Hacker News Reader

Comment by antidaily | Hacker News Reader

Discharged the same day?!

First one was 48 hours, and we were unimpressed at them holding on to us for so long. Second was born at 02:10, we were home at 19:39. Both cases was after an induction.

Many babies are born at home.

Is it true in the U.S. that the baby doesn't sleep next to the mother in hospital? I've seen these warehouses full of babies on TV shows, like in this photo:

https://www.adoptionchoicesofkansas.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

But it always looks a bit distopian to me.

FWIW our California-born babies slept with us (and was never taken away from me, except to be cleaned and weighed, and I was right there next to them the whole time). The "room of cribs" was the neonatal intensive care unit. It was, thankfully, empty when we were there.

> It was, thankfully, empty when we were there.

uhmmm... Won't you rather wish they were not empty? I suppose it all depends on the manner of the emptying.

In a previous life I did tech support in a hospital. One day I was called down to the ER to fix a printer or some other routine thing. I was accustomed to the chaos of the ER but that day nothing was going on. I commented to a nurse that "it is dead in here". She promptly and firmly informed me that we don't say those kinds of things in the ER.

Baby making activity is not randomly distributed throughout the year.

Depending on where you live (i.e. when it is warm), the peak month changes.

https://visme.co/blog/most-common-birthday/

Every NOC (network operations center) I've ever been in, if you start to utter the phrase "sure is quiet today" or anything similar, someone tackles you to the ground before you finish it.

You don't tempt fate like that!

I would reason that if the neonatal care units are empty, it means that all the children recently born were healthy and didn't need intensive care. :)

Between the time our first (2011) and last (2017) were born, our hospital (Michigan, US) changed their policy to have the baby sleeping in the room rather than in the nursery. We weren't too thrilled with the change, to be honest—the time the baby was in the nursery allowed us to get some additional much-needed sleep.

It's from 5 years ago, but I don't think much has changed since https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/29/new-mot... was published.

I should add that, from what I've heard, same day discharges is much more common for the second (/third/etc) child compared to having a first.

We wouldn't even have gone into hospital for the second one, except the midwife was unable (or too uncomfortable) to sew up the worse than expected tearing my wife suffered. Even after being whisked to hospital in an ambulance (at about 3 am), my wife was back home the same day.

Mostly, I believe, driven by the fear of infection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com