My TOF baby is Home

This is undoubtedly the happiest, saddest most nerve racking day of your life!

Maddison at 6 weeks come home with her nasogastric tube in. So we went through ‘the training’ of how to change it and test it to make sure it was in her stomach.
I wasn’t very good at this the tube kept on curling when I tried to get it over the bridge of her nose and go down into her stomach! Chris was good at it though.

We were soooo happy when she drank 20ml on her own. Then slowly slowly she took more and more. As you know they forget how to suck during their time in hospital. Maddison was 10 days old before she even had an oral feed.

At times I found this more stressful then the surgery, oxygen and morphine. I had the breast feeding nazcey on my back so I avoided her like the plague because she stressed me out so much.
You know when you have such a sick baby and everything being so out of your control that all you want to do is breast feed to give them a kick start when they can finally eat.
So meanwhile we’ve been expressing for weeks our freezer no longer stores meat but milk, milk and more milk!
I drowned my poor girl every feed, so much so I would have to change her whole outfit.

So once I decided to keep expressing and teach her to eat through a bottle that way I could control the flow more. I felt better and more in control and because I wasn’t stressed out so much and I think she felt that and she relaxed and in return she drank more. So eventually she could drink on her own. Still not as much as want she should but enough that she was putting a little weight.

So then comes that day THE happiest day ever when the tube comes out! We took so many photos because she looked so different. No longer would people stare at her in shops and follow us just to ask us what was wrong with her. I felt normal! I could just focus on being the best mum I could be.

Solids! ARHHHHHHHH that’s another story.