![]() ![]() Every day, there were these pricks and prods like those Eriksson described to draw drawn from the baby’s heel. While the baby didn’t need any big, invasive surgeries, it wasn’t an easy experience. That was the beginning of a 92-day hospital stay in the NICU until her daughter was strong and developed enough to go home. She needed to grow.Ī day-old infant at Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital, being held by her parents, as a machine helps her breathe. “She looked like a baby, but without all the chonk,” Rendina says. The tiny voice was coming from a teensy 2-pound, 7-ounce body that needed help breathing for the first few hours of her life. “It sounded like the tiniest little kitten. “But it wasn’t the scream of a newborn,” she says. It was silent for what felt like the longest time.īut then, there it was. There, the medical staff brought her daughter out backward, or, as Rendina puts it, “butt to the world.” Rendina was taken to a nearby hospital, where she had an emergency C-section. Rendina’s life was at risk, and the only solution was to deliver her baby more than two months early. “And because of the proteins in the blood,” she says, “my heart was working exceptionally hard. Her liver was creating enzymes that her kidney could not filter out. She had preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can in some cases be deadly. “It went very quickly from a very healthy, very normal pregnancy to a very dangerous, very scary pregnancy,” she says. When she got pregnant, she was so excited.īut when she was 30 weeks pregnant, she went in for a checkup. “I spent my whole life imagining what it was going to be like to be pregnant and what it was going to be like to be a mom,” Rendina says. But 13 years ago, she was 22 years old and pregnant for the first time. Naomi Rendina experienced this for herself. But let’s start with the good news: The NICU is a true modern miracle, a place where many waking nightmares turn into stories with happy endings. There’s a lot about treating some of the most vulnerable, tiniest humans on Earth that’s sad and frustrating. If there really is a healing power in touch, “that could make a lifetime of difference,” Inder says. That’s all absolutely true.”īut now scientists like Inder are asking: Could one solution be as simple as skin-to-skin contact - loving touch - from a parent? The experience of pain in the NICU seems to shadow children as they grow up, leaving them at increased risk for developmental challenges and behavioral struggles. “We’ve been poor, and continue to be poor, at recognizing pain and distress in our babies,” says Terrie Inder, the chair of pediatric newborn medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. ![]() Since then, a lot of progress has been made in recognizing that premature babies in the NICU can feel pain - and, more importantly, that the pain matters.Įven though the infants will not remember the distress, it’s believed these painful experiences add up to something like a lasting psychological injury, impacting brain development and their ability to regulate emotions later in life.īut how to treat this pain - and even how to recognize it in the moment, as some preterm babies are too weak to cry? Those are still questions without perfect answers. Eriksson recalls that even when the children needed invasive procedures like open-heart surgeries, they were done without any anesthesia or pain medication. ![]() Every day, they encounter painful pricks and prods from hospital staff to monitor them and keep their frail bodies alive. The NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) is where infants who are born prematurely - meaning infants born before 37 weeks of pregnancy - and full-term infants (who are born around 39 or 40 weeks) with health issues spend the first weeks and, often, months of their lives. “We could see it, of course, but science said ‘no.’” “In those days, we did not believe that they could feel pain,” Eriksson says of infants. Even everyday drugs like Tylenol and Advil can be harmful to use in infants because of their potential impacts on the liver and kidneys.īut a bigger reason why was more frustrating. Strong drugs like morphine can be dangerous for such young bodies. And we had nothing to offer.”īy anything to offer, he means drugs to treat the infants’ apparent pain. “The children were crying the mothers almost fainted,” he says. To draw blood for the daily metabolic test, he had to prick the babies’ heels with a tiny lancet and squeeze their heels to collect enough blood for analysis. When Mats Eriksson was just starting off as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit in the 1980s, he truly hated one part of his job.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |