February 18, 2025
NICU 101 with Mary Farrelly of The NICU Translator: Podcast Episode #278
Kristin Revere talks with Mary Farrelly, CEO of The NICU Translator. Mary gives expert advice on navigating the NICU. \
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Mary Farrelly. She is the owner at The NICU Translator, and our topic is all about NICU 101, what every pregnant person should know about the NICU.
Now let’s hear about Mary. She’s a certified NICU nurse, a doula, a nurse educator, and as I mentioned earlier, founder of The NICU Translator. With over a decade of experience as a Level 4 NICU nurse, Mary empowers families and professionals through evidence-based education, individualized NICU doula support, and specialized NICU training programs for doulas and other support professionals. Mary is passionate about reducing trauma and enhancing the NICU experience. She is dedicated to helping families and support professionals alike navigate the NICU journey with confidence and compassion.
Welcome, Mary!
Thank you! I’m so glad to be here!
I am so excited to talk about preparing for the NICU. I feel like our listeners, unless it is a known medical concern where they have the time to prep, aren’t necessarily educated and informed on what a NICU stay may look like.
Yeah, that is very common. The March of Dimes did a study a little while back. They looked at a bunch of childbirth education courses and prep work and birth classes, and only 10 to 15% even mentioned the NICU at all, much less giving more in depth knowledge about the topic, which is really not fair because the statistic is that about one in ten babies born in the United States every year will have a NICU stay. So it is something that is important to just talk about a little bit prenatally, not from a place of fear, but from a place of empowerment and informed decision-making. It’s still an important topic to think about as you’re planning a pregnancy or are pregnant and thinking about your birth journey.
Exactly. And my daughter had a short NICU stay, so I know from personal experience that it can be overwhelming, especially with your first child. I had preeclampsia and was induced at 39 weeks, and she had some minor glucose issues, but still, when you imagine rooming in with your baby and being able to breastfeed and then everything changes, it is quite overwhelming.
Yeah, it’s definitely not something that most people put into their birth plan, although I’m kind of on a mission to change that a little bit. It definitely totally changes the experience. Exactly what you mentioned, from what you imagined it to be and what you feel like it should be. It just looks different when the NICU is involved. One of my passions is to make it less traumatic and still bring the joy into the NICU experience, but no matter what, it’s still going to be different than what a lot of people imagine.
Exactly. So let’s get into your tips for preparing, as far as a potential NICU stay, and just an understanding of what that experience is like for parents.
Sure. So one of the things that I love to do with my own doula clients is – if you’re a birth doula or even a postpartum doula, you’re going to be talking through preferences and different options, maybe for where you want to labor, what pain control might look like, what you want your postpartum experience to look like. And I like to bring the NICU into that conversation, and I like to use what I call the fire drill model. I say, like, hey, just because – my daughter is in kindergarten – just because they do a fire drill at school doesn’t mean they’re manifesting a fire. It doesn’t mean a fire is going to happen. It just means that if a fire does happen, they know what to do, and it’s going to be a much more controlled and less chaotic and safer experience. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about the NICU and what that might look like, so if it is part of your story, then again it’s not going to be this total out of body, shock, overwhelm experience. You’re going to have a little bit, some grains of understanding about the NICU so you can then continue your journey through empowered parenting and informed decision making and not feel quite so overwhelmed by it.
That’s how I like to frame the conversations about it, but one of the most important things that most people don’t understand about the NICU, and I wish more did, is that there are different levels of NICU care, and if you take anything away from this conversation, I feel like this is just something to understand, either if you work with families or you are pregnant. Specifically in the United States, but it’s pretty universal – every country that has a NICU has some different type of level system – but in the United States, there’s level one through four. And a Level 1 NICU is basically just newborn care, so it’s a newborn nursery. Basically, any type of hospital that has a labor and delivery unit has the ability to resuscitate and stabilize an infant. But those Level 1 NICUs cannot continue care if the baby needs anything beyond basic newborn care. If your hospital has a Level 1 and your baby has glucose issues or maybe difficulty breathing or just needs extra monitoring or support, they would need to be transferred to a higher level of care. That might look like a Level 2, 3, or 4.
A Level 2 is sometimes known as a special care nursery. That is going to be more for what we call in the NICU a feeder-grower. So maybe a 34, 35, 36 weeker that just has maybe some needs for learning how to eat, maybe needs a little bit of time, say, learning how to stay warm on their own, but doesn’t really have any complex needs for respiratory support, testing, or monitoring. And then Level 3 is more of your general NICU care. They can take care of most babies down to 23 weeks all the way through term. They can do many different types of surgeries, respiratory support, things like that. But even some of those NICUs are limited in the type of support that they can deliver, so the top level of care is called a Level 4 or also is known as a regional NICU. In some states, there are two, three, four. California might have many more than that. But in general, there’s not that many of them, and they typically are associated with an academic or children’s hospital. So they might be pretty far away from where you are delivering or where you live. So it’s helpful just to know what NICUs are in your area and know what the transfer pattern is. Because what I see – I work at a Level 4, and I see families just totally shocked that their baby is not just in the NICU, but there in an entirely different facility than they are. That overwhelm can just be really, really daunting for people going through that experience.
Absolutely. I felt like it was overwhelming enough to be in the same hospital system and go back and forth from my postpartum room to the NICU.
Of course, yeah. The reality of the NICU experience that is the hardest piece is what you said, that separation, that physical separation from your baby. There are more family-centered care practices that help decrease that, like having rooms where families can spend the night. I did see – there’s one NICU in the United States that created a postpartum recovery room that is attached to a NICU room, which I think is just so incredible, but that is not the norm. That is the piece of it that we just can’t entirely prepare for or totally mitigate. But it is helpful just to understand what that might look like so you can feel a little bit more empowered and in control and become that advocate for your baby, even if you’re in a more unfamiliar environment.
Exactly. So what are your tips for families who have a certain vision in mind and then need to pivot? Let’s say with their birth plan, if they didn’t want to utilize pacifiers or wanted to exclusively breastfeed, and then the NICU happened. How can we change our mindset and be able to adapt to what is best for baby?
That is really challenging, and as a NICU nurse, it’s something that we kind of come up with – especially with families, I feel like something that’s happening in birth culture in our country, which is great, is that families are coming in deeply informed and confident in their decisions, but I feel like sometimes it creates this level of rigidity and rejection if things don’t go, as you said, according to plan. And I feel like some of it is very fear-based. You’re entering into the NICU where, again, a lot of autonomy is taken away. There’s a lot of unknowns. It’s very kind of loud and chaotic.
But one of the things that I think is the most strong antidote to having those types of feelings is a piece of education, like understanding the why behind certain practices in the NICU, just for my own – well, I’ll go back to the mindset, but just for people to understand, especially with pacifiers and breastfeeding. One of the things that pacifiers do in the NICU – the NICU includes for babies oftentimes some more uncomfortable procedures. Not always painful, but uncomfortable. And one of the strongest things that a baby has to be able to decrease those pain receptors and have a positive experience is that sucking reflex. It shows up so early in development, in utero, and they have that in the tiniest preemies in the NICU. They find comfort in sucking. And so for a baby – yeah, they just need that ability. It’s a tool. It’s not a plug that we’re using to keep the babies quiet. It’s an actual medical soothing tool to decrease the uncomfortable feelings of a NICU stay. So it is a powerful tool in our toolkit.
But kind of just understanding that everybody’s journey is different. No journey is better or worse than the other. The NICU families I work with often – sometimes feel internally -they have a hard time saying this out loud, but they often have similar experiences of feeling maybe some guilt or shame that they do not need, but they do, about, oh, if only I had prepared a certain way, the NICU wouldn’t have happened, or if only I had made this choice. And that is just not the case. The reality is that sometimes it’s hard for babies to go from life inside where they’re on autopilot. The mother’s body is doing everything for them. Then going out and transitioning into the real world – sometimes they just need additional support, and it’s not a reflection on you as a parent. It’s not a reflection on any choices that you made. It’s just a chapter in the journey of becoming a parent, and it can be a very humbling chapter and a really intense one. But one of my favorite things to hone in on is that the NICU is only the beginning. Even if you’re in the NICU for a longer period of time, which some babies, especially those preemies, are in there for weeks to months – it is still just chapter one. And how you show up in the NICU does not – you’re doing the best that you can and meeting the needs of your baby, but it doesn’t reflect on all those thousands of hours that you’re going to be continuing to parent them beyond the doors of the NICU.
Absolutely. So for our listeners who may have a known NICU stay that they need to prepare for, what are your tips?
I think that it’s very unique to know about a NICU stay. As you said, most NICU stays are unexpected. So those that may have heard from either a prenatal ultrasound or some type of bloodwork or maybe are higher risk for something else going on with your own body – one of the most important things is to kind of just get comfortable with the NICU you’ll be at. A lot of NICUs will offer a NICU tour. They might not advertise it, but nine times out of ten, if you ask, they will let you come in and kind of see it firsthand. Maybe look at the type of bed that your baby will go in. These are what the sounds of the NICU are. You might be able to meet a few nurses or doctors or even just the front desk staff, so you can see a few familiar faces when your baby is admitted.
And then I would ask about specific policies to that NICU. There’s a lot of common policies and procedures that are pretty universal to most NICUs, but some are a little bit more unique, especially around visitation, like what does it look like to have other visitors other than the parents into the NICU? Do they have sibling restriction? What is their support for breastfeeding?
If breastfeeding is part of your goal and you have a NICU experience, you are likely going to have a longer period of pumping, so if you know that you’re going to have a NICU baby, preparing for pumping prenatally would be huge. Understanding how your pump works, maybe taking a crash course in pumping, getting support from your doula on how that looks like because establishing milk supply will likely be through pumping in those early days and not from direct breastfeeding. Depending on the diagnosis, but that’s often the common factor for many NICU experiences because they’re just unable to eat either effectively by mouth, or at all if they’re a preemie and it’s just not developmentally appropriate yet. But they do get there eventually.
Exactly. I had to seek help from an international board certified lactation consultant, both in the hospital and home visits. It took a while to go from pumping to breastfeeding. Knowing that there are options after coming home, if you do have goals to breastfeed.
Yes, 100%. There is a whole process that NICU babies go through, and NICU families, with the whole pumping to breastfeeding journey. And having support is key. As you mentioned before with pacifiers, another piece of the NICU experience that can be really hard, especially if you really planned on exclusively breastfeeding or if that was your goal, is introducing bottles much earlier on. Because it is maybe not how – especially if you took a breastfeeding course, you’re maybe told not to introduce bottles early on. But NICU stays just change it a little bit, and it’s a bridge to home. When you’re thinking about bottle feeding skills in a NICU baby, it’s a way for them to get into your house, and these babies always do better once they’re out of the NICU, as long as it’s safe and they’re having that consistent care. But that’s another piece of the journey that is sometimes surprising for families, especially with a full-term NICU stay. That’s another common misconception, that the NICU is just preemies and you hit 36 weeks and you’re out of the woods. But about 40%-plus of NICU babies are term infants. So it’s not uncommon to have full term infants need additional support and monitoring.
Thank you for sharing that! So at Gold Coast, we work with a lot of twin and triplet families. Can you help our listeners navigate potentially different timing for twins and triplets of NICU stays, for example?
Yes, that’s a tricky convo to have sometimes because it’s so hard to have a baby in the NICU at all, but to have two demanding humans and then having different timelines can be really hard to navigate, and especially if there is – often, not always, but more often than not, one twin that is just getting closer to discharge quicker than the other twin.
Exactly. We see that frequently.
More often than not, one baby will go home first. And that can be really hard because you feel even more torn. Your heart is literally living in two different places, but I feel like the benefit that I’ve heard from families who have lived it is that they actually really valued that time home with the first twin and being able to get a flow for at home and understanding what that looks like and really getting to know that twin at home. So then when they get to bring the second or the third or the fourth baby home, they already kind of have a system and they can fit that baby into that system, and it’s less, in a way, overwhelming than having both kiddos home at the same time and trying to navigate. Because the transition from the NICU to home can be really challenging because you go from 24/7 nursing care, continuous monitoring, and if you have a question, you can literally ask someone within the first five seconds. Then you’re going home, and you’re kind of figuring it out on your own. Even if you have a great pediatrician and family support and a doula, there’s still some gaps in confidence and rhythm and flow and sometimes having that bridge with multiples with having one and then the other can be great. And most NICUs that I’ve worked in, if there is a twin home and the other twin is still in the NICU, they’ll leave a bassinet at the bedside of the NICU twin so that when the sibling comes to visit, it’s easier to still take care of two babies and be there for the one that is still in the NICU. So we try to still facilitate because we know that it can be really tricky to navigate sometimes.
I love that. What are your favorite resources for NICU preparation in that prenatal planning phase?
So my personal favorite – I have a free NICU birth plan template that anyone can download, if you’re a doula or you’re a NICU family or you’re pregnant or you just have people in your life where you’re listening to this and you’re like, okay, let’s talk a little bit about the NICU. It’s just a few questions that you talk through and you ask yourself, basically, about what your preferences are in different scenarios. If you are interested in that, it’s on my website. And then there are a lot of other free resources online that can give you a little bit of a snapshot of what the NICU looks like. I also have an Instagram that has a bunch of information there. There are some other YouTube channels and nonprofits. One of my favorite nonprofits is Dear NICU Mama because it’s a really strong peer to peer emotional support resource. They just are amazing at building community between families that have gone through it and families that are going through it currently and kind of helping them through that together. It is so needed. It’s just incredible.
Hand to Hold is also a great resource. And Project NICU. If you are a NICU family, two things I love to plug with them is both of them do free mental health support for NICU families, so they partner with either their own therapist teams or through Better Help, and they offer free mental health support for NICU families because statistically, NICU families are just at a higher risk for having postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD symptoms. Much higher, statistically. And I think some of that is related to the lack of support and lack of resources, which is the gap I’m trying to fill. But some of it is just because it’s a hard experience to go through. Those are just a few resources to dig into. But if you’re someone who’s prone to anxiety prenatally or overthinking things, the NICU can be kind of scary to talk about because it’s not something that anyone really wants to experience. The first thing I say to families when I see them at the bedside is, I’m sorry. This kind of sucks. I’m sorry that you’re here. You have to give space for the grief of a NICU experience because it is grieving the loss of the experience that you wish you had as a family.
But I feel like building a little bit more confidence and understanding of it can decrease the overwhelm of the experience. Not from a place of, oh, I need to know every single thing about every single NICU and I need to do all these things, but just having some foundations to understand it. If you are a NICU family that is going into it and you are a prenatally planned NICU family, I have another resource called The NICU Toolkit which has much more in depth resources of how to birth plan for a NICU stay, NICU one on one, I have a NICU cheat sheet in there. It’s a more comprehensive look at the NICU experience. And for some pregnant people, that might be really interesting, but for others who just want to know the bare minimum, I feel like just having a few questions built into your birth plan is a great place to start.
Excellent. So as far as navigating the family and friend relationship with the big NICU transition, what are your tips for communicating with family members about how they can be helpful and how they may not be able to help in the care for the babies when they get home?
Yes, that is a really important topic to think about, in so many ways. One is that if you are a person who is supporting a NICU family, whether you’re a doula or a family or a friend, know that there’s a few things that I hear universally from families about the support that they wish they had or that they really appreciated having. One is just knowing that people are there but without expectations. So texting someone, saying, hey, I’m thinking about you. If you want to respond, I’m here to talk. You can word vomit, whatever you want, but you don’t have to respond. I see people really pressured to feel like they have to give everybody an update and have all these different things, but the burden should never be on the family. If you are a support person, build a bubble for that NICU family so that they can focus just on taking care of their baby in the NICU, taking care of themselves physically postpartum, because that is so neglected in NICU families. I often see them rolling into the NICU, and they don’t even care that they gave birth. They just care about their baby. But that often can lead to more postpartum complications and difficulties with milk production and breastfeeding because they’re just not caring for themselves.
So the next big thing is feeding the family, making sure that they have food. Hospital food is not that exciting or healthy. Whatever makes sense for them. Is it Door Dash? Is it GrubHub? Is it going and stocking their freezer so when they’re taking their baby home from the NICU, they have meals ready to go? Is it coming of the NICU and saying hey, I made you a bowl of chicken soup; here you go. Or packing a bunch of really healthy snacks they can throw in their pumping bag or on the go to and from the hospital. Just making healthy and nutritious but still comforting eating easy for families is huge.
And then just taking care of their life because life doesn’t stop just because they’re in the NICU. Their other children might need to be picked up from school. They might need their dog walked. They might need their laundry done or their floor vacuumed. Just taking care of life without asking, what can I do to help – just saying, I am going to help in this way, or just showing up.
But another resource that I just heard about is something called SupportNow.org. It’s almost like a meal train meets Go Fund Me – like, a registry, and it’s the perfect resource for NICU families because it can be set up for anyone and it’s a way for people to do updates, too. If you want to do it for updates, you can just post one update on there daily, or not at all. You can put chores on it and people can sign up to walk your dog. You can have a meal train on there. People can donate money if you’re having difficulty with medical bills. It’s a really cool resource that I just learned about, and I feel like it’s the perfect fit for NICU families. And it’s totally free to use, too. So I recommend that.
And then just showing up emotionally because as we kind of touched on before, there’s a lot of grief in the NICU stay, but there’s also a lot of joy, too. Every family can have those same emotions just minutes apart in the same day, but kind of taking the temperature and being like, are you ready to celebrate? You’re a mom! You made a beautiful baby! This is incredible! Look, she’s off of CPAP and meeting this milestone! Or, do you want to be sad that you have to deal with this or be angry even, and just showing up in that way, too, holding space for whatever feelings. The thing I hear also that is the least helpful are “at least” statements. At least you’re in a good NICU. At least you get to go home and sleep at night. They’re like, I don’t want to do that, but thank you. All those kind of minimizing statements – like, a family can say it out loud if they want to, but to have someone say it to them feels very dismissive and hurtful of how they’re actually feeling and living that NICU stay.
I’m glad you mentioned that. It is so true.
It’s very common, too. I feel like a lot of times people also – if they have a NICU experience and you don’t understand it, they tend to kind of back away from families and they’re like, oh, we’ll give them space. When they’re ready – we don’t want to bother them. But they really still need a lot of help, especially if they have a doula or some other type of postpartum professional, having an understanding of the NICU and knowing how to facilitate bonding and knowing how to talk through emotional support and trauma informed care and connecting with evidence-based resources is so huge for families because they feel like someone gets it. Unless you’ve been in the NICU, a lot of times you feel kind of alone and that your story is just so different than other people’s. You don’t necessarily know who you can talk to about it in a safe way. It’s a key piece of navigating it.
Exactly. So Mary, as you mentioned postpartum doulas and birth doulas, what are your tips, since you do quite a bit of education for maternal health practitioners, to prepare families for a NICU stay or to support families after the birth that are having some difficulties emotionally, as you had mentioned, some of those transitions – how to be the best support they can be?
I love this so much. I call myself a NICU doula because I am a doula and I support doula work, but I do it with a specialized lens, understanding the unique needs of NICU babies because they are different than a “regular” baby. They’ve experienced a different experience. Even if it’s a short stay, it still changes that postpartum trajectory for both the family and the baby. So one of my passions is creating a whole network of NICU-informed doulas who can speak to this for families. So again, it decreases both the stigma of a NICU stay, the overwhelm of it, and potentially even the trauma. So I have a shorter two-day course called Navigating the NICU for Doulas, and then I’m building a full comprehensive NICU doula certification program that should be out in 2025, which I’m super, super excited about.
But just in terms of some tangible tips, if you work with families prenatally, even just talking about it a little bit can do so much to decrease the overwhelm because our NICU families in general – they’ve picked their doula. They’ve made an active selection of who this person is in their life and inviting them in, so they have so much trust in the doula’s opinions and resources and thoughts. So if they have never mentioned – if you’re a birth doula and you’ve never even mentioned the NICU but the NICU happens to your client, they’re going to be kind of shook by it. They’re like, well, we didn’t even talk about this. I must be so other. I must be so not the norm. But statistically, if you have 20 birth clients a year, at least 2 of them are going to have NICU stay. So even just taking that free template that I have and building it into a conversation and speaking about it can just decrease the stigma and the overwhelm and just kind of frame it in a different way so that it doesn’t have that same type of disruptive feeling for a family from the prenatal space.
And then during – if you are supporting during a birth experience, helping with that logistical support is key. Being that person to organize support so that you decrease the mental load and the burden of it can also be extremely helpful. Someone just taking the lead, because sometimes – especially if you are a grandparent of a NICU baby or a sister, or your sister is having a NICU experience – it’s very emotional for them, as well, to be worried about this baby and be thinking about them. So they’re not always in a place to kind of see the bigger picture and organize support. I feel like a doula can play a super important role in that piece of things.
And then during the transition to home, understanding a little bit more about what makes NICU babies unique. What, maybe, about their NICU stay changed – a lot of times, what I’ll see is NICU babies have processed the sensory world differently. It doesn’t stay forever, but the NICU is kind of a chaotic environment. We try to do our best to create neuroprotective kind of pockets of care, but in general, it’s still a medical setting. It’s still a hospital. Sometimes babies coming home have a lot more sensitivity to stimuli. This can look like tummy troubles. It can look like grunting and groaning and reflux. And it can look like disruptive sleep patterns and things like that. So just understanding the why behind this is happening can be really helpful for talking with families because it doesn’t quite normalize it, but it makes it feel like, okay, I get what’s happening. Now let’s get to the root cause of things that’s unique to that baby, so then we can help kind of make it better and use our tips and tricks to kind of mitigate some of those symptoms that babies come home with.
But just having an understanding of both the NICU experience, what that looks like, and then having a bigger radar for mental health symptoms in working with families. Because I’ll see sometimes doulas talking about working with a family, and they’ll say, you know, maybe they had an emotional outburst towards them, or they were really rigid in how they wanted their baby to be cared for. And while no family should ever speak to a doula in a way that’s not appropriate – you have to maintain that – but I can see where some of these families are coming from if a NICU stay was involved. The NICU is very scheduled. It has a lot of rules to follow, and a lot of these families, you saw your baby struggle. You saw a piece of – not the worst nightmare, but you saw it happen. It wasn’t theoretical. It happened. So a lot of times when families transition to home, one of the biggest things is they never want their baby to be uncomfortable again, and sometimes that can manifest in more postpartum anxiety or OCD type symptoms. So being on the lookout for it and just kind of being aware about it and having an extra level and layer of compassion and support and knowing what resources to send families to so if they do need additional help and support, you have kind of a toolkit for your community about where to send families to.
Excellent. And one of the benefits of having a birth doula with an unknown NICU situation when baby needs to go to the NICU with a partner, the mother is not alone, and we can help support emotionally, come up with a feeding plan, talk through what a NICU stay is like. With your education for doulas, we can be even more informed in our own trainings and personal experience with supporting families.
Yes, that’s one of the questions in the birth plan. If you were going to have a NICU stay and your baby is being separated, who goes with baby and who stays with you, and what does that look like? That’s another thing that I see families. When baby needs to go to the NICU, who’s coming, or is anyone coming, and everyone is just looking at each other, like I don’t know, what do we do? I don’t know, what do we do?! So even just thinking about that is huge. But yes, birth doulas especially – you’ve already formed that relationship with a family. You already have an idea of what their preferences and goals are. So you can also, once you have a much more comprehensive understanding of what the NICU is like, just like you have a good understanding of what labor and delivery looks like and all the different policies and procedures within that – you can help advocate for your client’s preferences for the postpartum experience within a NICU setting just as you would within a more typical postpartum experience. So just being able to be that source of comfort, being that source of, someone knows me and they’re just here for me and my baby. They’re not here for anybody else. They know me and they’re here to support me. The relief of that is just so amazing to see. I’ve seen doulas come down into the NICU, and those families feel supported in a different way, especially if that doula has NICU knowledge. But on the flip side, I’ve had some of my post-NICU clients say that they had a birth doula, and they had a NICU stay, and they felt very abandoned by their doula because the doula just didn’t understand or feel confident in their care or didn’t even know what to say. So just as I said before, they kind of backed away because it was out of their comfort zone. But these are the families that need the most support, and I know as doulas, we all just want to – the reason we got into this work was to show up for families in a way that maybe they aren’t able to have without our support, so having that extra layer of NICU knowledge and evidence-based tools and guidelines and understanding how the NICU works is just so essential for being able to care for all of your clients, no matter what the birth outcome is.
Exactly. I’m so thrilled to have you train our team shortly so we can better support our families with resources and the empathy that is required in this time that has many different transitions.
I’m so excited! I feel like the more I’ve had doulas go through these trainings and learn all these different tools and support guidelines – I feel like I can almost feel the NICU narrative shifting. I think that doulas are truly the missing link to having a more family centered, positive experience for families, and I just can’t wait to see the power of this education and this shift in the NICU experience for families.
Agreed! Thank you for making this change! It’s exciting. Any final tips for our listeners, Mary?
I think that I wanted to just circle back. I know that the NICU can be a heavy topic and this can be kind of triggering for some people, but I wanted to just emphasize that if you are a pregnant person or a parent, your baby is so lucky to have you, and you are the best expert in your baby’s care. You can have support, and the NICU can feel very overwhelming and intimidating, but you still know your baby best. You still know your family best, and you are just the most important part of your baby’s experience, and the NICU is just the beginning. There’s so much joy and so much love ahead.
Excellent advice! So how can our listeners connect with you?
Sure! I am on Instagram a lot. I’m @thenicutranslator. I also have a website, The NICU Translator. That’s where you can get a lot of my free resources. I have a blog there. You have that free birth plan template. I have a free discharge checklist. And that’s also where you can learn about the upcoming sessions of navigating the NICU for doulas. You can work with me one on one as a NICU family. I work as a virtual post-NICU doula, so I help facilitate the transition from the NICU to home. And if you have any questions, you can just email me, hello@thenicutranslator.com.
Excellent! Thank you so much, Mary, and we’ll have to have you back on to chat about life after the NICU.
I would love that! That sounds amazing!
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