New Lenox’s Silver Cross Hospital provides Will County’s first NICU

NEW LENOX (CBS) — More than 6,800 babies were born in Will County in 2020.

But any of those infants needing intensive care were not treated close by.

The sick newborns had to be moved to other hospitals miles and miles away.

That’s not the case anymore.

Morning Insider Lauren Victory takes us inside Will County’s first neonatal intensive care unit.

Inside Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, baby Brooke needs extra TLC that she wouldn’t have received here if she was born just a few weeks earlier. The hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, only opened at the end of July.

“We came here and I’m like, ‘Oh, well, thank God we came here,” said new mom Stefani DeBenedetti, who planned to deliver Brooke at Silver Cross but didn’t expect her to need NICU care.

Previously, about 50 Silver Cross-born babies each year that needed special heat-regulated beds and other intensive care equipment had to be transferred to the next closest NICU, likely in Chicago or Peoria. Those parents, from Will County and surrounding areas, would have to travel dozens of miles to see their newborns.  

“I couldn’t even imagine,” said baby Brooke’s dad, Brett Schultz who is from Marseilles, Ill.

Michele Vana can imagine. Her triplets were born months premature in 1995.

“They would be on and off ventilators throughout their stay,” she said. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘We were there for you every day.'”

That meant nine weeks commuting back and forth from her home in Lockport to a NICU in Chicago, usually more than two hours roundtrip.

“When you have a critically-ill child that you barely know because they’re so young, every minute is a gift with them because you don’t know if [you’re going] to have any more,” said Vana.

More than 12,000 babies were admitted to Illinois NICUs in 2019, according to state data. Only 25 facilities in the entire state offered neonatal intensive care in 2019 (the most recent data available).

“Now we can do surgery that we weren’t able to do before,” said Silver Cross NICU medical director Dr. Corryn Greenwood. The new unit is staffed with neonatal experts and equipped for all sorts of care.

“[Before] we could not provide prolonged ventilator (so, that’s a baby on a ventilator or respiratory support) for more than about a day or so,” said Dr. Greenwood, adding her unit can perform special tests now too like an EEG that looks at brain activity.

All these years later, Vana’s experience still affects her so she and her husband made a big donation to help other NICU babies like Brooke and her parents. The new unit is named after Amy, Matthew, and Jay Vana, the Vana triplets.