When Dr. Harriet Miller began working as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies in Orlando, Florida, she saw babies who were scared, stressed, and desperately in need of comfort.
When babies cry, parents often reach for a pacifier. But Miller found that her patients couldn’t use one.
Premature babies have difficulty breathing, so tubes are placed in their throats connecting them to a mechanical respirator. These tubes leave little room in tiny mouths for anything else. Put a pacifier in and it just falls out, making stressed babies even more frustrated.
“They were upset, they were crying but you couldn’t hear them cry because they were intubated,” Miller said. “It was just heartbreaking for me to see them. ”
So Miller took out her bandage scissors and modified the pacifier, cutting a notch on the side so the tube fit alongside it. Her simple design not only made babies calmer, it significantly helped their recovery because they could channel their delicate resources from crying into healing.
“These babies don’t have a lot of excess energy that they can waste,” Miller said. “They’re trying to fight infections. They’re struggling to breathe. They don’t have a lot of tolerance for pain. They don’t have great reserves.”
