact, his systems may be hypersensitive, because his brain is too immature to filter out unimportant messages. At the slightest noise, he may startle, his heart rate may increase, his breathing may stop, and he may turn from pink to blue. He squints to shut out the bright lights. And he quickly learns that touch is frequently followed by the pain of various medical treatments.
Despite his defenselessness, your baby must endure weeks or even months of vitally important yet invasive medical procedures in the high-tech isolation of the neonatal intensive care unit. Moreover, he is separated from you. In the NICU, health care personnel and machines monitor all of his bodily functions and you have limited opportunities to caress and cuddle him.
It is painful to see your infant’s body covered with sensors and wires and tubes, to stand by helplessly and hear him wail as blood is drawn. It is frightening to learn that he has difficulty breathing or that he cannot maintain his body temperature without mechanical assistance. Machines, and not you, have become the controlling influence during the first few days or weeks of your child’s life.
Confronted with such an experience, you may feel powerless to comfort him. Allowed only limited visits, you may struggle with fear, bewilderment, and longing, especially since you know that your premie, though very ill, is still a little person. He needs the warmth of your loving embrace and affection to recover, grow, and thrive.
THE KANGAROO CARE REVOLUTION
Since 1983, however, there has been a revolution brewing in the treatment of premature babies. It is called Kangaroo Care, and it holds a dual promise: of helping preterm babies recover from the effects of their prematurity and of helping parents empower themselves and bond with their infants. Kangaroo Care—as a supplement to technical medical interventions—is simply the best you can do to help your premature infant. And it is a procedure that doesn’t cost a penny—only parental love, cheerfully given.
During Kangaroo Care, hospital personnel will remove your diaper-clad baby from the incubator or crib and help you hold him upright, skin-to-skin and chest-to-chest. As your infant lies between your breasts for an hour or two, you will note that he calms down, snuggles in, and falls asleep. He may even try to nurse. Kangaroo Care puts a stop to the cacophony and confusion of events in the intensive care unit. It protects your child by allowing him to fall so deeply into slumber that nothing—no loud noises, no bright lights, not even heel sticks—may disturb him. Kangaroo Care is that simple, yet it provides untold benefits to both parents and infants.
THE BENEFITS OF KANGAROO CARE
Why is it that Kangaroo Care can help premies recover from the effects of prematurity? Scores of international scientific studies have shown that Kangaroo Care offers the preterm infant many physical and emotional benefits. These include:
• A stable heart rate
• More regular breathing
• Improved dispersion of oxygen throughout the body
• Prevention of cold stress. (When a premie becomes too cold, he burns up much needed oxygen and calories to stay warm.)
• Longer periods of sleep (during which the brain matures)
• More rapid weight gain
• Reduction of purposeless activity which simply burns calories at the expense of the infant’s growth and health
• Decreased crying
• Longer periods of alertness
• Opportunities to breastfeed and enjoy the healthful benefits of breastmilk
• Earlier bonding
• Increased likelihood of being discharged from the hospital sooner
In Chapter 6, “Why You Should Use Kangaroo Care,” we will explore these benefits in greater detail.
The benefits to parents have also been documented. Those who have practiced Kangaroo Care feel more positive about the birth experience despite its inherent difficulty. They are eager and ready to bring their babies home, and feel confident in handling them because they have already enjoyed opportunities to bond with their infants and create a loving relationship. This is true of fathers as well as mothers. (See Chapter 2, “Kangaroo Care Promotes Bonding,” and Chapter 12, “Especially for Dad.”) In short, Kangaroo Care helps premature babies to recover as it enables their parents to lovingly, actively, and positively participate in their care.