While protests in cities across the nation continued following the death of George Floyd on May 31, 2020, a pregnant Meghan Buck was undergoing a surgery to give her identical twin sons Elliott and Owen a better chance for survival. Unfortunately, Elliott died six weeks later in utero.
“I sat in that hospital bed by myself every day during a pandemic and tried to just keep cooking my surviving baby. We made it to 27 weeks and one day,” she said.
Owen, the surviving twin, was in the neonatal intensive care unit for 81 days after he was delivered via an emergency cesarean section. He was 2 pounds, 1 ounce. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, parents’ time with their babies was limited. Buck and her husband didn’t get to see Owen together, as a family, until they walked out of Advocate Children’s Hospital-Park Ridge with him.
“COVID made a terrible situation worse,” she said. “You wore your mask in the NICU and wanted to because you didn’t even want to risk it. So, I would sit there and get dehydrated, because I didn’t even want to risk taking down my mask to drink my bottle of water.”
Buck said that if there had been a room, a private family room where she could have gone to cry or be by herself to freak out, it really would have made a difference.
By spring 2022, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland & Northwest Indiana is expanding to two more locations — inside Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital and Advocate Children’s Hospital-Park Ridge through the opening of a new Ronald McDonald House and Ronald McDonald Family Room, respectively.
The $4.5 million endeavor will provide services to both traveling and local families whose children are receiving critical medical care; the space will be steps away from the neonatal intensive care unit in each facility. The Prentice location will be a 2,000-square-foot space that will have five private sleep rooms, two shared bathrooms and other hospitality services. The Ronald McDonald Family Room in Advocate Children’s Hospital-Park Ridge will provide four private sleeping rooms with en suite bathrooms, as well as other hospitality services.
“We’ve got moms and dads that don’t really have any place to go besides bedside on that unit, so the beauty of being able to add a Ronald McDonald House environment … for families to step away a bit, have a cup of coffee, grab something to eat, take a nap and just get away from the beeping machines and the intensity of the unit to take a break is a great gift,” said Holly Buckendahl, CEO, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana.
With the new in-hospital additions, there will be a total of 10 Ronald McDonald Houses and family rooms in the area, according to Buckendahl. She said the two new sites combined will enable the organization to serve an additional 40,000 individuals and have overnight lodging accommodations for 2,700 parents of critically ill children each year.
“Part of that becomes families getting to know other families in those spaces and sharing stories and finding support in the milieu of the environment,” Buckendahl said.
“I’ve heard stories that normal NICU families develop great bonds and friendships because of what you go through together. There was none of that because of COVID, no community,” Buck said. “There was no safe space for me to go. I know the pandemic dictated our time and our experience there, but even post-pandemic it is so important, especially for new mothers who are recovering from very traumatic circumstances — not to mention all of the physical stuff your body goes through — to have a safe, special place to just take a beat sometimes. I just want somebody else who has a traumatic experience like me to have the benefit of that.”
Born July 23, 2020, Owen came home on oxygen Oct. 13. He’s been off oxygen since December, Buck said, and now weighs about 16 pounds. You can hear the smile in her voice when she talks about him.
“He is such a good baby. He sleeps through the night,” she said. “Just this week he started to really talk a lot. I’m hoping that he sits up later this month. He has no idea how he came to be and what our world looks like, but he smiles all day long.”