Soon after actress Danielle Fishel and her husband Jensen Karp welcomed their baby boy into the world, he was quickly whisked away and admitted into the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit.
Roughly a week after Fishel met her baby boy, she took to Instagram to explain to her fans that complications arose following Adler’s birth. Those complications would result in a three-week stay in the NICU.
Now, Fishel is going into more detail about what those complications were in a new interview with People. As Dearly previously reported, Adler was born one month prematurely, and shortly after his birth, doctors discovered fluid in the baby boy’s lungs.
The reason for the fluid would later be diagnosed as chylothorax, a “leak in the lymphatic system.” According to Fishel, breast milk worsened the chylothorax:
“I had this feeling instantly of somehow it was my fault. As a result, the couple “had to take him off of breast milk and put him on a specially formulated formula that doesn’t use the lymphatic system.”
The 38-year-old mom continued:
“This milk that I’m producing that’s supposed to keep him alive and is supposed to be the healthiest thing for him is the thing that’s keeping him in the hospital. I just felt like it was somehow my fault. Even though I knew that wasn’t really rational, it’s hard. You want your body and everything you do as a mom to be functioning optimally for your baby and when it’s not, you feel like a failure. There was a little bit of a mourning process and a grieving process for me there, but now that I’ve come to terms with it and I know that hopefully the plan is that I get to transition back to breast milk in the next few weeks, I’m feeling much better about that. We’ll see how it goes.”
However, once the mom does start introducing breast milk into Adler’s diet, she doesn’t believe she’ll be able to breastfeed him because he’s “never been on my breast before.”
Nonetheless, the mom says she was able to store plenty of breast milk by pumping for him so that he can drink it out of a bottle:
“He’s a pro with the bottle now.”
At 10 weeks old, Fishel describes their baby boy as “a chill baby,” but a chill baby who “seems to have inherited his love for food from his mother.”
And now that their “strong” and smiley baby boy is home, the mom said she and Karp are simply enjoying the moments they have with their son. Because, as they are well aware, these precious moments “go by so fast.”
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