Nursing News:
Nurse creates mementos in effort to reach out to grieving parents

By BRUCE A. SCRUTON

Decorated with Winnie the Pooh, or simple blue or pink color schemes, Memory Boxes are filled with keepsakes for parents who lost their babies before they had a chance to create a history.

A sample box sits on a table at Albany (NY) Medical Center Hospital. Many items in the box are things that parents who leave the hospital with their newborns take for granted: a teddy bear; hand - and footprints; a mother-child necklace set; pictures of the child.

Sitting at the table is Lesley Gorny-Hornbeck who helps assemble the boxes. "I wish someone had done something like this for me," said Gorny-Hornbeck, a nurse in The Birth Place, once known as the maternity ward, at Albany Med.

Gorny-Hornbeck has lost two babies - Cailin, victim of a cord accident right before birth, and an early term miscarriage. Sitting on her lap during the interview is her daughter, Erin, 8 months old.

Gorny-Hornbeck and Jean Rowe, another nurse on the ward, assemble the boxes and help prepare the nurses, doctors and others in The Birth Place to help with the inevitable tragedies.

Because it is a trauma center and handles the highest number of high-risk pregnancies in the region, Albany Med gets about 200 cases a year of stillborn births, miscarriages or babies who die shortly after birth. Nationally, about 15 percent of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, defined as a fetal death before 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The Memory Box project has grown. After talking with parents and staff, and researching other hospitals' work, the two nurses went into the community. Some of the items are provided by Bridging People and Places, a service organization from Saratoga Springs.

The necklaces of colored beads are created by a woman who also lost a child. As can be expected, reactions to a stillbirth or miscarriage vary. Some families are grateful to have memories, some reject any notion of keeping things, Gorny-Hornbeck noted.

"At some point in time, people often come back, asking for stuff," she said. That's why most of the Memory Box items are kept for a time. "We're trying to create a history for parents. I feel good about doing it," she said.