Watching her daughter on stage, reciting a poem she wrote, is a memory Karla Contreras will never forget.

Karla was surprised when she learned her 8-year-old daughter Elisa, who suffered HIE at birth, would be sharing a poem at her school's poetry slam. But as soon as she got the note from her daughter's teacher, Karla knew she wouldn't miss it.

By Jamie Wyatt

When Cooper was born I was a mess and everything was so baby/NICU focused I realized I was neglecting myself greatly.

When I got some particularly concerning news one day, I went in to an anxious despair. I wallowed in it for about 24 hours then I gave myself a gift; I’m a very visual person so I visualized a beautifully wrapped square box.

When we got discharged from the NICU just about seven years ago, I had a million questions. The most burning desire for me was to connect to other families who had gone through what we had just been through... a traumatic birth, hypothermic cooling, scary MRIs and EEGs, tubes and wires, and infinite unknowns ahead of us. I had to go to google to understand what Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy meant, despite being warned not to. 

You don’t want to be me.

And I get it. There was a time I didn’t want to be me either.

By Nick Burton

In 2015, when our son, Grey, was born, there were not many interventions available to neonatologists to help lessen the brunt of an HIE injury.

In fact, we had to make a decision within our son’s first two hours of life to be transferred from what we thought was a high-level NICU to a nearby university hospital so that our son could receive brain cooling—the only option available to help protect his brain from further injury.

A week or so later, while our newborn son’s condition remained critical, an attending physician had a difficult conversation with me and my wife. She said, “we’ve gotten good at saving lives like Grey’s, but we haven’t caught up with what comes next.”