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A Letter from Amy George |
July 19, 2006
NewsChannel 19's Amy George reports:
Haley Phillips is touching her one-week-old son Carter for the first time.
She can't hold him in her arms.
She can only barely touch his foot.
"I just wanted to put my hand all over him," she says afterwards.
But she can't.
Carter and his twin brother Cooper were born almost four months early. Carter weighs just one pound five ounces.
"I want to bring him home so bad," Haley says. "I want to hold him and take care of him and go to bed with him right there. But I know because they were early this is the best place for them to be. And I wouldn't want them to be anywhere else."
Both boys are at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Huntsville Hospital for Women and Children.
Carter is in a new state-of-the-art bed called a Giraffe Omnibed.
It's the first one ever in North Alabama.
"[Carter] was put in it two days ago because the skin was a major problem," Dr. Meyer Dworsky, a neonatologist says. "And the baby's skin is much better today, two days later."
You see, premature babies have very thin, almost translucent, skin. It's filled with water, which evaporates.
When that happens, the skin becomes very dry - even cracking and bleeding in some cases.
But this Giraffe Omnibed has a high humidity level, so it slows water loss and protects the skin. That can keep the baby from getting an infection, which can be deadly in premature infants like Carter.
"The smaller the baby, the more the benefit," Dr. Dworsky says.
The way it works now in this NICU, the tiniest and most critical babies go into what's called an open warmer. In fact, that's what Carter's twin Cooper is in.
