St. John’s Neonatal ICU: 20 years of saving tiny lives

Eighteen years ago, at 28 weeks gestation, Nina Forza dove into the world with her hands above her head, her mother Vicki says.

She just couldn’t wait to get here,” Vicki says, beaming, while Nina, now a senior at Springfield Catholic High School, blushes and looks away.

Vicki, a hospice nurse for St. John’s, looks back on those days fondly, but at the time, her daughter’s birth at St. John’s, which was 12 weeks early, was a time of joy mixed with worry. Nina is the Forzas’ fifth and only surviving child. Vicki’s four previous pregnancies ended in premature births where the babies didn’t survive. Nina weighed less than 2 pounds at birth.

Two years before Nina was born, St. John’s opened its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which is an ICU for preemie or sick newborns. Nina spent the entire summer of 1985 in the NICU. She was two months old before her mother was able to hold her.                                                         Vicki Forza

“Within the first 24 hours of her birth, she had to have three chest tubes because she kept pulling them out. She kept us on a roller coaster ride for awhile. Her heart wasn’t closed when she was born, and we thought we were going to have to take her to Kansas City for surgery. Thankfully, her heart closed the night before we were supposed to leave for Kansas City,” Vicki says. “The day we took her home, Aug. 30, 1985, we had spent the night before at the hospital caring for her with the help of the NICU staff, so we would be prepared for when we were on our own at home. That helped a lot.”

The “roller coaster ride” Vicki describes of caring for premature or sick babies is a familiar journey for NICU staff and physicians. Each year they care for 400 babies and their families.

Each year in October, St. John’s hosts an NICU reunion, where former patients, their parents and the NICU staff can see each other again and celebrate the former patients’ “graduation” from the NICU. This year’s reunion is on Oct. 5.

“We always ask the families to come to the NICU reunions so we can see the patient again. Seeing the babies healthy and going home is the greatest joy of working in the NICU. When that day comes, everyone is so happy for the baby and the family,” says St. John’s neonatologist and NICU medical director Melinda Slack, M.D.

The Forzas, who haven’t attended an NICU reunion since Nina was a child, plan to attend this year to celebrate the unit’s 20th year of operation with the other “graduates,” parents and staff.
“When Nina was a child, the reunions meant more to the NICU staff and I,” her mother says, “because of course, she doesn’t remember anything about being there. As she gets older, and especially when she has her own children, she will come to understand how important the care she received in the NICU really was.”

Slack, who helped open St. John’s NICU, has seen the now 24-bed unit grow over its two decades. The nurse-patient ratio is dependent on each patient’s condition and varies from 1:1 to 1:3. Once St. John’s only neonatologist, Slack is now joined by colleagues Vish Subramanian, M.D., Consolacion Sison-Switala, M.D. and Edward Stevens, M.D.

St. John’s maternal-fetal medicine specialists Gary Thurnau, M.D. and Robert Fraser II, M.D., who care for women with high-risk pregnancies, work hand-in-hand with the neonatologists.

Slack considers tools like the drug surfactant, which is now widely used to prevent a pre-term baby’s lungs from collapsing at birth, and high-frequency oscillating ventilators, among the greatest advancements in neonatal care since she helped open the NICU 20 years ago. Because fetal respiratory development occurs in late pregnancy, most preemies are born in respiratory distress.

The NICU is also now an integral component of St. John’s Children’s Hospital. In addition to the unit, St. John’s has a 28-bed pediatric floor at St. John’s Regional Health Center, including a pediatric intensive care unit and a pediatric intermediate unit, and physicians who are subspecialized for pediatrics in areas such as allergies, endocrinology, neurology, ophthalmology, psychiatry, surgery, cardiology and neonatology.

Nina Forza and her family will celebrate another milestone in her life next June – her graduation from Springfield Catholic High School. Her plans after graduation include possibly attending St. John’s School of Nursing.

“Helping people, and the human body, have always fascinated me,” she says.