Neonatal Baby Quotes

SCBU (pronounced Scaboo) is the Special Care Baby Unit, NICU is Neonatal Intensive Care, PICU is Paediatric Intensive Care, PIKACHU is a type of Pokémon.

The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.

So certain were experts that neonates felt no pain that through the mid-1980s major surgeries on newborn babies were sometimes performed without anesthesia. These included major cardiovascular procedures requiring prying open rib cages, puncturing lungs, and tying off major arteries. Though provided with no pharmacologic agents to blunt the pain that cracking ribs or cutting through the sternum might have induced, babies were given powerful agents to induce paralysis—ensuring an immobile (and undoubtedly terrified) patient on whom to operate. Jill Lawson’s remarkable story of her premature son, Jeffrey, and his unanesthetized heart surgery provides a heartbreaking account of such a procedure. After Jeffrey’s death in 1985, Lawson’s campaign to educate the medical profession about the need to treat pain in the young literally changed the field. And likely led to improved awareness of pain in animals, too. bA technique called clicker training pairs a metallic tick-tock! with a food treat every time the animal performs a desired behavior. Eventually the animal comes to associate the sound of the clicker with the feel-good neurochemical rewards of the food. When the treat is discontinued, the animal will continue doing the behavior, because

A whole hospital ward seemed to be crossdressing, nurses pretending to be mothers playing like boys with Tinkertoy babies.

there is something unforgettably compelling about having actually been there, alone, at two in the morning, gloved, masked, and robed like a latex-covered priest, receiving into my hands a blue, bloody, and lifeless baby and having to decide.

The newborn’s preference for a mutual, rather than unilateral, gaze shows that babies are designed for reciprocity.

This was the first experience of billions of First World babies of their mothers for decades; at worst, the mothers – or their babies – experienced respiratory distress, were stupefied, unconscious, or in a delirium.

The likelihood of my baby being injured during co-sleeping was, in reality, significantly lower than it would have been had I left her in the hospital cot. In the UK, 90 percent more babies die alone in baskets or cots – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – than they do when they securely, rather than hazardously, co-sleep with their mothers.

But there’s something wrong with Haslam’s explanation of why this is. Think of a newborn baby. We all accept that babies are human beings. But on Haslam’s analysis this is puzzling, because babies lack the uniquely human characteristics that he lists. Neonates can’t speak or engage in higher order thought, their emotions are at best extremely crude, and they are not industrious, imaginative, or cultured. If we consider babies to be human even though they lack the traits dubbed “uniquely human,” then it simply can’t be true that anyone without these characteristics is viewed as subhuman

back to standing and listened. I needed to hear the truth. She gave me sound advice and recommended going to an appropriate emergency room if I felt anything suspicious with the baby. She said that our local hospital wouldn’t staff the neurosurgeons necessary to perform life-saving surgery, so we would need to travel to a larger city. Since we became more restless and hopeless every moment, Adam and I decided to drive the four hours south and crash the ER at an L.A. hospital. We went to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center because our midwife found great reviews about their Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Studies into the reactions of newborns to cries also cast fascinating light on their developing senses of self. When 1-day-old babies were played audio tapes of another neonate crying, as well as recordings of the wails of an 11-month-old, and a tape of their own cries, they cried most to howls of the neonate, but didn't respond to the playback of their own cries. Already at birth, it seems, babies can discriminate vocally between me and not-me, and are most sensitive to the group that most resembles them. Babies' cries can also be a guide to their psychological state. Entering a ward full of battered babies, voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg heard strangulated cries-'their experience of violence had already pierced their voices.

Same went for babies born addicted to drugs. In 2001, sixty-two Kentucky newborns were hospitalized for neonatal abstinence syndrome. The next year, ninety-three. Two years after that, 166. By 2007, 275.