NEW YORK Teen gives hope to parents of preemies

Dennis March volunteers in the ward where he was born at less than 3 pounds.
By DONALD P. MYERS
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Weighing 2 pounds, 10 ounces, Dennis William March was born on a winter Sunday night 19 years ago, a premature baby with virtually no lungs. "He looked like this scrawny little chicken," his mother says now. "They gave him 72 hours to either make it or die."
The infant, tiny enough to fit into his father's hand, suffered from an often-fatal condition called respiratory distress syndrome: He could not breathe.
Nurses in the neonatal intensive-care unit at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island rushed the baby onto a mechanical ventilator to keep him alive.
And then everybody waited. That's all they could do. Within a couple of days, the baby born 10 weeks prematurely had lost 7 ounces, but he battled on.
"This was our firstborn, and we were scared to death," the mother, JoAnne March of Lake Grove, N.Y., said recently.
He made it, thanks to the constant care of Donna McCarthy, Carol Feldman and the other nurses and hospital staff. After seven weeks he weighed 4 pounds, 8 ounces, and his mother and father took him home.
Success story
Dennis March returns now to the same intensive-care unit where he spent the first weeks of his life. He volunteers every two months, talking with parents of "preemies," showing them that their babies can make it through troubled times and grow up normal, just as he did.
"If it wasn't for this unit, I wouldn't be here," said March, a 2002 graduate of Sachem High School in Ronkonkoma and now a student at Suffolk Community College. "When I volunteer, I'm there for the parents whose babies look just like I did. When they see me, they know there's hope."
Since her son was 3, JoAnne March has also volunteered at the neonatal unit, telling parents what she went through. She is a member of the Little Angel Fund, a nonprofit parental-support organization established at the Stony Brook hospital a month after her son was born. It was started by the parents of a girl born 16 weeks prematurely, who, after a 33-day struggle, died.
As part of her volunteer work, JoAnne March, 47, gives gifts to today's newborns, including handmade hats and booties. Every Father's Day, her husband, Danny, 48, returns to support other fathers worried about their newborns in the hospital.
"They came through for us, and this is our way of giving back," the mother said. "When you're a parent sitting in front of an incubator and looking at this chicken baby, you just can't imagine how he's going to grow up and be normal. For the parents, my son is a success story, a showpiece, a light at the end of the tunnel."
Statistics
Of the 250,000 babies born prematurely every year in this country, up to 50,000 suffer from respiratory distress syndrome, which at the time the Marches' baby was born, killed about 5,000. In 1963, a baby born to President and Mrs. Kennedy died of the condition.
Six years after Dennis March was born, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a lung-developing drug called surfactant, which now saves thousands of premature infants' lives.
When JoAnne and Danny March brought their son home 19 years ago, they propped him up on the sofa next to a tan teddy bear, 15 inches tall, and snapped a photo to show how tiny their son was. The bear was bigger than the boy.
"I'm here to tell you," the college student and rock-star wannabe says now, "I'm bigger than the bear."
Even tinier
Many of the premature babies in the neonatal intensive-care unit are a lot smaller than Dennis March was. The nurses there sometimes care for 50 babies at a time. Some are as small as 12 ounces.
For the parents of a preemie that small, hope is hard to hold onto. Their babies have no meat on their bones. Their ribs protrude. Their blue veins stand out.
"Some of the babies don't make it," said Donna McCarthy, 48, a registered nurse who helped care for Dennis March in 1984 and still works in the neonatal unit. "It's a very sad time for the family. We try to help them through it. I don't mean to toot our own horn, but we're a very caring bunch."
Carol Feldman, 44, also was one of Dennis March's primary nurses and still works in the unit. "To see the babies grow and go home, that's the payoff, knowing we had something to do with that," she said.
A normal kid
JoAnne March and her husband, a wine and liquor salesman, have two other children, Annie, 8, and A.J., 15, who was born a month premature.
Dennis grew up normal despite his parents' fears, from 2 pounds, 10 ounces to his current 5-foot-11 and 135 pounds. He works at an auto parts store. His passions are playing his guitar and driving his 1996 Thunderbird.
"All the things that parents of teenagers pull out their hair about, we've got it," Dennis March's mother said, laughing. "He's typical in every way, and that's exactly what we prayed for 19 years ago in the intensive-care unit. So now, when he drives too fast and stays out late, we rethink that. You've just got to be careful what you pray for."