K. McIntyre: How Bed Sharing Saved My Baby |
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 From the Twinkle in your eye to the babe at your breast, and everything in between.... |
I’ll never forget that night, when my baby was a mere 3 months old. The horror of it will be etched in my mind forever. Every detail of it still haunts me. It is not a memory I let out too often, because it taints everything – every moment- with fear. It had been a normal evening; I had nursed my sweet baby to sleep in our bed as I always have. He was restless and had cried for a time before giving in to sleep. This was not terribly unusual, it had been a pattern that he had been following for weeks (starting after he had received his DPT shot…but that’s another article). I lay down beside him and fell asleep myself. A few hours later, in the still of the night, I awoke in fear. Something was wrong. My mind was screaming "LOOK AT THE BABY!" I looked over to where he lay beside me, but he was too still. The room was dark, but he glowed a ghostly white in it. My heart pounding out of my chest and a pain in the pit of my stomach, I lay my hand on his chest, reassuring myself that sometimes the eyes play tricks and that he was fine. I leaned my face close to feel the heat of his breath…but it was not there. I cannot even describe the degree of panic that I felt in that moment. If you are a parent of an infant though, I am sure that you will understand. It is every parent’s greatest nightmare, and it was happening to me. I placed my hand on his chest and rubbed my hand back and forth. Nothing. No movement, no breath. This couldn’t be happening! Again, but this time more urgently, the way that you would rub a newborn pup or kitten to get them to breath. Suddenly he took a ghastly breath in. So deep and sudden, it filled the entire room with its gasp and lurched his tiny chest in the air. It sounded like he was sucking the life back into him, and he was. After that he breathed normally. I held him on my chest, with his ear to my heart to remind him to keep going, and cried. In the morning I took him to our pediatrician, but was anything but consoled. Sometimes these things just happen. Sometimes babies have apnea. Sometimes they resume breathing on their own. Sometimes they don’t. After a discussion with a specialist it was determined that we should do nothing, just go on with our lives as if nothing happened. A monitor was mentioned, but was deemed extreme due to the fact that it was dark and I could not tell what colour he was definitively. It may have been an ALTE (Apparent Life Threatening Event, where the baby has turned blue and has ceased breathing and causes alarm to the caregiver), it may not have. Monitors have been shown to overpower the family’s life, fixating them on the baby’s mortality and creating an unhealthy environment. But how was I to ever sleep again? What if it happened again? My mommy senses had woken me up the first time, but could I count on them again? How could I live with myself if something happened (something…I can’t even bring my mind to even think the words) and I didn’t wake up? The fear was overpowering. It tainted every moment. Monitor or no monitor, my baby almost died and I felt helpless. I slept for weeks sitting propped up with my baby on my chest. I had read studies on Kangaroo care where premature infants are placed in direct contact with their parent’s bodies and their vital signs improved and evened out. I hoped that I would wake if I felt his body slow down or stop and would be able to revive him again. Those weeks are a dark memory; fitful sleeping, eyes hot with fatigue and a tiny beloved body curled in my fiercely protective arms. Eventually, my little son had different ideas. He was no longer content to spend his nights in my arms. He would squirm, try to roll around, try to move to a cooler spot away from my chest. What was I to do? We bought an AngelCare monitor, built a co-sleeper, so that every breath would be checked. An alarm was supposed to go off if he stopped breathing. I set the monitor to "tick", every breath reverberating in my dark room with a solid "TICK, TICK, TICK". The doctors were right. I fixated on it. I couldn’t sleep, afraid of the moment that the ticks would stop. My husband refused to sleep in our room, the monitor instilling fear with every sound. The false alarms nearly sent us off the deep-end. My little son asserted himself again. He did not like the co-sleeper. He would wake and cry for my body. Although he was not content to sleep on my chest, he still wanted contact. Still wanted to rest his face against my breast, toss his little arm over my belly. And to be truthful, the foot of space between us seemed as wide as an ocean to me. Slowly he moved back into my bed, where he has slept ever since. Now, 6 months later, the fear still has not passed. I doubt that it ever will. Some nights when it takes hold of me again, I wait until my son falls asleep and then slide him back over to the monitor. It doesn’t last long, but at times I am unsure of myself, lose faith in the fact that I am able to keep him from harm. Current research, although still inconclusive, seems to point to the fact that my baby may just be alive due to the fact that we share our sleep. SIDS research seems to suggest that some babies are born with a deficiency in their arousal mechanisms, meaning that when they have a deeper pause in breathing, the signals that they should be receiving to resume their breathing patterns are not fired. My son having been somewhat deprived of oxygen and nutrients in the womb due to a prematurely aged placenta seemed to fit the profile of a baby with potential arousal problems. Mother-infant sleep pattern research, by James McKenna (Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Behavioral Studies of Mother-Infant Sleep, Notre Dame University) seems to suggest that co-sleeping infants experience more of these arousals from cues from the movements and sounds of their mothers than solitary sleeping infants do. He has suggested that co-sleeping may provide the infant with important practice in arousing that may help SIDS prone infants survive a SIDS event like the one that my son experienced. Anecdotally, I was told months after our horrible night by my own doctor (who had helped bring my little son into this world) that I had done the best thing possible to help my son survive those dangerous few months where babies learn to regulate their own breathing. When I described what had happened, she nodded her head knowingly and said, "Babies NEED to be close to their mothers". But he was right there with me in the bed! "Ahh, but he wasn’t touching you. He was lying away from you and couldn’t hear your heart or feel your breathing on him. By putting him on your chest you were reminding him of all of the things he needed to do to keep going." I must say that I left her office with a renewed sense of trust in my ability to mother my baby. A sense that I wasn’t necessarily powerless after all. I do not mean to imply that co-sleeping can prevent all SIDS deaths. It is a mysterious killer, and the answers are still to be found as to why so many babies are silently stolen from their parents. Nor am I through the fear that this could still happen to us. My son is now a 9 month old, vibrant and healthy little boy, but I still wake in the night and rest my hand on his chest and lean my face in close to feel his breath on my cheek. I still lay awake watching his chest, making sure that each breath is followed by another. What I do know is that I sensed something that night. A change in the little body that lay next to me. And that change woke me up. Would that have happened if he had of been in a crib away or a room away from me? Could I have sensed a difference that far? I don’t know the answer but I cannot bring myself to think of what happened if my son had not been in my bed that night… if I had chosen to follow the advice of countless people and parenting "experts" and had him in his own crib. It sends a chill down my spine. It has been a hard lesson of trust. In the instincts that guide both my infant and myself. It has always felt right to have my child in my arms, and that is where he has always sought to be. Perhaps somewhere we both know, have always known, that this is what he needs to grow. In the meantime I strive to enjoy each moment of every day that he is with me. Study each curve of his baby round body, drink in the sweet little boy smell of his soft head, and savour every hug, every baby-wet kiss. |
