Corewell Health celebrates NICU’s 50th anniversary

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — It’s an exciting month for Corewell Health as the health care system celebrates the 50th anniversary of its neonatal intensive care unit, the first to open in West Michigan.

“When I started there was, I don’t even know that we counted beds, but there were maybe 30 spaces,” said Vicki Cook, who has been a NICU nurse at Corewell Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids.

Now, the Gerber Foundation Neonatal Center is a level IV, 108-bed regional NICU that annually admits more than 1,200 babies from 38 counties in Michigan.

“It’s just grown size-wise, staff-wise, and technology has changed so much,” Cook said. “Stuff that we thought was the best for kids 40 years ago, we found out it’s not, it wasn’t good, but it was the best we knew. So things have totally changed.”

It’s now one of few neonatal centers in the country to have a designated space for micropreemies.

“It’s amazing that the viability of babies, like 28 weeks or so when I started (decades ago), we didn’t basically do anything for. We’ve learned so much,” Cook said. “Now 28-weekers, they’re even too old for our small baby unit. Now it’s the 22-weekers.”

Cook is a major part of the unit’s history. She attended school back when Butterworth Hospital offered a nursing program and began working weekends at the hospital as she completed her education.

“I got assigned in NICU and I loved it and I’ve just stayed,” Cook explained.

After 45 years with the hospital, she’s the longest-standing NICU nurse at Helen DeVos.

“I guess I never realized when I started that it was so new, that it was a new field. But it’s been really neat to watch Dr. (Leonard) Radecki, who started the unit, and still, we get together with people who have worked in the unit. I get together once a month with people who still work here and people who have been retired or gone for 30 years and reminisce,” Cook said.

She doesn’t remember what exactly led her to this career.

“I just knew in high school that I wanted to be a nurse, and I don’t know why,” she said.

Four and a half decades later, she knows it’s exactly where she was meant to be.

“It makes you have a perspective on how lucky, how fortunate you have been in your own life … thinking about what you’re giving these babies … a chance at life,” she said.

The 50th anniversary celebration has led Cook to reflect on her own career and the people she has learned from along the way.

“Our unit has been very progressive and everything’s based on evidence-based practice and when you go to conferences and stuff, you realize how progressive we are. Most of the things that people are learning about, we’re already doing, so we’ve been lucky to have leadership that for being in Grand Rapids, that we are a very progressive unit,” Cook said.

Though the job can be physically and emotionally taxing, Cook said it’s well worth the reward.

“Think the biggest thing is the families that come back years later. Or even now, I’m seeing second-generation kids that I took care of that have kids in the unit,” Cook said. “I had a lady chase me down in Meijer a couple weeks ago, has a 15-year-old, that recognized me. I still have a family that I took care of their twins 35 years ago; well, more than 35 years ago … 1985, that the twins were here for almost a year and both died and that mom still texts me at least once a month.”

Cook said it’s those lasting relationships with families and colleagues that she’ll forever cherish.

“Kind of feels like that was my mission in life,” Cook reflected. “It’s very fulfilling and it just is like my purpose.”

Cook plans to retire in January, but said she already has plans to volunteer at the hospital, making tiny holiday outfits for NICU babies .

Corewell Health plans to host a birthday-themed reunion for its NICU graduates on Sept. 14.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WOODTV.com.