Bo Wheeler, who’s a pilot, came home late from a work trip on Dec. 10, 2023. He remembers sleeping late the next day, waking up to watch the Bears beat the Detroit Lions. That’s when things took a bad turn for him and his wife Roz, who were expecting twins.
That evening, the discomfort Roz Skozen Wheeler had been feeling turned into pain. They called her OB-GYN and headed to Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital. It was 28 weeks into her pregnancy, 12 weeks before her due date.
Her doctors tried but were unable to delay labor to give the twin babies’ lungs more time to develop.
So Roz and Bo Wheeler were about to become parents much sooner than expected.
Bo Wheeler describes the births of twins Max and Vivi this way: “You’re in this crazy situation that is like a car crash. You didn’t expect to be here. You didn’t wake up thinking that this was going to happen this morning. And now you’re thrust into it.”
The twins were born by emergency C-section — Max, weighing 2 pounds, then his sister Vivi at 2 pounds, 4 ounces.
Besides the health of the tiny babies, the doctors were worried about Roz Wheeler. She had preeclampsia, a serious pregnancy complication. They needed to get her blood pressure under control.
After the delivery, Wheeler could only look on as his wife and babies were whisked away for treatment.
“Everyone you know and love is in a very precarious situation, and it’s on you to kind of keep it together,” he says. “You don’t have anyone to share that with because they’re all in a much worse state. So you can’t complain.”
A rare program to help fathers
When people think about pregnancy and the joys and excitement that come with it, they don’t expect their child to end up in a neonatal intensive-care unit, as Max and Vivi did.
When that happens, doctors’ focus understandably is on the newborns and the mother. They rarely have been trained in even how to talk with the non-birthing parent who, of course, also is experiencing trauma.
Dr. Craig Garfield, a pediatrics professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who’s on staff at Lurie Children’s Hospital, and Dr. Cameron Boyd, a third-year NICU fellow at Northwestern, have seen the stress, anxiety, even depression and post-traumatic stress disorder some of those parents experience.
They say many fathers feel they have to hide their feelings, reasoning that who are they to complain, they weren’t the ones to give birth.
Garfield and Boyd are trying to change that. That’s why they run the NICU Dads’ Group, which, at a recent meeting at Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital, includes fathers whose newborns are in intensive care and “alum dads” like Mike Swain, who has four children, three who were NICU babies. They’re now older and doing great. But he’s there to talk about his experiences and offer advice.
“I had a lot of dark nights, not knowing where to go, and I had nobody to talk to,” Swain tells the new dads, urging them to “make some friends in this unwanted fraternity that you’ve joined.”
The men listen as other dads tell their stories. Most look worried and tired.
Brandon O’Connor is the first of them to speak up. He is a therapist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He and his wife Hayley Grines have been at the NICU for 16 days. Their twins Sonny and Felix were born at 31 weeks. Felix was 2 pounds at birth. Sonny was 3 pounds. They were placed on ventilators and were unable to eat on their own.
O’Connor has just found out Sonny had bleeding in his brain. The doctors and nurses talked with him about the medical procedures and treatment he would need.
“I’m trying to be the supportive person rather than the one sort of freaking out about everything, navigating all the people who are checking in on updates on our kids,” O’Connor is saying. “Also trying not to put that burden on my wife, who’s doing her own processing of everything.”
A photo that Brandon O’Connor posted in his “Sonny & Felix NICU Updates” blog that he used to keep family and friends informed. He wrote with this photo “Major update: Felix just woke up and played with us for what feels like the first time. He was responding to our voices and playing with our fingers and smiling. We melted, obviously. He was being so incredibly cute and interactive. Pictures can’t do it justice, but here’s an attempt.”
‘Dads are kind of left to sit there’
Garfield started the NICU Dads’ Group six years ago. Those who join often downplay their experiences and feelings. He and Boyd say the support group helps them process what they are going through. It’s important, they say, to offer this support because the training that doctors receive and the entire prenatal process centers around mother and baby and that, when there is a problem at birth, the attention understandably focuses on the mother and child but often no one is really there for the non-birthing parent.
“In some situations, moms are under medication, so they may not even be fully aware of what’s going on, and dads are kind of left to sit there and literally watch and hear and see,” Boyd says. “They often see these emergent cases with the mom and baby visually, and I think that creates a trauma within itself.”
Garfield and Boyd want the dads to be supported and equipped with the resources they need to take care of not only their babies but also themselves. And not just when a baby is in an NICU but also after going home because being discharged from the hospital doesn’t make the stress and anxiety magically go away.
Garfield says that, in his research, he has found that stress can affect fathers as much or even more than it does mothers. In a recent study, he found that dads’ stress levels while their babies are in the NICU are as high as moms’ and that, once the families are home, the moms’ stress level typically is lessened but often the dads’ stress level stays the same or even gets worse.
Part of that, he says, is because at home the parents no longer have a medical staff at hand. Also, for fathers, there’s the stress of trying to help with the baby and possibly take care of the mom even as they might have gone back to work and now have the medical bills to worry about.
“We work with men who may put a very stoic face on, who may say, ‘No problems, no questions,’ but, in reality, they do have questions, and they do have problems,” Garfield says. “Oftentimes, you wouldn’t know that by just looking at a dad. But, if you scratch the surface, many of them are going through a lot.”
‘I’m trying to support her’
The dads group discussions start with basic questions. What happened? How are mom and baby doing?
Then, the doctors ask the dads, one by one: How are you doing?
Most of the men struggle with that.
“I don’t know,” O’Connor says. “I’m not, like, good. I’m not, like, my best self. I’m going to work, you know. I’m at the VA. It’s really stressful.”
O’Connor says his friends and family keep wanting updates. He’s thinking about all of the people who rely on him in his personal life and at work. Then, he turns back to himself.
“I don’t know,” he says of how he’s doing. “I’m fine. I’m trying to support her. It’s very public that my kids are in the NICU. And I started a blog so we didn’t have to update everyone. So that is both nice that people care but also exhausting. So I’m just tired, I guess.”
O’Connor says the twins, just over a month old, are showing progress, getting stronger, and the support group is helping him, that he recommends it for any dad going through this.
“I found that it was really relieving to hear the other dads having experienced very similar things that we went through and then in the ways that they differ,” O’Connor says.
Dads who join the group while their babies are in NICU can stay on as alum dads. That’s what Bo Wheeler chose to do. He wants to help others the way the support group helped him 15 months ago while he and his wife stayed in the NICU for 118 days.
Wheeler says that, every time he tells his story, even though he’s reliving all of the bad parts, the hurt isn’t gone but now feels lighter.
He says his twins continue to face challenges but have shown remarkable progress, and the family is adjusting to life post-NICU.
He tells the new dads what it felt like for him at first and offers some advice.
“I felt like the joy of having kids was stolen from me. These were my first kids. I came into trauma and scary, and everything was awful for a very, very long time. It felt like it was never going to end. We never got the chance to celebrate that we had kids.
“So I would suggest: The day you know you’re gonna be released, go out and celebrate the fact that you guys are parents.”