Raising money for the George Town Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

We are four mums in Grand Cayman who have recently had babies; with all four babies needing a little extra assistance on arrival from the George Town Hospital NICU.

Having your newborn placed into the NICU is an extremely stressful and high pressure situation; the normal euphoria felt at meeting your new baby is put on hold while you wait for medical intervention and hope that the cuddles you’ve been anticipating will come soon.

All four of our babies have very different reasons for why they ended up in NICU, these include respiratory distress, infection, jaundice and pulmonary hypertension, just to name a few complications. However all four were treated with the same fantastic care by the team within the NICU department at George Town, and it’s for this reason that we have felt compelled to give back.

Baby Willow and baby Maverick both needed the use of a CPAP machine during their NICU stays in order to assist with their breathing. With both babies being full term, it became apparent that the current CPAP machines the hospital use are more suited to premature babies and therefore the sizing for full term babies is inadequate. Our hope is that we can raise enough money to donate a new CPAP machine to the hospital that will have the ability to fit full term babies as well as babies who are born prematurely.

To raise awareness for all NICU babies and in order to help raise money for the new CPAP machine we are going to tackle the Cayman Islands marathon as a relay team. Circa 7 miles each, this may not seem far to many but for us at a few months postpartum (and with ten kids between us) it’s a challenge!

Living on a small island, we are extremely lucky to have a neonatal unit at all and want to do what we can to assist!