Hello and good morning to you, worthy friend. This is the first of a few very exciting updates coming your way this month. So let’s do this…
In 2015–a whole decade late to the party—I started watching Grey’s Anatomy. It was the year Derek Shepherd died. He witnesses a car accident on a road in the middle of nowhere, and he stops to help. He pulls four people from the wreckage. He saves their lives; they are stable before the paramedics arrive. When he gets back into his car, he looks down at his ringing phone; when he looks up a semi truck is already crashing into his vehicle. He is taken to a hospital ill-equipped to manage a complicated trauma such as his. The surgeon who treats him is more worried about blood in the abdomen than the damage to his brain. By the time Derek’s head injury is discovered, he’s already brain dead.
The show’s writers took Derek to Dillard Medical Center because they needed him to die. They had to write him off the show, but what about when it’s not a show? What about when you show up to a hospital in labor when you’re only halfway through a pregnancy?
It’s prematurity awareness month, and while much of prematurity awareness revolves around prenatal care that can help prevent premature birth, I do a different version of prematurity awareness centered on what people need to know about prematurity before they ever get pregnant.
I didn’t walk into a Dillard Medical Center the day I went into labor with my identical twin daughters. While I didn’t know it at the time, I walked into the hospital with the number one NICU in the state of Florida.
Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies is a US News & World Report Top 100 NICU. They have a team of physicians that treats the world’s tiniest babies. I could have walked into a hospital four miles up the road without protocols for periviable babies like mine. I could have been on vacation in rural Georgia where the doctors would have told me there was nothing they could do, and I would have held my daughters until they died.
When we get pregnant, we may consider the possibility of miscarriage—since 20% of pregancies end this way—but most of us don’t consider what happens if we have our children on the cusp of viability. Most of us don’t know that in the event of extreme prematurity not all NICUs are created equal.
By the time most people are wondering if their hospital is equipped to treat a 22-weeker, it’s probably already too late.
Since my daughters, Vivienne and Margot, came home from the NICU in 2020, we have held an annual fundraiser for the NICU at Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies in lieu of a birthday party. This year, and every year moving forward, we’ve decided to extend this celebration of life to include the month of November—prematurity awareness month.
We raise money for the Winnie Palmer NICU because they saved our daughters, and we raise money for the Winnie Palmer NICU because they are raising the standard of care for periviable babies. The more good work they do, the more people will hear about babies like mine—babies who wouldn’t have made it if they had been born at a different hospital. Instead of mourning the loss of our tiny girls, we get to send them off to preschool with their peers next year.
Our hope is that the news of the tiny lives saved at Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies will spread and that expectant parents will start asking questions about what happens if their baby is born too soon. Our hope is that women in labor at 22, 23, or even 24 weeks gestation will know in advance which hospitals have the best outcomes for micropreemies.
Happy prematurity awareness month, friends. Miracles are happening here in Orlando at the hands of neonatologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists, pediatric surgeons, NICU nurses, and respiratory therapists. Please join us in making a donation to the Tiny Baby Collaborative at the Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies NICU, and help make more miracles happen.
This year these super-soft t-shirts, featuring a sketch of a blossoming human brain, was designed by local artist Lilly Anne Wilhite and printed locally by Real Thread.
Additionally, this year we’ve partnered with Eyre Home in Ivanhoe Village, and they are carrying limited stock of the 2022 Viv & Margot t-shirts at their shop located at 1219 N. Orange Avenue Orlando, FL.