Little Neil Norby is just 3 months old.
But already he is no stranger to heart monitors and respiratory machines, needle pricks and surgery.
Since he was born three months prematurely, a hospital’s intensive-care nursery has been his only home and medical devices his constant companions.
But Neil’s world isn’t just about incubators and other life-saving devices. After being poked or prodded by the nurses and doctors overseeing his care, the 3-pound infant is ready for a crucial part of his personal therapy.
It’s time to be cuddled.
“The human touch is the best medicine they can get,” explains Monica Sandrini, a volunteer “cuddler” at Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.
Each year, Sandrini and a team of 73 other volunteers love some 10,000 premature infants back to health, reading to them, singing to them and rocking them to sleep.
“It’s comforting for them. It gives them a sense of security,” Sandrini says. “And they need it for developmental reasons.”
Studies have shown that hospitalized infants who are touched tend to gain weight faster, have shorter hospital stays and even better survival rates than preemies left in their incubators all day.
Cuddlers, who typically have no medical background, also boost the babies’ social development, adding a personal touch to a sterile environment.
“What we do is try to divert their mind away from not feeling well, or feeling alone or out of place,” says Patrick Burns, a purchasing manager from Fremont, Calif., by day and baby cuddler by night. “We concentrate on making this time or this moment with them special.”
For some cuddlers, that means humming or singing to the infants, talking to them, reading to them or playing music. Others walk around the room with the preemies, giving them the opportunity to see beyond the confines of their small incubators.
Besides holding the babies, volunteers– who undergo training before being allowed to work with the infants–are at times expected to bathe them, feed them or change their diapers.
The job is not without its downsides.
“A baby threw up on me today,” says Loessa Tuhey, a retired secretary from San Carlos, Calif., who has spent six hours a week with the preemies for nine years.
But that’s just a minor consideration, given what these infants are facing.
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Most of the babies in the intermediate intensive-care unit are premature, in need of surgery–or both. The fact that many of the babies are very sick makes the cuddlers’ job all the more daunting.
“The very first baby I held had a tracheotomy tube,” says Burns, who joined the cuddling program five years ago. “I was quite nervous. But the nurses told me `This baby is happy, relatively healthy, is going to go home soon and would love to be held.’ “
But that isn’t always the case.
Sometimes cuddlers are asked to assist nurses when a baby’s blood is being drawn, helping to calm the infant while it kicks, screams or cries. And sometimes the preemie’s health is especially poor and all the cuddling, cooing and caring in the world can’t change that.
“If you have a baby that is not going to live and you know it, that’s the hardest thing to handle,” says Tuhey. “We’re warned not to get too attached, but I do mourn a little bit.”
The possibility of making a baby’s life a little better, however, continues to draw a large number of people to Stanford’s cuddler program. There is a yearlong waiting list to become a volunteer. Even the center’s 3 a.m. shift is completely full.
The program has been so successful that officials at San Jose’s Good Samaritan Hospital are looking to add cuddlers to their own preemie ward.
The knowledge that paid medical staff isn’t always available to soothe crying children can be a bit disheartening to parents of premature infants. Some parents have to go back to work before their preemie can be released from the hospital. Others live a great distance from specialized children’s hospitals and just can’t make the trek there every day.
To them, cuddlers are a godsend.
“It allowed me to have peace of mind,” says Cindy Goldberg of Woodside, Calif., whose daughter Madison recently spent two months in Stanford’s intermediate intensive-care unit. “We would be there 24 hours if we could, but that was not always possible. The next best thing was to have someone there whose primary role was to hold her.”
For Neil Norby’s mother, Tara Bloyd, cuddlers have represented an integral part of his rehabilitation, providing her son with emotional and intellectual support as well as physical comfort.
“You read about children who are in Romanian orphanages and are left untouched and all the problems that causes them,” she says. “The cuddlers help me feel OK. I know they’ll be here to pick Neil up if he’s crying.”