Meet the New Life After NICU TeamĮrika Goyer is the Program Director and a Family Support Navigator with Hand to Hold. Thank you so much Gena and Aimee for creating this special place. It is so important that we have a place where every parent can feel like they’re part of the club. Once more, Gena and Aimee will be added to our blogger roster so they can continue to contribute to the community on their schedule. The Life After NICU blog posts will be shortly incorporated into our Parent Blog, PreemieBabies101, so they will live on. We as fellow NICU parents from Hand to Hold are humbled, excited and thrilled to be a part of making sure Life After NICU continues to thrive as a parent peer support community on Facebook. They are only little once! Soak it in, gals! While we are just a little bit sad that Aimee and Gena are taking a step away right now and won’t be with us every day, we are so honored that they would trust us with their “baby.” And we are so excited to see how their boys grow and develop over the coming months and years. It is that place we can go where no matter how strange we think our question might be or how remote we think the possibility is that someone else might understand or empathize there is ALWAYS someone who says, “Yes, me too! I feel that way. That is the beauty and the brilliance of what we have in the Life After NICU community. These were the people who came to me and told me their stories, who let me know that what I was feeling was normal and also gave me hope that I could get through this. First it was the doctors and nurses and then, eventually, it was the other families. A whole NICU community that I had previously never even known existed became my community.

After the initial trauma – and the weeks and months of just trying to survive – I looked around and realized that I wasn’t alone. I never imagined that the same day my baby was born might also be the day that I would have to begin preparing for the possibility that they might die.

I never imaged that it would begin with a stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I assumed my journey into motherhood would look like it had for my mom and her mom and all the other moms I had been blessed to have around. When I imagined being a parent I never imagined what that could mean. I remember that when I first ran across Life After NICU how much the message resonated with me. Welcome to the NICU Parent Club… chances are you never planned on being a member.

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