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Excitement filled the air at Brackenridge Park on Sunday as staff members from the Baptist Health System gathered to reconnect with and witness the growth of their former patients from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
The annual NICU reunion aims to celebrate families’ resilience and the lasting bonds between them and their health care teams. In addition to reconnecting with hospital staff, reunion attendees enjoyed face painting, bounce houses, crafts and even had the chance to pet animals from the San Antonio Zoo.
San Antonio residents Laura and Shaw Riddell attended the reunion with their 10-year-old daughter Emma and their six-year-old triplets — Kyle, Nathan and Mal.
“This is the NICU family reunion, and it’s just a really important event in our boys’ lives, because they were in the NICU for just under a month,” Riddell said, “and so just coming back and seeing all the families who’ve been impacted by the NICU and just how well everyone’s doing, how well my boys are doing and just being able to be together and be thankful for this amazing program and community and hospital that not only supported our boys for the first month of their lives, but also just continues to care with these reunions.”
The reunion comes after NICU Awareness Month, which is recognized nationwide each September. Caring for the hospital’s tiniest, most fragile patients requires a multidisciplinary team, said Dr. Jaclyn Levan, who is a neonatologist in the Baptist Health System.
“For instance, in a delivery of a very pre-term baby, you’re going to have a nurse practitioner, a neonatologist, a nurse, a respiratory therapist and potentially another nurse to help with the delivery of that infant and for the initial care for that baby to come up to the NICU,” Levan said.
“And then while the baby is in the NICU, you have a team of physicians and nurse practitioners that help care for the baby,” she said. “And then you have the nursing staff as well as the respiratory therapists and speech therapists, occupational therapists and physical therapists that all aid in the care of the baby to continue to develop in our environment now that they’re born and to help improve their outcomes for future.”
Having had three babies in the NICU, Riddell recalls her family taking up a whole side of the room. Their nurse, doctors, speech therapists and occupational therapists all supported their boys through getting them feeding and swallowing, off of oxygen and ultimately helping them be discharged from the hospital, Riddell said.
Riddell said that while in the NICU, you can hear a lot of machines beeping and babies crying, but she thinks hospital staff does a good job of making families feel welcome and comfortable.
It means a lot to her family to see the hospital staff nearly seven years after her boys were in the NICU, and for them to see how well the boys are doing, because the staff members were an integral part of the beginning of their lives, Riddell said.
The event also provides families with the chance to connect with other families with similar experiences.
“It means a lot because sometimes when you’re in the NICU, you feel like you’re alone,” Riddell said. “Not everybody has a NICU experience. A lot of people go to the hospital, give birth and go home with their babies that … stay. But just being part of that community and just knowing that other people understand what we went through, and I understand what they went through, even though everybody’s NICU journey is a little bit different, just having that support in the community.”
Six-year-old Ryan Norris from San Antonio also had the chance to connect with his hospital staff during Sunday’s NICU reunion.
“Ryan was born at North Central Baptist in 2019, and he actually spent eight months in the NICU, and they saved his life,” his mom Marianne Norris said.
Ryan is nonverbal, and he likes people-watching, dancing and giving high-fives, his mom said. He stopped to take a photo with Lisa McLeod, his former nurse, during the reunion. She said she and Ryan spent every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night together for months while he was in the NICU.
She described what it was like to have the chance to visit with former patients like Ryan during the reunion.
“It’s amazing to see them thrive,” McLeod said. “This is why we do what we do. And we have the hard days, but it makes it all worth it to see them thriving and growing and having fun and interacting.”
For Levan, she thinks the chance to see her former patients thriving outside of the NICU and reaching milestones highlights what a privilege it is to care for them in the NICU. She said prematurity is one of the most common reasons for a baby to stay in the NICU.
“It’s nice for the public to be aware of what it means to have a pre-term baby, what goes into taking care of that pre-term baby and how well nowadays pre-term babies do even outside of the NICU,” Levan said.
