Last week on one of my rounds, a student described the case of Patient A, who was born at 32 weeks gestation. We went over when speech therapy took place, what happened during treatment, and some of the improvements being made by the baby. I remember feeling upset about all the things the baby was missing by being in an incubator such as not being exposed to language and being overstimulated by all of the noise coming from the incubators. Still, the one thing that affected me the most was when a student asked the presenter how present the parents were in this interaction, whether by phone or in person. The presenter’s response: they were not present at all.
I felt frustrated and upset that the parents would not go see or call to check up on their baby. I know I am not a parent, but I have a sister who was born prematurely at 33 weeks when I was 15. My parents would leave every morning to go to the hospital every day for two months straight to see her for a couple of hours. I talked to my mom about the rounds presentation, and she mentioned how a week after giving birth, the doctors were going to perform a different procedure on my sister. My dad was at work and could not take my mother, so she got on a bus and walked the rest of the way to the hospital. The doctor commented on how a family member of my sister had shown up within a few hours. He then pointed to all the other babies in the room and mentioned how none of the parents had visited or even called to see how their babies were. Not even called to check-in to see how their baby was doing.
I know that these are just two occasions in which parents have not been present, and it should not be generalized to everyone, yet I still think about all of the babies who do not have their parents' support. There is not much research about the interaction of parental visits in the NICU, but I was able to find common parent reactions to the NICU. Reactions summarized in the article healthychildren.org (cited at the bottom) include…
- Fear of the unknown
o Parents might feel uncomfortable with the NICU environment, or they might fear what their families think about the birth.
- Anger
o Parents might feel angry at the hospital staff or at not having the birth experience that they expected.
- Guilt
o Parents might ask what they did to cause this? Or how they could have prevented this.
- Loss
o Not having a full-term infant may lead to feelings of loss of what was expected. They might also feel the loss regarding the parenting role.
- Powerlessness
o They feel like they cannot do anything for their baby as their baby is surrounded by the high-tech technology.
- And Feeling on Display
o Parents might feel like a fish in a tank since in the NICU, one is usually sharing space in a large room.
This has allowed me to empathize more with parents and comprehend more of what they are going through. The thought of parents not visiting their little ones still upsets me, but I try to think about how the parents are feeling and the toll having a baby in the NICU is taking on them.
For more information regarding common parent reactions:
For research regarding parental visits in the NICU:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/485877
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3700586/
