Many mothers call their children “little miracles.” Wendy Thomas calls her daughter “brat.”
Sunday, for instance, 36-month-old Jewel was all smiles until she spied a camera angled in her direction, when she promptly burst into tears.
“She?s healthy all right,” Thomas said. “Healthy and spoiled rotten.”
But both descriptions truly describe Jewel, born at 24 weeks weighing just 1 pound, 6 ounces. She was one of about 100 pediatric patients reunited Sunday with the doctors and nurses who cared for them during stays in the University of Maryland School of Medicine neonatal intensive care unit.
“They treated her like she was their own,” Thomas said.
The hospital hosts the event every other year, a tradition dating to the early 1990s, and was organized this year by students from Glenelg Country School in Ellicott City. Senior Erica Esposito and junior Kate Broderick volunteered to chair the event and raised $1,500 for supplies.
The reunion was the second they coordinated for the University of Maryland, and they?ve also hosted them at St. Agnes and Mercy Hospitals.
“It?s great for the kids, but the parents get the most out of it,” Esposito said. “These are the doctors and nurses that were there for them for months.”
The tradition is also a time for neonatologist Renee Fox to reflect on the smallest, sickest newborns who didn?t make it, and to see children who did smiling and playing ? instead of inside incubators.
“It?s great to see them come back in a situation where they are really happy and see how they are doing,” Fox said.
The medical school is celebrating its bicentennial this year. Its 40-bed neonatal intensive care unit is the largest in the state.
