Celebrating the work of our Neonatal Services
On 17 November we’ll be joining others in marking World Prematurity Day – nowhere more so than in our dedicated Neonatal services.
Our Trust is proud to recognised as a centre of excellence by the sides of thousands of babies and families each year in our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Neonatal Surgical Ward (NSW), Transitional Care (TC), Outpatient Baby Clinic, Neonatal Surgical Outreach and Milk Bank.
Two of those many babies our expert team has cared for identical twins, Emmett and Sebastian. Mum, Lauren Murphy, gave birth to her boys at just 28 weeks and six days with the Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS) - a prenatal condition in which twins share unequal amounts of the placenta’s blood supply; resulting in the two foetuses growing at different rates.
It meant that Emmett, the smaller twin, was born weighing just 1lb 9oz and Sebastian weighing not much more at just 3lb.
In the first days of their lives both babies lived with multiple complications that required surgery and mechanical ventilation.
Emmett needed more support and faced more challenges than brother, Sebastian, who was able to return home with support after being on NICU for 13 weeks. Emmett was transferred to the High Dependency Unit (HDU) at the Children’s Hospital after being on NICU for 16 weeks.
Our teams cared for him for a further four months before the day finally arrived when he was well enough to go home with his family; mum and dad, Lauren and James and his four siblings.
Lauren said: “I cannot thank all the teams enough. They truly did bend over backwards for me and my boys. NICU became our second home. The team always understood and explained everything to us along the way; always there when I needed support.
“It was such a difficult time, I had two of my babies in a hospital but also had a six-year-old, a three-year-old and 10-month-old back at home who needed me too. Without the team I’m not sure how I would have managed to get through that. They would even update me often on the phone when I couldn’t be there.”
Riley is another ‘graduate’ of our specialist Neonatal Service. He was born prematurely at 36 weeks and four days, weighing 4lb 11oz. Riley, now almost nine-months-old, also had a challenging start to life.
He was transferred to the care of our Children’s Hospital team from Dudley at five-days-old and had multiple issues with his stomach including NEC (necrotizing enterocolitis) that meant he underwent six operations that resulted in him having a stoma bag fitted – removing 92 per cent of his small intestine and half of his large intestine.
Riley spent around four and half months on our ICU and NSW before returning home to with mum, Laura and dad, Stephen, to their family home in the Quarry Bank. He’s since had his stoma bag removed but is having parenteral nutrition and a drip feed through a Nasogastric tube (NG tube) 12 hours a day and medication to help him with his conditions.
Laura said: “All the teams were amazing, every step of the way. I can’t thank them enough, they became like family. Without all their hard work and dedication I wouldn’t have my little boy. They never gave up and always fought for the best for him.”
