My Lockdown Life: What it’s like having a baby during a pandemic
Giving birth during a killer pandemic – cut off from family and friends, with supermarkets sold out of essentials like nappies and wipes – was never the way Loretta McKail pictured having her first child. This is her lockdown story.
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As Victoria fights coronavirus together, we asked you to tell us how you’re going.
It’s been the toughest of times, but we know we’ll get through it.
These are the stories from the lives of ordinary Victorians as we all try to navigate our way through our second coronavirus lockdown.
LORETTA MCKAIL from SKYE
I started working from home two weeks before the end of Term 1 (mid-March) because I was heavily pregnant and I thought it was safest to minimise exposure to other people. I then had my beautiful baby in hospital just as the country was going into lockdown mode. Contamination fears meant I couldn’t use nitrous oxide as pain relief during the birth, we weren’t allowed visitors to the hospital or home and it was difficult to find a pharmacy with pain relief or other medication that my baby and I needed.
On top of that, supermarkets were out of stock of essentials like nappies and baby wipes, which added to the stress of being a new parent.
My mum wasn’t able to meet her first grandchild until she was a few weeks old and my husband’s parents had to wait even longer because they live in regional Victoria.
As the days went on, I learnt that my maternal child health appointments would be done via the phone and not in person — as a new mum I didn’t know any different but at the same time, I wanted to know that I was doing all the right things and that my baby was healthy — not easily done via a phone call.
I was really looking forward to making connections with other new mums in my area but of course, mother’s groups were not running as normal either.
Frankston City Council established a mother’s group and we met via zoom many times to discuss all the joys of becoming a parent with a maternal child health nurse. Making the connection with them (albeit virtual) has made going into lockdown 2.0 just that much easier knowing that there are eight other mums around the corner going through the same thing as me.
Despite some of this sounding fairly negative, there have definitely been positives out of the situation. My husband is a teacher so where normally he would be home for 2-3 weeks on parental leave, I was lucky enough to have him home for six weeks. Even though he was still teaching, it was an extra pair of hands in what would have been some very isolated days home with a newborn.
Despite the challenges that maternal child health visits by phone presents, the nurses were all so incredibly knowledgeable, helpful and understanding of what I was going through as a new mum of a baby born during a pandemic.
While part of me feels like I’ve missed out on the fun of “showing my baby off” to friends and family, the extra bonding time that we’ve had in our own little isolation bubble has been very special.
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