Neonatal Intensive Care

A Father's Day race benefiting the Greater Baltimore Medical Center's neonatal intensive-care unit drew more than 1,000 participants to Hunt Valley Sunday — grateful parents, preemies young and grown, supporters and some folks who just wanted to run on a beautiful morning. "This is our way to give back," said Havre de Grace resident Danielle Dabbs, 27. Her infant son Wyatt spent the first two weeks of his life in GBMC's unit, known as the NICU, after being born about a month early.

Fans of all ages headed to Mercy Medical Center on Sunday for a rare opportunity to hold the bat used by baseball legend and Baltimore native Babe Ruth during his historic season in 1927, when he set the single-season home run record. Partnering with Mercy Medical Center, the Babe Ruth Birthplace Foundation and Museum offered fans the opportunity to hold a piece of sports history to commemorate Ruth's Feb. 6 birthday. He would have been 116 years old. In the first public display of the record-setting bat — which has been kept in the private archives of the Babe Ruth museum — baseball fans put on protective gloves and struck their most exemplary batting poses, emulating the cutout of Ruth that served as a backdrop for souvenir photographs that fans could have taken for a $10 donation to Mercy's neonatal intensive care unit.

Stories of life and death told against a background of hospital gowns, fluorescent lights and the worried words of loved ones hoping for the best are nothing new to many Baltimore viewers. Hundreds of thousands tuned in when ABC News took viewers inside Johns Hopkins Hospital on its 2000 documentary series, "Hopkins 24/7," as well as a sequel in 2007. But Baltimore's Mercy Medical Center is the focus this week in a new docu-series, "NICU," premiering at 10 p.m. Thursday July 15 on the Discovery Health cable channel.

The first time Colin and Andrew Prazak came to the University of Maryland Medical Center, they hadn't even been born. The twins were delivered there seven weeks' premature, said their mother, Angela Prazak of Northeast Baltimore. On Sunday, they returned to the hospital for a reunion at Maryland's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a day to share stories and celebrate overcoming the anxiety that accompanied the arrivals of the roomful of children, accompanied by their parents, some grandparents and siblings.

EVERY NINE weeks during the school year, pupils in Peg Dear's seventh-grade home economics class at Harper's Choice Middle School make a delivery to Howard County General Hospital. Each quarter, they donate about 25 quilts they have made in class to infants in the hospital's Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). "The parents love having these quilts for the babies," said Debbie Fleischmann, nurse manager for the unit. "The staff likes them because it helps us create a more homey atmosphere in the unit, to balance some of the impersonal sorts of things that they see."

Myrtle M. Watson, an Army nurse whose indelible memories of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor remained with her for the rest of her life, died Feb. 11 of vascular disease at Oak Crest Village. The Northeast Baltimore resident was 98. Early in the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Mrs. Watson was busy working her first solo weekend assignment in the orthopedic ward at Schofield Hospital near Pearl Harbor, which was short-staffed because it was a weekend. She began pushing bedridden men out to a second-story lanai so they could take in a barefoot inter-regimental football game that was to be played on the hospital lawn.

LaQuasha Singletary was having a normal pregnancy until the day her blood pressure shot up and her vision blurred. The Pikesville woman was rushed to Sinai Hospital, where she delivered a 2-pound, 8-ounce baby boy named Caleb Lyles 10 weeks sooner than expected. Caleb's early delivery left him vulnerable to necrotizing intestinal disorder, a potentially deadly disease common in premature babies whose digestive systems aren't fully developed. Studies show feeding with breast milk exclusively reduces babies chances of getting the disease.

For Sean Hearn, there was no better way to spend Father's Day than sweating through a hilly 5K road race in Towson, pushing sons Shane and Wyatt in a double-wide stroller. A little more than four years ago, Shane spent 10 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at Greater Baltimore Medical Center before going home to Hunt Valley on Mother's Day. "As he laid in the NICU, I made lots of promises, and one was to participate in this," Hearn said shortly after finishing GBMC's 25th annual Fathers Day 5K race.