Adorable baby photos captured in Neonatal ICU provide touching keepsakes for parents
The tiny felt costumes Elizabeth Ottaway lays gently on the babies this time of year make them look like precious Christmas presents. At Halloween, she dresses them up as pumpkins.
The unusual photo shoots at the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, at Children’s National Health System provide important keepsakes for parents. Ottaway understands what they’re going through, what it’s like to be a parent there amid the fluorescent lights, beeping medical equipment and gut-wrenching fear for the tiniest, sickest babies.
Fourteen years ago, Ottaway’s son Alexander was born prematurely and transferred to Children’s hospital hours after his birth. Some of his organs, including his esophagus, were not fully developed. His months in the NICU were a roller coaster of ups and downs, and he ultimately was not able to recover after a surgery for an abdominal blockage. He died after five months and 9 days.
“The NICU at Children’s was Alexander’s only home. The love and care he got, and we got, while he was there was amazing,” Ottaway said. “It affected us and made us want to be able to give back to that community.”
Ottaway, 54, and her husband, John Rusinko, 57, now have 9-yearold healthy twins they adopted from Ethiopia. The photographs Ottaway takes one a month at the NICU are a way to honor the son they no longer have.
The photos, she said, are also a way to help parents who are exhausted and worried about their babies shift their focus, if only briefly, to experience some of the joy of having an infant.
“They enjoy the photo sessions - it’s a sense of something they’d be doing with the baby if the baby was home already,” Ottaway said. “It’s very positive. They’re very appreciative.”
The idea for the photos came when Ottaway, an amateur photographer, recalled Alexander being in the NICU over Valentine’s Day. She loved when Alexander’s nurses dressed him up in a heart bib, a playful gesture that touched her and her husband, making them feel the NICU saw Alexander as more than just a patient. She said she feels the same gratitude from the fami-
lies when she gives them the photos.
During the photo shoots, Ottaway always asks permission first from parents and doctors, and then she gives the parents the photos and thumb drive with digital images.
First-time mother Samantha Mullen has spent two disorienting months driving back and forth from her home in Calvert County, Maryland, to Children’s hospital to visit her daughter, Phoebe, who was born prematurely. Phoebe is still in the NICU in part because she’s having trouble swallowing food.
Mullen said she was thrilled to have Ottaway take pictures of Phoebe dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween and again recently when Phoebe was in a tiny Christmas present costume.
“I want to be able to remember this even though it’s not an ideal situation to be in a hospital,” said Mullen, 29, who works as a server in a restaurant. “It’s a nice thing to have to remember her coming into this world.”
The photos are particularly meaningful at holiday time, Ottaway said, when families are spending anxious hours in the hospital while the rest of the world, it seems, is out celebrating with good cheer. Ottaway has vivid memories of leaving the hospital with her husband late on Christmas Eve after visiting Alexander and realizing they didn’t have any food in their refrigerator at home.
“We were hungry and couldn’t find anything to eat. Nothing was open,” said Ottaway, who in 2010 retired as an international affairs specialist for the Department of Defense. “It can be very isolating to have a baby in NICU.”
Two years after Alexander died, Ottaway joined the parent’s advisory committee to help the hospital better understand what parents need in their time of crisis. She told the staff that when a baby dies, the best way to handle it is to acknowledge the death to the parents, using the baby’s name, and simply say “I’m sorry.” Many staff members did that for her, she said, but there were those who did not. “Ignoring the family is hurtful,” Ottaway said.
On the advisory council, she was able to connect with parents who also lost a baby.
“We felt like we could openly talk about Alexander without having to explain things,” she said. “There were other bereaved parents there, so indirectly it became a support group.”
She found that when she was in a place of bottomless emotional anguish, one of the few things that helped was being with people who understood that pain.
She said she has drawn on those experiences the few times parents have asked her to take photos of their babies who doctors believe are at the end of their lives. In one case, she was able, with a nurse’s help, to briefly remove the tubes from the baby so the parents could have photos without the tubes being visible in the pictures.
“If I can do something that will give another family a memory that’s special to them, I’m willing to do it,” Ottaway said.
Through the years, Ottaway has remained close with Alexander’s nurses, some of whom knew her son as well as she did. After Alexander died, Ottaway - a runner decided to run a marathon course that went directly by the hospital. A group of nurses gathered outside the building on the sidewalk to cheer her on.
She helped the hospital as it moved and upgraded its neonatal unit within the hospital. Soon, she found herself baking cookies and organizing a blood drive for NICU families. She now throws a cookie party each year that has grown into a large open house at her Alexandria home, with more than a hundred people coming by to bring cookies and package them for parents. Ottaway delivers them with handwritten notes.
“It’s been an extremely healing process for us that we didn’t anticipate,” Ottaway said of the volunteer work she and her husband do for the NICU.
About four years ago, she came up with the idea for the photos and found a lot of support, in particular, from the nurses. One nurse who Ottoway formed a bond with is Denise McMillan, who has worked in the NICU for 26 years and was Alexander’s nurse.
“Out of the roughness of the NICU experience, she tries to help parents find a happy place,” McMillan said, adding the majority of the NICU experience for parents focuses on doctor reports and test results. “She’s doing something special for someone else. A picture is priceless.”
Ottoway and McMillan have also connected over something deeper: In 2005, McMillan had her own baby who was in the NICU for 5 months, including over the holidays, and then died.
“Life does continue on,” said McMillan, who now has a 4-year-old daughter. “But you always go back to that place in your mind during this time of year.”
That is the foundation for the cookie drive, Ottaway said. But her dedication to the NICU and its families year round is about Alexander.
“By helping people who are in similar situations, it is a way of honoring his memory,” she said.