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For the first time in over two decades, Jennifer Reents-Dickkut walked into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City. She came with her twin daughters, Payton and Annika, who spent 100 days in the NICU when they were born.
Annika Dickkut graduated from the University of Kansas last weekend. Payton Dickkut graduated from KU last year. Their journey from NICU to KU is certainly one of resilience.
“It’s really cool to see, like, this is where it all started,” Annika said.
Jennifer said she remembers every detail of the hospital. Her twins were born in St. Joseph and brought to the NICU at Saint Luke’s when she was 25 1/2 weeks pregnant. She described a frightening phone call.
“… ’We don’t want to alarm you, and please don’t speed, but your daughter had a brain hemorrhage, so get here quickly,'" she recalled.
The twins' medical journey was a miracle from the start.
“They said people were crying. People didn’t know what to do," Jennifer said. "She was crashing, and people prayed in different faiths, and she stabilized.”
Her baby girls weighed less than two pounds each. Jennifer said her husband’s wedding band could fit around one of their legs.
“Now we’ve come so far,” said Danielle Gathers, RN, MSN RNC NIC, and nurse manager at Saint Luke’s. “But 25 weeks — 20 years, 25 years ago — was huge. That was rare."
The twins were considered Extremely Low Gestational Age Newborns (ELGANs).
Jennifer kept multiple mementos from their time in the NICU: a tiny diaper, names the staff made for their isolettes and the many Polaroids nurses took for the family, with captions to keep everyone up to date.
“You have a baby as your patient, but you also have family, you have parents that you need to care for just as much and get them through that journey,” Gathers said.
One of the pictures showed Jennifer holding one of her babies for the first time. She had to wait 30 days for that.
“That was a wonderful moment,” she said.
While the rooms and most of the faces at the NICU look different, the family got to see one familiar face. Nurse Liz was still there and got to hug the family all these years later.
For Annika and Payton, their medical journey didn’t end when they left the NICU. They've had eye surgeries, appointments and more. But they have adapted and thrived.
Both girls played in the marching band at KU and are thinking about grad school.
“We work with people, mostly in the intellectual disability category, but some of them have physical things that come along with it,” Annika said.
Jennifer said returning to the NICU made her reflect on both the destination and the journey her girls have had.
“It’s a journey to be back, but it’s good because this is what the journey brought me, is my girls, and they’re adults and they’re thriving,” she said.
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