“Whenever I walked in, I felt like I was with family,” Jason says. She, along with the other doctors and a cadre of compassionate nurses, put Karen’s mind at ease and gave Kylie’s dad, Jason, a sense of confidence and calm. Coleman, MD, medical director of the NICU, took over as her primary doctor. “At first I was concerned about being there because it wasn’t a large metropolitan hospital, but it became clear pretty quickly that Kylie was getting the best care possible,” Karen says. But she was a fighter, and with the diligent care of the doctors and nurses at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Jefferson Health – New Jersey in Washington Township, she hung on. Kylie entered the world at barely 11 inches long, medically frail, and dependent on a ventilator to breathe premature babies in her condition often don’t have a strong chance of survival. “I walked into Jefferson never having sought medical care there before.” Kylie, born weighing 1 pound 10 ounces, was considered a “micro-preemie,” a baby who is born weighing less than 1 pound, 12 ounces or before 26 weeks of gestation. “I felt the baby coming-I had to get to the closest hospital as soon as possible,” Karen says. Her mother, Karen, went into labor just shy of 24 weeks, and was unable to make it from the family’s home in Williamstown, New Jersey, across the bridge to Philadelphia to deliver at the hospital where she works as a nurse practitioner.
Kylie was born amidst a whirlwind of worry compounded by a blur of whooshing, beeping medical machinery. At 5 years old, she doesn’t really remember the first weeks of her life, but the pictures in the book tell her story-from small, sickly preemie to thriving, soccer-playing, always-smiling kindergartner. “And that’s my breathing tube… and that’s my nurse…” she says, pointing at the photos. Petite, perky, and pony-tailed Kylie Lucas sits on her mother’s lap, flipping through the pages of her memory book as her dad and big sister look on.
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