Kids once in West Penn Hospital's NICU celebrate 5th birthdays
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- On Monday at West Penn Hospital, it was a fifth birthday party for several local children and their families, to commemorate five years of life and for the hospital, five years of high quality neonatal intensive care.
It was back in 2019 that Allegheny Health Network unveiled its new $23 million NICU at West Penn. Since that time, the NICU has been providing an expert level of care for premature and critically ill infants.
Dr. William McCarron, the director of West Penn's NICU, says that it's amazing to see these babies back at the hospital, grown up and celebrating such big milestones.
"We put babies through some very difficult stuff sometimes and we put families through that," said Dr. McCarron. "When you see them come back as a happy, normal 5-year-old and see all those moments that they've gone through with their family after they left us, it just puts it all into perspective. We are not in it just to get you home, we are in it to get you to be a happy, healthy, normal kid."
One of the 5-year-olds celebrating at Monday's event was Aurora Zimmerman and her parents Christy and Tom from Mars, Butler County. They said that when Aurora was born, she was a full-term baby at nine pounds, but she had immature lungs and pulmonary hypertension. She spent 11 days in the NICU.
Christy says that they are so grateful to be here and for the care they got from the doctors and nurses at this Level 3 NICU.
"They really included us in their daily goals for Aurora," said Christy. "So whether that was her on-call doctor, the nurses, the feeding specialists, the cardiologist, they met as a team and they included us as a team to keep us included in the decisions and what was going on for her care and what goals they were hoping for today. It really helped the emotional and mental state that you go through as parents of a NICU patient worrying about their children and their health and safety."
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