Baby holders offer comfort to newborns
Baby rockers offer comfort to newborns in NICU
Nancy Baycroft is one of 90 baby holders who volunteer to rock and cuddle infants in Texas Children’s Hospital’s NICU unit, spending valuable time with the babies when parents can’t be there.
The baby holder in the red vest peers through the slats of the stainless steel crib. Inside, an infant swaddled in a pastelstriped blanket is stirring.
His little fists clench inside miniature mittens. His legs wriggle. His eyes pop open.
“Well, hello. I see you. I see you,” Nancy Baycroft coos in a sing-song rhythm. “Yes I do. What’s your name?”
Baby Boy Real, as one sign identifies him, stares up at Baycroft. She rubs his back, her hands encased in cyan-colored hospital gloves, her touch light and soothing.
“My name is Omi,” says a laminated card taped to a cabinet. “Please help me grow BIG and STRONG.”
The strains of “Brahms’ Lullaby” drift from a dangling Sesame Street mobile, mingling with the soundtrack of NICU 2 on the fourth floor of Texas Children’s Hospital. Beeping monitors. Burbling machines. Buzzing alarms.
Baycroft dons a pale blue hospital gown and settles into a recliner in a dimly lit corner. A nurse lifts the squirming Omi out of bed H147, gingerly disentangling the wires attached to his small body, and slips him into Baycroft’s waiting arms.
A digital clock behind her head reads 13:12 — about an hour into Baycroft’s shift as a volunteer who cuddles hospitalized infants.
Time to close off the world, shut out the noise of H pod and focus on the child nestling against her.
“Hey bud, what’s there?” Baycroft whispers, tracing Omi’s line of vision. “Oh, you’re just watching your pretty nurse. You’re just looking around.” Baycroft began this threehour shift as she always does — by requesting permission. “May I go in?” Baycroft asked the duty nurse, before entering the neonatal intensive care unit where, on any given day, up to 140 tiny patients are being treated. She scrubbed up to the elbow, then began to patrol the floor. From NICU
2, where “growers and feeders” with less serious medical needs stay, to NICU 4, where babies are hooked to ventilators and feeding tubes. Then back again.
Past signs taped to headboards: “Handle me gently, my bones are fragile.” “Please be quiet, I’m sensitive to noise.” Past the pneumatic whoosh of newborns swaying gently in high-tech baby bouncers called mamaRoos. Past infants flanked by medical equipment with flashing numbers and preemies bathed in blue light in covered Isolettes.
She veered away from screened-off areas, knowing that is a signal for privacy. She skirted around huddles of parents and doctors, speaking in hushed voices of procedures and prognoses, discharge instructions and surgery prep.
She walked round and round through the warrens of cribs and crash carts, monitors and machines. Waiting, watching, listening. Ready to dart when a nurse called out “I have a baby here.”
Ready to dash at the faint sound of a infant bleating like a just-born lamb.
Ready to be drawn, as if by radar, to the side of a crib to calm a fussy patient.
“Is that better?” Baycroft asked, as she gave a pacifier to a squirming, squealing baby girl in a pink onesie. “You’re OK. You’re OK.”
A pink stuffed lamb sat on a nearby counter. A prayer card with the image of a guardian angel was pinned to the crib.
Baycroft stroked the top of the infant’s head with four fingers and murmured “Shhhh, shhhh.”
It took only four minutes to quiet the 38-day-old girl — but the contact will likely provide much greater benefits.
Babies who are cuddled regularly while in the NICU have shorter hospital stays, spend fewer days on oxygen, show decreased incidence of neurological complications and require less sedation, said Shana Thomas, Child Life Activity Coordinators for the Texas Children’s NICU & Pavilion For Women.
The hospital’s 90 volunteer baby holders step in when parents cannot be at the hospital because they are working, caring for other children or live too far away.
The volunteers never ask about a baby’s medical condition or outlook, often don’t know their names, beyond the posted signs, and rarely meet the families. They know some of their charges will grow strong and healthy. Others will not.
Still, Baycroft says she forms a bond with every child infants she cradles — no matter how long they are in her arms.
In quiet moments, she likes to wander to a hallway lined with photographs of former NICU patients, children born months early and weighing under 2 pounds, toddlers who battled serious illness. Now healthy and smiling.
The success stories fortify Baycroft, who wears a gold star pinned to her red volunteer vest, signifying more than 600 hours of service. As do the words surrounding the images.
Resilience. Mighty. Survivor.
In the quiet corner of H pod, time seems to fade away, the noise of the NICU to recede.
Baycroft has settled into the recliner with Omi, whose full name is Walter Omar PinedaReal Jr. She pats his bottom and keeps up a soft, steady patter.
“You’re checking everything out. You want to know what’s going on.”
Omi’s eyes are wide and curious, absorbing the world around him. Baycroft’s face looking down at him. The nurse checking monitors and securing his oxygen line. The rotating mobile where Elmo and brightly colored rings jangle and dance.
“You’re so busy watching it go round and round,” Baycroft says, as she gazes at Omi, who gazes at Elmo. “You’re very happy right now. You like your pretty song.”
The tinkling melody from the mobile drifts over the placid scene. “Lullaby, and good night You’re your mother’s delight Shining angels beside My darling abide.” In the neighboring crib, a newborn with a green knit cap is napping. Her tired mother wears a T-shirt that says “And so the adventure begins.”
Omi’s adventure began on April 6, the day he was born. His parents already knew that he would have heart problems. But shortly after birth, doctors also realized that his esophagus was not attached to his stomach.
The newborn was whisked away from his mother, who had delivered by C-section, for emergency surgery, then spent four weeks in NICU 4.
Vivian Real spent every day of her 60-day maternity leave by her son’s side, sleeping at the nearby Ronald McDonald House, before she had to return to work as a customer service representative for FedEx.
Now, she and her husband rush to Texas Children’s after work to be with the boy they call their little “guerrero” — or warrior. Their mothers visit during the day. And the baby holders are there when the family members can’t be.
“They are the big angels to my little angel,” Real says.
Baycroft doesn’t know any of Omi’s history as she rocks him. Instead, she envisions his future. She imagines him healed and hearty. She wonders what path his life will take.
“What you going to do?” she asks the 3-month-old. “How are you going to change the world?”
Even before becoming a baby holder, Baycroft had been no stranger to hospitals.
Twenty-seven years ago, her son was born seven weeks early and spent a month in the NICU. Like Omi’s mother, Baycroft, a former marketing director with Estee Lauder, also had to shuttle back and forth between her job and the hospital.
“When you have a baby in the hospital,” Baycroft said, recalling that time, “your mind is not on anything else.”
Eight years ago, her 80-yearold father, Bruce Madera, was diagnosed with cancer shortly after moving to Houston. Baycroft, who had just retired to spend more time with him, instead ended up helping him navigate doctor’s visits and medical treatment.
When he spent 100 straight days in the hospital, she never left his side.
When he died a year and a half after his diagnosis, she was devastated.
When she needed something to wrench her out of grief, her daughter suggested volunteering at Texas Children’s.
It would be a way of giving back, something her father had always done. It could be a way to find peace and comfort, something Baycroft desperately sought.
At first, it was hard. Going back to the corridors of a hospital evoked the pain of seeing her father suffer. It sharpened the loss she was trying to dull.
Then Baycroft began to hold the babies. As she comforted them, she found the comfort she needed.
Omi’s eyelids are just starting to grow heavy when his grandmothers appear by his crib.
“Look who’s here,” Baycroft exclaims.
“Donde esta mi nino precioso?” bubbles his maternal grandmother, Matilde Real. Where is my precious boy?
“Isn’t he precious?” Baycroft agrees. “Absolutely precious.”
The baby holder stands, carefully adjusting Omi’s tubes and cords, and tucks him into his abuela’s waiting arms.
“Sweet baby,” Baycroft says, as Real kisses the crown of her grandson’s head.
The mobile is still spinning, still playing “Brahms’ Lullaby.” “Guardian angels are near So sleep on, with no fear” Baycroft already has hurried on, a muffled wail tugging her to the next crib.