Hola a tod@s, my dear friends.

A few days ago Fabiana Ciccioli from Argentina wrote an accurate reflection: OPEN MIND = OPEN DOOR.

“If we open our mind to other paradigms, the doors of our ICU will open too.

If we put ourselves for a moment in the skin of a mother who leaves her baby and can´t feed him that with her breast full of milk, we understand it.


One day at a Conference someone asked me how long the visit in the ICU can be opened. I asked him if he had children and he answered me yes. Then, I asked him: ·How long would you want to be with your son in the ICU?. His reply was 26 hours a day. He did not ask anything more.

I know that our ICU architectural features are not appropriate because we have no single rooms, nor we have many nurses, doctors, or technology and the family may find our deficiencies.


But also I know that the benefits of open doors go more than the benefit to the family and the patient. I am convinced that makes well to us as people because it brings us closer to our essence, because love always returns.

Today a mother gave could breastfeeding her baby in our unit and made us very happy. I am tremendously proud of the team we have. We are changing the paradigms. We are returning to the roots. We are protagonists of this change.”

And that same day, Ibone Olza sent me the post Breastfeeding against bets (only available in Spanish) published on her blog. Her experience in 2010 was published in the following article: Breastfeeding following emergency peripartum hysterectomy. The article ended with a recommendation: “The need in all cases to try the possibility to join mother and baby even when the mother is in the ICU, with the conviction that this reunion may hasten in addition maternal recovery value.”


This image of another mother (Crystal Irving Thibeault) breastfeeding hir baby in ICU and her testimony corroborated this:

“A nurse helped me breastfeed my son the first day of his life while I was in the ICU after his birth. At that time I was tetraplegic and could only feel his soft hair and skin when they put it around my neck to embrace him. Breastfeeding was the reason that permitted her to stay with me in the hospital for 5 months, while I lived in the unit of physical rehabilitation to learn to walk again (complications when he was born). After sixteen months. I still breastfeeding my baby”.

Today we celebrate this. Because in all parts of the world, you can always try a little harder still.


Happy Thursday,
Gabi