Erin Snyder was born four months premature on July 31, 1978. She weighed one pound 15 ounces, roughly the size of a can of Coke. At the time, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Sioux Valley Hospital was a one-room sea of infant warmers with beds two feet apart. Seven days after birth she would need surgery to repair her undeveloped heart. She needed constant care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where she spent four months before going home. Thirty years later, Erin is an architect for a firm in Chicago after graduating from the University of Notre Dame and Harrington College of Design. She returned to the now Sanford Children’s Hospital to see the state-of-the-art Boekelheide NICU. While the NICU has drastically changed, complete with 45 private family suites, some of the faces remain the same. Lawrence Wellman, MD and Lawrence Fenton, MD, the first neonatologists in the area, are still physicians for Sanford Children’s and her nurse, Georgia Stern, who is now Director of The Birthplace at Sanford USD Medical Center. "It's good to come here and see this place," Erin says. "I obviously don’t remember my stay here as a baby, but it still means a lot to me. If they wouldn't have been here, I would not have survived." Erin's sister, Liz Donohue, also now works in the field. Liz works in research for SAFE Passage Study at Sanford Research/USD, her career choice influenced partly because of Erin's experience as a baby. "Things like this do have an impact on your life and I’m happy to be part of the same system and field that saved my sister 30 years ago," says Liz. |
