Bound by ‘shoebox baby,’ mother and nurse reconnect
It just makes me think, ‘Wow, every interaction you have with anybody is so important. To be able to be in this position where I’m part of someone’s story of their life— that’s such an honor.” —Jeannie Joseph
ROCKFORD, Ill.—Neonatal nurse Jeannie Joseph vividly remembers the day the 3-pound infant was brought in a shoebox to the special care nursery at SwedishAmerican hospital in Rockford. The tiny infant wore a baby doll’s onesie and was wrapped in a dish towel.
Because the boy—born six weeks prematurely—had gone for hours without the warming and nutrients needed for a baby born so early, Joseph and the medical team worked quickly to treat him for hypothermia, dehydration and an infection from the household scissors used to cut his umbilical cord.
The following morning, when the baby was stable, Joseph noticed a teenage girl walking with her head down toward the nursery doors. The girl just wanted a look at the baby she was preparing to relinquish under the state’s Safe Haven law.
The longtime nurse remembers feeling her heart swell with sadness and compassion.
“I put my hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I’m taking care of this cute little guy,’” Joseph recalled of the day in 2004 when she led the teen mom to the baby in his incubator.
“I said, ‘ You know that you saved his life, right? I don’t want you to hang your head. You gave him the best chance you could,’” Joseph recalled. “All of a sudden, she went from looking down to up at me and we just connected.”
It was a connection that kept the 15-year-old mom, Cherish Coates, coming back to the nursery each day to visit the baby and drop off breast milk. For the next several weeks, Coates leaned on Joseph for support as the young mother began the process of putting the baby up for adoption. She relied on the nurse even more when she ultimately decided to tell her family—who had no idea she had given birth to a son in her own bedroom—about the baby, and to keep him, against all odds.
Although the nurse and mother eventually lost touch, their connection inspired Coates to become a nurse and eventually enter law school, with hopes of becoming a mental health attorney.
After 12 years with almost no contact, Coates reached out to Joseph on Facebook last year with a message that reunited the two women who said they had never forgotten each other. Since then, the pair have been in regular contact, sharing encouragement, photos and a bond that even they sometimes can’t believe began more than decade ago with the case still known at the hospital as the “shoebox baby.”
“I just wanted to let her know how much of an impression she made,” said Coates, now a 29-year-old mother of three, including the now 5-foot-3, 13-year-old Allen, the baby in the shoebox who brought her and Johnson together and is now a thriving eighth-grader.
“It feels like such a blessing,” said Coates, who works as a law clerk in Mesa, Ariz., while attending law school. “We will always be connected because we share this unique story.”
A HARROWING DELIVERY
Coates grew up painfully aware of the difficulties of teen pregnancies. Her own mother was 15 when she had Coates, whom she left to be raised by her loving and devoted grandparents in Rockford. Her mother, who dropped out of school and moved out, visited weekly. Family members often warned Coates that a pregnancy while she was young could keep her from becoming the first in her family to finish high school and go to college—something they were all rooting for, she said.
Despite her grandparents’ best efforts, Coates, at 13 years old, met a boy two years older than her while shopping at Cherryvale Mall in Rockford. It didn’t take long before she and the boy were together every weekend, spending time at the mall and at the movies.
The couple had been inseparable for nearly two years when Coates suspected she might be pregnant. She shared the news with her boyfriend, who cried along with her as the terrified teens repeatedly discussed what they should do.
Coates didn’t have to try hard to conceal the small bump that eventually surfaced in her belly, because it was barely noticeable. She hid morning sickness, kept up her A and B grades, and never missed a shift at her parttime job at McDonalds, she said.
But on the snowy afternoon of April 24, 2004, the young couple was thrust into the reality of their situation.
Coates began feeling severe stomach cramps at the end of the school day. She locked herself in her bedroom and whimpered softly in pain, she recalled.
Moments later, Coates delivered her baby on the SpongeBob SquarePants comforter covering her bed. She cut his umbilical cord with scissors her grandfather had in the house.
“I remember just looking at how beautiful he was, and how tiny he was. I had never held a baby before; I had never baby-sat or anything,” Coates said. “I remember being scared that I was going to break him.”
Coates then called the baby’s father, who walked to her house and used a ladder to climb up to her second-floor window. They decided to leave the baby at the hospital—where staff could tend to him—using the state’s Safe Haven law, which allows parents to leave a newborn at a hospital, fire station or police station without fear of criminal or civil liability.
The teen parents tucked the baby into an old boot box Coates found in her closet and included a Winnie the Pooh doll and a couple Gerber rice cereal packets near the baby’s head. Then, using her best penmanship on notebook paper, Coates wrote her baby and the hospital staff a note.
“It said, ‘ We love you, we are just not able to raise you. We want his name to be Allen Corey and we will hope to be able to see you again. God will be watching over you,’” Coates recalled.
Allen’s dad climbed down the ladder outside Coates’ window carrying the baby in the shoebox, and walked along Rockford’s main roads to the hospital, Coates said. It was nearly eight miles away.
‘SOMEONE LOOKING DOWN’
At the time, SwedishAmerican hospital had never received an infant under the Safe Haven law, which was enacted in 2001 to protect babies who are then put up for adoption.
Today, 120 babies have been relinquished and placed for adoption in Illinois under the law. Most of them are given up at hospitals, said Dawn Geras, executive director for the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, which lobbied for the law and now works to educate the public.
Joseph, who had by then been a neonatal nurse for more than a decade, knew the law had been passed but had never seen it in action. That changed on that April morning, when the hospital’s Emergency Department called the nursery to say they were sending a possible Safe Haven baby upstairs.
A few minutes later, Joseph saw a teen boy crying as he walked toward the nursery carrying a shoebox. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and looked terrified as he handed the box to medical staff, said Joseph, who remembers thinking how young he looked.
“We were sad, of course, but we had to work very fast with this baby,” Joseph said.
The baby’s father stood by and watched as the medical team took the infant into isolation and began warming his body, Joseph recalled. She told the young father he didn’t have to give names but that information on the baby’s mother and birth circumstances would be helpful.
With a body temperature of 94.7, the baby was in grave condition. Premature babies must be kept warm immediately because they lack the fat to raise their body temperature. They also are often not developed enough to regulate their own blood sugar or breathe on their own, said Dr. Martin Anyebuno, MEDNAX-affiliated neonatologist at SwedishAmerican, who treated the baby that day and still works at the hospital.
Anyebuno was surprised to see that the tiny baby was breathing on his own, despite all the stress he had experienced.
“This is one of the cases I won’t forget,” Anyebuno said. “There was someone looking down on him.”
After medical staff got the baby’s condition under control, Joseph spoke again to the young father, who had been sobbing for nearly three hours while watching doctors and nurses care for the baby. The nurse told him that if he relinquished the baby that day, she, by law, could no longer give him updates on the baby’s condition. But if he wanted to get a parental bracelet and take some time for he and the mother to explore their options, they could come back, Joseph recalled.
The boy took the bracelets, and the young couple came back the next day, and every day after for several weeks.
A MOTHER’S LOVE
Cherish Coates fell in love with her baby, Allen, the first time she saw him in his incubator. But the 15-year-old cried every time she thought about telling her grandparents about her unexpected pregnancy.
With Joseph’s help, Coates arranged to speak with hospital officials about open adoption, which would allow her to help choose potential parents. As Coates considered her options, she formed a routine: she’d let her grandfather drop her off at school, then take a city bus to the hospital. Each day, she brought chilled bags of breast milk she had pumped at home and hidden in a basement refrigerator.
During the visits, Coates opened up to Joseph about her grandparents and her fears about giving up on her own dreams because of the teen pregnancy.
Coates said Johnson “was not judgmental at all, just very nurturing and motherly. She encouraged me to tell my grandparents, but she didn’t talk to me like I was just some stupid teenager. She talked to me like I was a person.”
About a month after Allen’s birth, as the baby was almost ready for discharge, Coates got the nerve to bring her own mother into the hospital. She reasoned she would have to be understanding because she had been in the same situation years earlier. The pair walked into the nursery and to Allen’s incubator. The daughter, too scared to speak, said nothing.
Coates recalled that her mom’s face turned pale as a ghost after seeing Allen in the incubator. Coates was relieved when Joseph approached and filled the silence. “Jeannie was there. She spoke and explained he was born early.”
After his teen father brought him to SwedishAmerican hospital in Rockford in a shoebox, newborn Allen Coates was treated for hypothermia, dehydration and an infection from the household scissors used to cut his umbilical cord. The next morning, he was stable and his mother was hovering nearby. Coates’ mother immediately wanted to hold the boy.
When baby Allen was discharged from the hospital a few days later, at nearly a month old, Johnson and Coates hugged as the nurse repeated several times, “Just promise me you will stay in school.”
To Coates’ surprise, neither her grandparents nor her mother ever expressed anger about what had happened. They told her only that they wished she hadn’t hidden her pregnancy from them for so long.
The family agreed that Coates’ grandparents and her mother would care for Allen during the day so the teen could continue with high school. After a few months, Coates enrolled at an alternative school that offered a day care for students.
“My grandparents nearly cried because they loved watching him,” Coates said. “However, I did not want to place that burden on them.”
‘SHOEBOX BABY’ THRIVES
Coates did stay in school, as Johnson had hoped, graduating from high school and then from Rock Valley College in Rockford to become a certified nursing assistant. Memories of Joseph weighed heavily on Coates as she worked for seven years as a nursing assistant at Rockford Memorial Hospital, and then Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Glendale, Ariz., where she relocated in 2013.
Her son, Allen, also reached one milestone after another.
Although he began talking later than most children and had a speech impediment early on, he excelled with special education services. By the fourth grade, he was enrolled in mainstream classes and reading at a ninth-grade level, his mother said.
Today, he loves playing soccer, running cross country, trying new video games and watching football.
Allen’s father and Coates separated when the boy was 4, and he is no longer in touch with Coates or their son, she said.
Early last year, Joseph received a Facebook message from Coates and was brought to tears, proud to learn that Coates had stayed in school and humbled to know she was part of her inspiration. To this day, the nurse insists she didn’t do anything for Coates that her colleagues wouldn’t have done.
Johnson, who still works full time at SwedishAmerican’s special care nursery, thought of Coates regularly over the years—when there were cold, snowy days in April, like the day Allen was born; whenever a young mother came into the nursery surrounded by family; on Mother’s Day.
The two are not sure when they will see each other, but they remain in regular contact online.
“It just makes me think, ‘ Wow, every interaction you have with anybody is so important,’” Joseph said. “To be able to be in this position where I’m part of someone’s story of their life—that’s such an honor.”