Premature Birth Hits Home For Maternal Newborn Nurse
WCBS 880's Marla Diamond is working on a special series of reports leading up to this Sunday's March of Dimes March for Babies, which will be held at Lincoln Center at 10:00 a.m. To sign up, visit www.marchforbabies.org and tune in to WCBS 880 and check CBSNewYork.com for Marla's upcoming reports.
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - A woman who spent her life helping others deal with a troubling situation is now helping her own family deal with it, WCBS 880's Marla Diamond reported.
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As a maternal newborn nurse, Jennifer Ort helped parents adjust to life with a premature baby.
Then her granddaughter Abigail was born at only 33 weeks. She weighed only 4 lbs., 8 oz.
"I never thought that it would be us," Ort told Diamond.
Abigail and is now in a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.
"The baby has already had three surgeries and seven procedures. The baby, as we speak, right now, is in the operating room. She was scheduled to have open heart surgery yesterday, but they canceled it because the baby has a small bleed in her brain," Ort said.
Ort is marching in this Sunday's March for Babies for her granddaughter and for other babies born too soon.
"This really hit close to home and I said right after Abigail was born that we need to put together a family team where we can really put our support now behind the March of Dimes, behind the research that's necessary to bring some answers to why babies are born prematurely," said Ort.
One in eight babies in the United States are born premature, Diamond reported.
