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Like every new mum, Jillian Johnson wanted to do the best for her newborn baby.
She’d booked into a hospital that championed breastfeeding and after her son Landon was born she put him on her breast whenever he cried.
Yet her baby seemed so unhappy, crying constantly and wanting to feed.
She asked questions and voiced her concern but trusted the doctors and nurses to tell her the right thing to do.
Five years after her precious baby died from dehydration, Jillian is speaking out to educate other new mums.
Jillian says her son would still be alive today if he’d been fed a bottle.
‘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,’ she wrote.
Jillian’s story is one we rarely hear amid the constant “breast is best” messages. Yes, it may be best for many but not all mums can feed and not all babies latch on properly. As Jillian says, she wishes she’d listened to her instincts and given her son a bottle feed.
‘I’ve learned I have to be my child’s number one advocate,’ she says.
Jillian tells how Landon nursed for over nine hours during his first 24 hours of life but after 53 hours had lost 9.72 per cent of his birth weight.
The pair were discharged from hospital in the US less than three days after giving birth.
‘We took him home …. not knowing that after less than 12 hours home with us, he would have gone into cardiac arrest caused by dehydration,’ wrote Jillian.
When Landon was unresponsive, Jillian and her husband Jarrod rushed him to hospital where he was put on a ventilator and an MRI showed he’d suffered a brain injury from oxygen deprivation due to low blood pressure from dehydration and cardiac arrest. The couple chose to turn off their son’s life support 15 days later.
While she still feels anger and guilt over the loss of her son, Jillian says she now knows it wasn’t normal for a newborn to cry so much. Her daughter Stella was so much quieter than her son, she says.
Jillian’s story is a warning to all parents. If you sense your baby is not content or you have any concerns that breastfeeding is not working then speak up. Yes, there’s constant pressure not to bottle feed and to do the “best thing” for your baby. Ultimately, however, what’s best is making sure your baby is fed.
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