The incubator in the Jewish General Hospital hallway just off the main lobby had a plush purple toy in it and looked a bit old and decrepit.
But that was the whole point.
The incubator was serving as a piggy bank – and starting off point – for a $1.3 million auxiliary campaign.
Its goal is to furnish the hospital’s renowned neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with 20 needed state-of-art models by the time the NICU moves down from the fifth floor to the JGH’s still-unfinished Pavilion K, which is to house a new emergency room.
At the Nov. 18 launch of the drive – one day after World Prematurity Day – purple, mauve, and violet prevailed.
Balloons, and rubber-band bracelets in those shades festooned the hallway, and the assembled included Dr. Apostolos Papageorgiou, chief of pediatrics and neonatology; JGH Foundation CEO Myer Bick; development professional Danyael Cantor; auxiliary director Nancy Rubin (who is co-chairing the initiative with Nancy Rinzler), as well as Amanda Bergeron, a healthy 10-year-old who weighed just over one pound as she struggled to thrive in the NICU a decade ago.
Out of the 4,500 infants born each year at the hospital’s birthing centre, 700 are premature and need the NICU. The ones most at risk may weigh only a few hundred grams at birth.
And not all make it, as was noted in Parliament on Prematurity Day by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, who lost a grandson due to prematurity issues.
Premature infants, he said, “are the largest pediatric patient group in Canada,” representing one out of 10 births.
“This is a very special day for us,” said Papageorgiou, a 40-year-veteran of the hospital and a leading figure in Canadian neonatology. “We have the best survival rate of any unit in Canada, and this new generation of incubators will help.
“The babies here fight for their lives, and need the technology that helps them do it.”
Papageorgiou and NICU head nurse Serge Cloutier said in an interview that the new units will go a long way in aiding preemies.
Each new specialized unit costs $65,000, and is equipped with a special cover that lifts hydraulically and allows treatment of fragile preemies by “working around” the infants without needing to physically remove them. The incubators also have built-in climate control heat lamps.
The incubator project was not the auxiliary’s own brainchild. That came from veteran community volunteer Barbara Brock, who had initiated a similar project earlier at Royal Victoria Hospital and hopes to do so at others.
Amanda Bergeron’s mother, Dr. Coren Mann, a researcher at the hospital’s Lady Davis Institute, asked those gathered to contribute generously, and held back tears as she recalled her daughter having to stay six weeks on a ventilator in the NICU, each day an excruciating test for “distraught families and hormonal mothers.”
This should not be the case at the new and vastly improved NICU in Pavilion K, which will occupy more than double the space it now has on the fifth floor. It will have six intensive care beds as well as 10 beds for new mothers to stay alongside their convalescent infants.
The new NICU will have room for 40 incubators in all, Papageorgiou said, and a successful campaign will bring the total of high-tech ones in the NICU to 33.
Members of his own Greek community “are even buying two,” he said.
More details on the incubator initiative are available by calling 514-340-8216.