Profile
by Lisa Hezmalhalch
"I thought, what can I do to be around babies, even though they're not mine?"
--Coach Lois Vos
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Coach Vos Visits, Holds Needy Infants Weekly
Coach Vos makes notes in her gradebook at volleyball P.E.
--Lisa Hezmalhalch, photo
After a day of teaching at Multnomah Bible College in the athletics department, Coach Lois Vos spends four hours each Wednesday night holding babies in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit.
She volunteers her time holding babies with eating and/or oxygen problems. On a typical night, Coach Vos enters the unit and uses a phone on the wall to call a nurse in the unit for permission to enter.
OK'd by the nurse, Coach Vos enters through the first set of doors and scrubs to remove germs.
"If I'm not healthy, I can't go in. They don't want us giving anything to these little munchkins that they don't already have," Coach Vos said.
After signing in, she is ready to enter the neonatal intensive care unit.
Coach Vos began holding babies at Legacy Emanuel six years ago. The idea came to her while she pondered her unmarried and childless state.
"It's kind of a bummer [not having children]," Coach Vos said. "So I thought, what can I do to be around babies, even though they're not mine?"
The hospital offered to let her work in the pediatrics department, spending time with children who have cancer. But she was afraid of getting too close to them because of the real possibility of losing them to death.
So the hospital referred her to the neonatal intensive care unit. She filled out the proper paperwork, took an open-book test and committed to taking a tuberculosis test every year.
As a volunteer, she had to commit to following employee guidelines and to come in for at least four hours a week. "Sometimes I just stay longer," she said.
Since she began volunteering, Coach Vos has become good friends with the nurses. "A lot of us just call her Coach," Susan Retzer said. Ms. Retzer is a registered nurse who has been working with Coach Vos since January 1999.
"Honest Injun, she remembers different issues we're having and asks us about them," Ms. Retzer said. "She's like a counselor for us."
"Some nurses really let me be involved," Coach Vos said. "It's awesome. I've built some great relationships there. I have so much respect for the nurses. Their world is very different than mine."
To the left of Coach Vos when she enters the neonatal intensive care unit is the level-three room. The babies there weigh around one pound and aren't held. "Their skin is not ready to be touched yet," Coach Vos said.
The babies in level two, her unit, are referred to as the growers and feeders. They are under trauma, are drug babies, or have other problems.
"I have seen more abnormalities than I ever knew existed," Coach Vos said. Because of hospital confidentiality, she could not give any examples.
Each baby is hooked up to a monitor that sounds an alarm if something goes wrong. The monitors check each baby's heart rate, respiratory rate and saturation rate. Saturation rate measures how well oxygen is saturating the blood and is the alarm that sounds most often.
"Alarms are always going off," she said. "I used to dream about alarms. It can be a very sad place. I pat the under-stress babies but don't wake up the drug babies. If the drug babies are awake, they're crying."
When the babies are awake and crying, "she'll sit and rock them," Ms. Retzer said. "She has a quiet way with the babies; they mold to her and go right to sleep."
The babies in the third level usually stay for four to six months if they survive that long.
On the second level, Coach Vos's level, the babies that survive usually stay for about 16 weeks. "One baby, the size of a pop can, didn't make it," Coach Vos said.
"It's not for everyone," she said. "There are times that I know a baby is getting taken off the respirator, so when the nurses aren't looking, I'll go in and tell the baby about Jesus before it dies."
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