Sometimes, when you are a tiny baby in intensive care, you are baptised the night before you have surgery.
If you are baptised in the NICU, your nurse will have a small, delicate scalloped seashell ready for the service.
A stern older chaplain will pour sterile water over your little head, using the seashell.
The chaplain will politely request that the nurses nearby recite the Lord's prayer.
There will be no party, no cake or gifts, no special white outfit. Your parents might not even be there.
But sometimes, there will be a volunteer photographer.
The photographer's heart will break just a tiny bit as the last drop of holy water lingers on your temple, and then drips down onto your bedding.
7 comments:
How many of them make it? -p
Many people are very thankful for those volunteer photographers who choke back the tears to immortalize those precious lives.
thanks crying today was i really wanted to do
Well P, it's a very highly regarded hospital and takes transfer of critical patients from many other hospitals in this state.
I did some googling to try to answer your question, and the best I can do is to leave it at "quite a few of them make it".
The March of Dimes coordinator I work with quoted me a number, of something like 500+ admissions last year.
Thanks for the link, Sgt. !!
shoes... sorry.
Give to the March of Dimes!
Their goals include prevention of premature births and to reduce infant mortality rates.
They sponsor the program that I work with, and they have programs in dozens of hospitals. In addition to the photography stuff, there are educational services, help in obtaining material things for the unit (like buying comfortable nursing rocking chairs, etc.) and so on.
You rock Carly. It sucks having a sick baby, and the pics make it bearable sometimes. When Amelia (yup, it's me) was first born, those two NICU pics were all I had. Gold from a Polaroid.
And yeah, the March of Dimes rocks too.
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