NICU

Remember on the last post how I was talking about the NICU? Well today I am going to go into more detail with that. 

The NICU, neonatal intensive care unit, is a place where early and sometimes sick babies go to to get all better. Miss Ashlee e planned to me that when Noah was born he looked a little different. He has Trisomy 8, Flat Stanley wrote about that last year. She put it real simple like...we all have chromosomes. Each person is suppose to have 46 but some kids have extras and it makes them special. Like kids like Micah. He has 47 it is called trisomy 21, we know it as Down syndrome. 

Babies who rock that extra chromosome sometimes have to stay in the NICU. Half of the babies born with Down syndrome have to have heart surgery after they are born. When they get their surgery they recover in the NICU. Noah's trisomy is only partial and that means it isn't a full extra copy, but just a part of one. Ok enough about chromosomes. 

Like I said when Noah was a baby he was in the NICU. He had to have surgery on his belly button and then got a really bad infection. That was before Miss Ashlee adopted him. His transitional care mom was there to take care of him. A transitional care mom is just a temporary mom until they get adopted. The infection got really bad and he had to stay in the hospital for a long time, but then he got all better. 

The NICU is designed so that it's very safe and very sterile. People coming into see the babies had to not be sick, wash their hands and put on paper gowns so that they didn't get the baby sick from the outside germs. Any time a mom or dad would leave the room for any reason they would have to wash up before they came back into see the baby. Some of the babies in the NICU  are so little. That's why the doctors and nurses want to be extra careful so that they don't     get them sick. 

When MissAshlee, AJ and Micah  went to see the cardiologist they had a new  model NICU room.   We could go in and look at what it was like to be in a NICU. There was a baby in a plastic bin that is called an incubator. It's not the same as what chickens are hatched in, I ask. The room had a lot of machines and some bags hanging that looked like they had water in them. It was really medicine.  I guess as a kid seeing all that with it being your baby brother or sister can be real scary. Even as a mom and daddy it can be scary. That's why they have that room there. So you can go look and see what it would be like.  

Miss Ashlee said the machines can make beeping sounds and other sounds and flash different color lights and to a new mom that can be hard. Even though she never had to be in the NICU with Noah, because she acted him after that, he still had a lot of stuff done at the hospital and had to spend lots of nights. She said because he wasn't a new baby he went to a floor called the PICU, pediatric intensive care unit. That's for bigger babies and kids.  Many times Miss Ashlee would spend the night on the couch in Noah's room in the PICU. The NICU doesn't have a place for moms and dads to sleep. 

As a photographer Miss Ashlee has gone into the NICUs to take pictures of the new babies for their moms and dads. She said sometimes they are super tiny, sometimes they have tubes on them and some times they are a bit bigger, but they are all beautiful. 

Learning about the NICU made me feel less scared about it. Here are the pictures from the NICU room we got to visit.