Caring for a newborn hits home for teen parents

Maria Shilaos reportingLife changes dramatically for teenagers who become parents. But their stress is compounded when their baby is born prematurely.

"It's kind of traumatizing if you think about it," says 18-year-old Natalie. "You are seeing your daughter hooked up to all these machines."

Natalie and her 17-year-old fiancé were shocked when their baby arrived at Primary Children's Medical Center on Oct. 10. Only 26 weeks along, the baby weighed only one pound, 13 ounces.

"I've never even seen a newborn baby," Natalie says, "so when you see your own daughter in an isolette, and you can't even touch her, for a minute you don't even feel like that's your kid for a minute. You don't feel like a mom because you can't pick her up. I can't kiss my own kid."

"As you can imagine, it's an incredibly stressful time for parents," says Donald Null, medical director of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Primary Children's. "I like to tell parents, 'You need to ask any questions you want. You need to understand that we will tell you everything that's going on, be it good news or bad news, so that you'll be comfortable that no one's going to hide things from you, and that you're really loaning your baby to us to take care of until the baby is ready to go home.' And I treat these babies like they belong to me."

"When you're little, they look at your parents and they talk to your parents about it," says Natalie's fiancé. "When we first came here we thought they were going to talk to our parents, but they were actually looking at us in the face and saying, 'This is what's going on. This is what we're going to do to your daughter,' and then it was different. It was like you are the one deciding what to do, and it was different and hard, but we had to do it."

The day I spoke with the teenage couple, they were trying to decide if they would be able to care for their child's feeding tube.

"We watched it yesterday," says Natalie. "It's about 22 centimeters you have to measure, and they do it so quick, and it just goes up through their nose, underneath their eye, and down their stomach."

"What scared me about it was that the tube might go into her lungs if you don't do it the right way and make her stop breathing," says Natalie's fiancé. "I don't feel right about taking her home with that thought in my head."

But their only alternative is to leave their baby in the hospital for another four to six weeks.

Tomorrow, in part three of our series, we'll see what the hospital does to make sure these teens are ready to take home a tiny baby.

Make sure to join us for the KSL Primary Children's Radiothon on Feb. 25 and 26.

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