The Chaos of Taking a Newborn Baby to the Doctor

Pediatricians should make house calls

Every so often I’d arrive at a prenatal checkup at my OB-GYN the same time a new mother was being wheelchaired out of the hospital clutching a newborn, a dazed and disconnected look on her face. I tried to study her without staring, wondering how it would feel when that was me.

When it was my turn to take the Maternity Ride to Good Luck, I found my answer: it’s bonkers. All of it is completely bonkers– Watching them remove the security bracelet from Juniper’s ankle (because babies need anti-theft protection), being pushed in a wheelchair despite being able to walk on my own, my husband waiting in our car in the driveway outside of the hospital doors, and finally, the nurse’s aid being like, k bye and dumping me and the baby onto the sidewalk. Still dazed by the strangeness of it all, I immediately had a mini-panic attack trying to figure out how the car seat worked. On the ride home, I felt like my body had just been through a spin cycle. Everything hurt.

The little house we were renting at the time was perched almost at the top of a hill. From the living room window, more than fifty steps up from street level, we could see Elysian Park, and the sky above Dodger Stadium lit up during home games. I loved that view, but I cursed those fifty steps that enabled it the day we got home from the hospital, and I cursed them again three days later, when we had to load our tiny baby back into the car for one of the more nerve wracking rituals of new parenthood in America: the newborn checkup.

People who don’t have kids might not know this (I didn’t know this until I was pregnant), but a mere 72 hours after having a baby, right around the time that a mother is experiencing the hormone crash equivalent of going through puberty, painful breast engorgement, and is still bleeding from a wound the size of a vinyl record the placenta left in her uterus as it peaced out after the birth, that new mother who was so recently been through such a physically traumatic ordeal that she had to be wheelchaired out of the hospital has got to load the baby and her own broken carcass into a car and drive to a doctor’s office so that a doctor can weigh the baby, look it over, take its temperature, say, ok, baby looks good, see you in a week and then send everybody back home.

That's the best case scenario. If the baby isn't doing as well as they'd like, or if mom is having trouble feeding the little one, there are more visits-- with doctors, lactation consultants, etc.

If, say, a new mom’s partner has little or no paternity leave available to them, or if their partner isn’t in the picture, and a mother has to do this without help, it’s exponentially more difficult.

Mothers who had c-sections are told not to drive at all until their incision is healed two weeks or longer after giving birth, and are told not to lift anything heavier than their baby for six to eight weeks. Car seats weigh 10 lbs or more. So, if a mother who had a C-section is unpartnered, how’s that supposed to work?

In addition, the very act of transporting an entire little family to the doctor can cause a new mother unnecessary stress, and stress can impact things like milk production, sleep, and the likelihood of experiencing postpartum depression and anxiety. Which is, in turn, bad for the baby. So why do doctors force their patients to do things that are bad for them?

If my own mother expected me to get into a car and drive to her on Hormone Crash Day with my three-day-old newborn, I would not only tell her no, I would be offended that she even asked.

Just to get out in front of some questions:

Can’t the dad or other caretaker take the baby to the doctor’s visit and let mom stay home and rest? Not really. When the baby is that young, it is basically a maternal appendage, especially if the mother is breastfeeding. Wherever baby goes, mom goes.

Do you hate your pediatrician or something? No, our pediatrician is great. I’m bitching about the system.

The expectation that new parents travel to health care providers during the first days of their baby’s life, like most aspects of the US health care system, is incredibly fucked up. The amount of effort that it would take a travel-equipped doctor, nurse practitioner, or RN to go to a new parent’s home with an infant-sized scale and a thermometer is almost always less than the amount of effort it would take new parents to go through all this.

They’ve figured out how to do it in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, new moms are assigned home maternity nurses who come to their home for several hours per day for several days after the birth to help the parents out. The service was once covered by the government, but now is mostly covered by insurance once families chip in a small hourly fee. Dutch babies’ first check up is also a house call. We pay so much for health care here that the least providers should do is give new parents the option to have the checkup come to them, rather than the other way around.

House calls for newborns should be standard practice for doctors. When everything has the highest possible stakes and parents are operating with the least possible experience, anything that helps them all get through in one piece should be something to work toward.

Juniper had her nine-month checkup this week. She’s an expressive baby, which means that the second the doctor entered the room, she began yelling and waving torn up tissue paper from the exam table around, creating a cacophony so loud that I had to strain to hear the doctor. At one point I looked over at Josh doing what could only be described as “wrangling” her as she did her best to twist and buck her way out of his arms, stopping occasionally to clap her hands because she’s learned that when she claps her hands, Josh or I will stop what we’re doing and say “Bravo, Juniper!”. Around this age, she’s supposed to be able to start understanding the concept of the word “no,” but I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case for her. She only understands “bravo.”

I thought back to that afternoon of her three-day checkup when in the same exam room this Juniper weighed under seven pounds and I was terrified that she’d catch something in the elevator. I was so nervous, she was so tiny. That afternoon back in November, I had to sit down because I felt woozy. I was a nervous wreck; at one point my husband reassuringly patted me on the butt like he used to before we had a kid, only to recoil when he felt the presence of the enormous adult diaper I was wearing to catch the postpartum blood. When I thought back to that first few months of frequent check ups, I felt a little bit like how I felt on the day I paid off my student loans.

Phew, glad that’s over. There’s got to be a better way. It shouldn’t have been this hard.

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