Silas Chaychuk-Ray was born six days ago, at 25 weeks and two days into mom’s pregnancy.
He’s doing well, said his mother, Sonya Chaychuk.
“When he was born,” she said, “he was breathing on his own and crying,” much to everyone’s surprise.
Even with all the tubes and medical equipment, he was squirming and moving around in his special crib Friday early evening, kicking up his tiny feet.
Chaychuk said she lost a baby last year, at 21 weeks.
“So this is like — we’re really hoping, ” she said.
They’ll likely be in the neonatal intensive care unit at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center for three months, as Silas builds up his strength.
“It’s going to be a long three months,” his mother said.
The Holtzman Twins Special Care Nursery/Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is built with single rooms for families, with beds and a shower so parents can stay with their children in the hospital.
Sonya Chaychuk and her family joined hospital staff and the unit’s benefactors and others for a 10th anniversary celebration for the wing, which specializes in caring for the most fragile of newborns, Friday afternoon.
Silas was born after the shortest gestation period in the unit’s history. Emma Pyper, now 10, was born at 28 weeks, the hospital’s previous earliest-born baby. The normal gestation period for a baby is 40 weeks.
“There was actually still construction going on here,” said her grandmother, Kathleen Pyper.
Emma’s mother was pregnant with her when a drunken driver slammed into them in a head-on collision, forcing an early birth by C-section. Kathleen Pyper said doctors were worried Emma would be developmentally delayed or have other issues, but she grew up perfectly healthy.
Families and children who’d been through the wing came too.
There were a handful of children there with their families, invited to celebrate the anniversary, all that had gone through the unit.
As with Emma, you’d never think how fraught all their births had been, Pyper said.
“They (the staff) just were amazing, they took care of her, taught us how to take care of her at home,” Pyper said.
The unit usually has around 12 to 15 babies any day, and they range from full-term babies with problems to very premature babies, said Melanie Fain, the nurse manager at the unit.
Other neonatal ICUs might have a few curtains, or even several babies in something more similar to a traditional hospital ward, she said. The private room setup eases stress on families that can come from long stays in an ICU, she said.
“It creates a very healing environment. In other words the baby is a patient, but the parents have the baby in hospital for months. It’s a different experience for parents if they are in a big room with other babies,” she said. “It creates such a great place for the parents. When I think about what were doing here, I think about that.”
Cali Jo and Gabe Boline’s boy, Harlan, was born at 31 weeks.
“After he was born, the doctors come in, they start instantly working on him, getting tubes up and everything,” Gabe Boline said.
Harlan had sleep apnea, acid reflux and a host of other respiratory issues, Cali Jo Boline said. Mom and Dad didn’t get to see him for four hours after he was born.
Gabe Boline said it’s all still a blur, but he remembers running back and forth between where the medical staff were working and his wife’s room, relaying what was happening.
The Bolines were in the unit for a long 6 1/2 weeks.
“When you see a tube come out, you’re like, ‘Yes!’ ” Gabe Boline said. “That was a victory, so it was a real gradual process.”
Harlan is a healthy kindergartner now, and Cali Jo Boline said she’s grateful for the doctors and nurses they met.
“I’m thankful for them being so real, because if you don’t connect with the nurses, then your stay isn’t going to be very good,” she said.
Between 3,000 and 3,500 babies have come through the unit, said David Nierenberg, whose family established the unit. It bears the maiden names of Nierenberg’s mother and aunt, who were born twins in New Jersey in 1928.
“In the wilds of Jersey, my grandmother, who was a 19-year-old woman, thought she was having a stomachache,” he said.
Her husband, Nierenberg’s grandfather, had seen a few births before emigrating from Russia. Thinking something was amiss, he called the phone operator to find a doctor.
“The doctor, fortunately, arrived in time to catch my aunt,” Nierenberg said. She weighed all of 2 1/4 pounds.
“The first thing the doctor said to my grandparents was to ask whether they had a cemetery plot. Before they could engage in a conversation about that, he said, ‘Wait a minute, I think I see another one,’ ” and Nierenberg’s mother was born 8 minutes after, at 2 1/2 pounds.
Since it was nearing wintertime and too dangerous to move the babies to a hospital, the doctor told Nierenberg’s grandparents’ to keep the home warmed to human body temperature for weeks for the babies’ health and feed them with an eye-dropper every few hours.
They both survived, so, on their 77th birthday, his family gifted the unit to the hospital.
Nierenberg’s grandfather died 29 years ago, he said. His aunt, 11 years ago. His mother has been dealing with Alzheimer’s for 14 years.
We could be sad about that, he said, “but on the other hand, there are over 3,000 lives that were started here.”
“It’s not good to grieve over our losses when there are babies that need to be fed by eye-droppers and wrapped in grandpa’s silk pajamas.”
