Triplets throw thank-you party at Community
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| Father Matthew Peters holds Ashlee, nurse Xong Xiong holds Emilee and mother Cadee Peters holds Gracee during the triplets' birthday celebration at Community Regional |
The three little girls, dressed in frilly party dresses and matching head bands, blew kisses, waved and gave out hugs as medical staff marveled at how big the triplets had grown and how they’re developing at the same rate as children who don’t start out their first few weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Although two of them are identical twins, each girl has a distinct personality. Gracee “is all drama” said her mother, Cadee Peters, as Gracee pounded on the table and squealed. Cadee pronounced Ashlee the “serious one” and Emilee as “happy, just always happy.”
To mark the girls’ one-year milestone, parents Cadee and Matthew Peters threw a party with sandwiches and three big cakes for the Community Regional staff. They also donated a framed photo of the three girls sitting bare-bottomed on a white rug and looking over their shoulders at the camera.
“I think this is the first time the nurses here have seen them with clothes on,” said their mother Cadee, smoothing out Gracee’s skirt.
The girls are also giving $1,000 to Community to buy baby mannequins for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation classes that are required for all parents bringing home babies from Community’s neonatal intensive care unit. Cadee said she appreciated the classes and the fact Community also provided CPR training to the Peters’ babysitters in Spanish when it was needed.
Cadee spent a week in Community Regional’s high risk antepartum unit on bed rest before the girls were born and the triplets stayed in the same bassinet in the neonatal intensive care unit there. Cadee said they all got wonderful care from staff and that many of the nurses stayed in touch with the family after they went home.
Community Regional provides resources to women and babies not available anywhere else in the Central Valley, such as the region’s only perinatology program, specifically for women with high-risk pregnancies. The downtown Fresno hospital has been California’s second busiest birthing center for the past three years, averaging 20 births a day. And because of its expertise in delivering high-risk babies, the regional medical center ranks first in the state in delivering the most babies weighing less than 3 pounds.
Community Regional expects to do even more to deliver and keep alive the tiniest and most fragile of babies in the next few years. Construction has started on a brand new neonatal intensive care unit. The 54-bed unit, scheduled to open in 2009, will be housed on the hospital’s fourth floor and serve as the home to high-risk babies.
As construction crews hammered in the hallway outside the room where the Peters triplets were celebrating, antepartum nurse Xong Xiong said she’s excited to see the expansion starting. “Lots of time when we have multiples one stays and the other one has to go to Children’s hospital, or they all go,” Xiong said. “But often mom is not well enough to ambulate and go see them. That’s hard.”
Community Regional’s new nursery for high risk babies will be bigger and Level 3, able to take care even more serious cases, Xiong said.
Erin Kennedy reported this story. She can be reached at ekennedy@communitymedical.org.