The event gathers former NICU patients and their families every year, giving them a chance to reconnect with the nurses and caregivers who helped them through some of the hardest days of their lives. Kids who started out fighting for survival in a hospital isolette spent Saturday playing miniature golf and games instead, a long way from the machines and monitors of their first weeks alive. Some even climbed inside a miniature AeroCare helicopter, a nod to the kind of critical transport that can mean life or death for a newborn.
UMC's NICU nurses organize the reunion each year, and it says something about the bond these families build during a NICU stay that so many come back to celebrate it later. For parents who once counted their child's weight in ounces, an afternoon of laughter and mini golf is its own kind of victory lap. It also gives the hospital staff who spent long shifts caring for these babies a chance to see exactly what their work adds up to.
Some of Saturday's guests weighed less than a bag of sugar when they first came into the world.