Читать книгу First-Time Parent: The honest guide to coping brilliantly and staying sane in your baby’s first year - Lucy Atkins - Страница 29

Babies born before thirty-seven weeks’ gestation are considered ‘premature’. Some premature babies are fine, but if your baby is born at less than thirty-four weeks, she will almost certainly need to go to special care. Possible difficulties include not sucking properly, poor temperature control and immature lungs.

Babies born early haven’t had time to put on weight like term babies, so can look a bit different. They may have loose, wrinkled, red skin, be covered in downy hair (‘lanugo’), have a very big-looking head and skinny little body, have uneven or heavy breathing, and they might move very jerkily.

‘It’s important to remember that even though they look really scary, attached to wires, probes, drips and drains, they are still your little baby,’ says Lisa Hynes. Her first baby, Milo (now six), spent several weeks in SCBU, and her third baby, Lara (now eighteen months), spent six months in SCBU. ‘With Milo I was so scared of touching him–he would ping if moved–that I had to be encouraged to hold him as he seemed such a scary medical bundle. With Lara I was no longer scared of it all as I had seen it before and I understood the machinery. That made a big difference.’