Bleeding belly button

DS2s belly button oozes blood whenever he tenses his little tummy. He's 11 days old, and his stump fell off about 5 days ago. The bleeding only started today.

Any ideas? We have a doc appointment tomorrow, but I'd love any advice.

There must just be a little capillary that keeps opening up. When it's bleeding if you can get something clean eg gauze or something similar just put a bit of gentle pressure on it, it should stop. The doctor might need to cauterize it with a little cotton bud looking thing with silver nitrate on it, to stop it happening.

Does the area around the belly button look normal eg not red, swollen, angry looking?

Not red or angry, no offensive smell. Just the oozing. I don't remember DS1s bleeding at all.

It will be ok, just need to plug up the vessel that's bleeding, good luck

DS2 also had a bleeding belly button at a couple of weeks old. We were told to keep it clean, wipe it with antiseptic wipes at every happy change and make sure you dry it really well after a bath, it resolved on its own within a week or so.

Congratulations on your new baby!!!

What others have mentioned could be useful, I just wanted to add a recent experience I had. Last year I had my fourth child and 3 weeks after birth her belly button ws still seeping blood, no matter how much I washed it and tried to dry it, it still was losing blood. We had refused vitamin K at birth, when I mentioned the bleeding to my midwife she asked us to get further checks as the bleeding could be a sign of vitamin K deficiency. They took blood and found that her Vit K levels were fine, but they found that her platelets were VERY low. We were put into hospital immediately and stayed for a few days until they started to rise and we crossed off what it could be from the list. In the end it took six months for her levels to rise to normal range. We never found out a reason why, and she is absolutely ok now (9 mths) her levels were checked again last week and it was normal.

The reason I am sharing this is because I felt something wasn't right, because of my experience with the others kids I knew what amount of loss was considered normal, this seemed to be bleeding for a long time compared to the others. Did you have VIT K given to baby at birth? I would probably take bubs to the DR if you are concerned in a few days. Perhaps book an appointment for the end of the week, you can always cancel it if you need to. I would like to reiterate that our baby ended up being fine, but her bleeding belly button lead us to find her platelet count being low, finding out was very important even though it corrected itself eventually.


I would tune into your mummy wisdom and ask if you feel like you need to go to ask anyone? Have you got a clinic nurse you could go and see in your area?

Yup, he had vit k. We have an appointment tomorrow, but was looking for additional advice in the mean time. The clinic days are Thursday for my area. All good, I'll update tomorrow post check. I'm sure it's nothing, I'm just being paranoid.

I wrote a similar post to this about DS :) All advice (including from our midwife) was to use salt to seal it up. If it's bad you can just put table salt straight on, I put it in water and dabbed it on that way.

Ok doctors appointment done. They aren't worried about it. They took a swab to send away just in case. But doc really wasn't concerned.

That's good to hear

Sounds like a granuloma. DS had one. They used silver nitrate which didn't work. At 18 months he had it surgically repaired. Hope it gets better soon.