Accidental Starvation: Mom who Lost her 19 Day Old Son Links it to Pressure to Exclusively Breastfeed
Five years ago, Jillian Johnson, lost her dear son to accidental starvation just 19 days after he was born. The baby, Landon, suffered cardiac arrest 12 hours after he was discharged from the hospital, so sad.
Due to her ordeal, Johnson is now advocating for proper feeding of newborns whether it is breast milk, formula, or a combination of both.
Speaking about her terrible experience with PEOPLE.com, Johnson revealed that she was pressurized by her baby-friendly hospital to exclusively breastfeed her baby. As a result, he did not get enough colostrum (a mother’s early milk) in the first days after he was delivered and suffered cardiac arrest from dehydration just 12 hours after being discharged from the hospital.
”We had chosen to have Landon in a baby-friendly hospital — that means that everything is geared towards breastfeeding. All the classes that we took, whether it was breastfeeding classes, we had birth classes, we had Lamaze classes, all of them still pushed breastfeeding.
I can’t even say that pressure is the right word. Everything was pushed so hard, you felt brainwashed. You felt like you were a horrible person if you gave your baby a bottle, and you wanted to do everything you could to make sure that your baby was breastfed and not given a bottle.
It’s really not something I could put into words for somebody else to understand if they haven’t lost a child, but there’s a hole. There’s a hole in our hearts. He can’t be replaced. He would have been 5, he would have been starting kindergarten this year. The holidays are really hard because, what would he dress up as for Halloween this year? What would we have gotten him for Christmas?
There’s nothing wrong with giving your child a bottle. In the end, what would you rather have – a child that passed away because you did your best to breastfeed him? Or would you like to raise your child, because you had no fear and gave the child a bottle? There is nothing wrong with supplementing. It comes down to making sure that your baby is getting everything that they need, even if it’s the first few days of life. I know women who have had to give them a bottle for the first few days and they didn’t have to give them a bottle after that.”
Johnson, now a mother of two – Stella, almost 4, and Aliona, 18 months, stated that Stella and Aliona were fed with both breast milk and formula.
In a blog post ‘Fed Is Best’, the super mum wrote about her ordeal to help educate parents who may feel similar pressures to exclusively breastfeed.
”If I had given him just one bottle, he would still be alive,” Johnson titled the blog post.
Read excerpts here:
Landon was born in a ‘Baby-Friendly’ hospital. (What this means is everything is geared toward breastfeeding. Unless you’d had a breast augmentation or cancer or some serious medical reason as to why you couldn’t breastfeed, your baby would not be given formula unless a prescription was written by the pediatrician.)
Landon was on my breast – ALL OF THE TIME. The lactation consultants would come in and see that “he had a great latch and was doing fine” but there was one who mentioned I may have a problem producing milk. The reason she gave was because I was diagnosed with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) and it was just harder for women with hormone imbalances to produce milk. She recommended some herbs for me to take when I got out of the hospital.
Landon cried. And cried. All the time. He cried unless he was on the breast and I began to nurse him continuously. The nurses would come in and swaddle him in warm blankets to help get him to sleep. And when I asked them why he was always on my breast, I was told it was because he was “cluster feeding.”
I recalled learning all about that in the classes I had taken, and being a first time mom, I trusted my doctors and nurses to help me through this – even more so since I was pretty heavily medicated from my emergency c-section and this was my first baby. But I was wrong. I’ve learned I have to be my child’s number one advocate.
Did you know newborns aren’t supposed to cry all the time? They’re supposed to eat and sleep and dirty their diapers. I had no idea that he was inconsolable because he was starving – literally. And when a baby is only on the breast, how do we gauge how much they’re actually getting out? Sure, there should be wet and soiled diapers, and weight checks, right? And where is the limit as to weight loss and a minimum for the diapers changed?.
I still have many, many days of guilt and questions – what if I would’ve just given him a bottle? And anger because how would I have known. I remember when Stella was born, and she was always quiet. I kept asking the nurses what was wrong with her. They said nothing. She’s doing what she’s supposed to. Sleeping. Eating. And it was then that I realized that it wasn’t normal for a newborn to cry as much as Landon did. He was just crying out from his hunger. But I didn’t know. I should’ve known. I still struggle daily feeling as though I failed him.
Landon was diagnosed with diffuse seizure activity on EEG, the consequence of severe, wide-spread brain injury, after receiving a brain MRI. The MRI also confirmed brain injury consistent with Hypoxic-ischemic Encephalopathy, (oxygen deprivation due to low blood pressure from dehydration and cardiac arrest).
Speaking further, Johnson said the reactions to her post have been mixed.
”There’s definitely a lot of push-back as far as, why are we anti-breastfeeding?. We’re not anti-breastfeeding. If we were, our baby would still be alive. There are women and even their husbands who have come out and said, we went through this. We maybe didn’t lose our baby but we had to have our baby readmitted to the hospital, or it came close.
When I say parents educate yourself, I’m talking to the dads too because you can’t not listen to those instincts. If you think something is wrong, push on those doctors and nurses as hard as you can to make sure, until you feel that you’re being taken care of, that baby’s being taken care of. Especially at that age, you’re the only advocate that baby has so you have to do everything in your power to make sure that baby’s taken care of.
”As a community, we need to start taking care of each other. The amount of moms that have said, ‘I needed to hear this so that I could speak up,’ it’s amazing, because we shouldn’t be shamed for how we choose to feed our children as long as they’re fed,” she further told PEOPLE.
Photo credit: FedIsBest
Awwwww so sad.
Take heart madam.
am not a far. if xlusive n i never will…exclusive is fr dose who have enough milk not fr everyone