Former Nurse Returns to Welcome Great-Grandchildren at 94

Ruth Kotschenreuther doesn’t even recognize the space where she is visiting her two-and-a-half-week-old great-grandsons as the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) from which she retired almost 40 years ago.

“This was a newborn nursery when I came to GBMC in 1968. I worked nights mostly,” Kotschenreuther said. “We transferred all our sick babies and it got to the point where it was very difficult for the mothers to be here and their babies at another hospital, so we gradually got isolettes and oxygen and Dr. Melchijah Spragins (GBMC’s first Chief of Pediatrics) started building a large room: a NICU.”

The current NICU at GBMC is a 22-bed Level III provider of complex and compassionate medical and general pediatric surgical care for about 400 babies annually that are born too small, too sick or too soon. When Kotschenreuther retired in 1985, the NICU at GBMC had just received its Level II designation. She returned in June 2023 to visit her great-grandsons—twins receiving care in GBMC’s NICU.

“I wouldn’t know my way around here now. It’s completely different,” she said.

In 2018, GBMC opened a brand new NICU, featuring 10 single rooms and three doubles, for multiples. The new unit was designed with patients and family in mind. With each room featuring a Kangaroo Chair, designed for parents to sleep in, while also promoting breastfeeding and skin to skin contact, both vital for development. The new space is quiet, with soft lighting and space for families to have privacy while the nursing team is able to continue their work.

There is also a specialty care unit where babies can be transferred when they are improving, but not quite ready to be discharged. That’s where Noah Lintz and Rebecca Kotschenreuther now visit their sons, AJ and KJ. While hundreds of participants race to the finish on the other side of GBMC’s campus for GBMC’s 35th annual Father’s Day 5K and 1-mile Walk that benefits the NICU, they hope to be taking their twins home for the first time. But it’s been a road to get here.

“I came in on a Tuesday because I had high blood pressure and they said, ‘it’s delivery time!’ They shocked us by coming so early. I was due July 7, but they were born on May 23,” Kotschenreuther said. Everybody in this NICU has been amazing. I’m excited to go home but I’m going to miss it.”

There are countless stories of parents who have mixed emotions about their time in the NICU, equal parts gratitude for the care they received and relief that they can go home and start their lives together as a family.

The Father’s Day 5K holds space for both emotions—supporting the team and their compassionate, quality care, but also offering families a chance to revisit the place they called home for often many weeks. They reconnect with staff, meet other families like them and get a chance to remember the positive parts of a stressful period of time.

It also honors those who blazed the trail, like Ruth Kotschenreuther, and celebrates the generations of a family GBMC has been able to witness and care for.

Register for this year's Father's Day 5K today.