Feeding!

My next hour I got to feed a few babies, which I have also never done before. The hospital strongly recommends for the mothers to breast feed their babies but some either choose not to breastfeed or cannot for some other reason. My first baby I fed was a very hungry little boy! The bottles of formula that have are about 55mL and he drank it all! Every 30 seconds or so I would stop the feeding to burp him so he won't spit up later. There were still lots of babies in the nursery, which most of them had to have the bottle feeding. Once the little boy was finished with the bottle, I let the nurse know how many milliliters he drank so she can record it in her records. This is important for them to record so they keep track how often they have been fed and to know that they should be urinating as well because it can be very dangerous if the baby does not urinate or defecate. I changed the baby's shirt and wrapped him in his blanket like a sausage (there is a special technique to wrapping the baby with the blanket so that it covers everything except the head and neck). Once I put the baby back in his crib, I had to tilt the crib at an upward angle to help ease his digestion. Next, I fed two more babies - another little boy and a girl, and burped them throughout the feeding. So many babies come in and out that they all have ankle bracelets that monitor where they are at in the hospital. If a baby leaves the 3rd floor without the bracelet deactivated, there is a special code for "missing" baby. On a rare occasion, someone may forget to properly discharge the patient so the alarm would go off. On an even more rare occasion, a mother, or even someone who is not the mother can try to leave with the baby, whether it is their baby or not. If the alarm goes off for this particular code, there is a lockdown in the hospital and no one can enter or exit the building until the baby is recovered. This hasn't occurred very often at Ben Taub, but it is one of the necessary procedures that most hospitals practice.