Lens Family Presents CuddleCot to The Family Birth Place at Northwest Medical Center - Bentonville
3/3/2020
While you never get over the loss of a baby, one local family wants to provide additional support during that time of loss, learning from their own experience and keeping their son’s memory alive.
A special dedication ceremony took place on Friday for a new CuddleCot system, presented to The Family Birth Place at Northwest Medical Center-Bentonville by the Lens family.
In memory of their infant son and baby brother Caleb, Jill and Josh Lens along with their children Hannah, Gretchen and Brandon donated the special crib in conjunction with non-profit organization Ashlie’s Embrace. The use of CuddleCots allows grieving families whose baby is stillborn or dies shortly after birth the option of spending more time with their baby after their loss. The device's cool temperatures slow the natural changes that occur after death, giving parents and families more time with their children.
The Lens family lost Caleb at 37 weeks gestation on June 19, 2017, about six months before they moved to Fayetteville. Jill and Josh were already parents to two daughters, Hannah, who was five, and Gretchen, who was two. They had been looking forward to their new son and baby brother. His death in utero, just two weeks before Jill’s doctor planned to induce labor, was completely unexpected.
The family has already donated one CuddleCot system to the Texas hospital where Caleb was born, but they weren’t able to do a dedication there since they’d already moved.
“We are excited for our family to be here to be able to do this dedication in Caleb’s memory. We want to try to do whatever we can to help others who may find themselves in a similar circumstance,” Jill said. “And donating a CuddleCot helps keep Caleb with us.”
“We are so grateful to the Lens family,” said Denten Park, CEO for the Northwest Health market. “They are absolutely amazing. Losing a child is incredibly difficult. For the Lens family to seek out opportunities to give other families experiencing such a tragic loss more time to grieve their precious little one is absolutely amazing. We are so blessed to have such caring and wonderful people as part of our community.”
“Nothing brings us more joy than helping a baby enter this world, and nothing brings us more grief than watching our patients walk through loss,” said Dr. Amy Fry, an obstetrician-gynecologist with Northwest Women’s Specialty Group who is on the medical staff of Northwest Medical Center-Bentonville. “We do all we can to support them and offer words of comfort, but they need more than what we as physicians can provide. The gift of time is something precious, and the CuddleCot enables these parents to have more time. It is so commendable that someone has given this gift born out of their own experienced grief. We are so proud that our facility will be able to give bereaved parents more time with their child.”
Jill’s Story
Now a law professor at the University of Arkansas, Jill said it had been a normal pregnancy so she wasn’t particularly concerned when she woke up one night with some discomfort. “I just thought Caleb was sticking his butt up into my ribs like he’d been doing.”
What Jill and Josh didn’t know was that Jill was experiencing a placental abruption, though without the pain and bleeding most women have. In an abruption, the placenta detaches from the uterus, depriving the baby of oxygen.
“Because my brother was in town and could stay with the girls, we went to the hospital. They couldn’t find Caleb’s heart beat and that started the awfulness of that night. At 5:30 am that morning, the doctor told us what we already knew – that Caleb had died…
“My labor started naturally (shortly after the official diagnosis). I was bleeding internally and in a bad state, so my doctor sedated me. I don’t remember a lot of Caleb’s birth. But my husband witnessed it all.
“We didn’t expect this and didn’t know what to do after Caleb was born. The doctor told my husband that we’ll want to hold him and be with him. So we spent several hours with him (6-8 hours). One problem I had was that because of the sedation I had to keep telling myself to wake up because that was all the time I was ever going to have with Caleb.
“Josh and I both held Caleb and I was able to experience skin to skin contact. It’s something I’m so grateful I did because I did that with my girls. It was maternal… it was what I was supposed to be doing with my baby. It was the saddest day of my life, but one of the happiest too because I got to hold him. Josh and I spent the day with Caleb and had a priest come in a do a blessing. We also planned his funeral. Now we want to try to do whatever we can to help others who may find themselves in a similar circumstance. We hope that no one ever loses a child to stillbirth like we did, but we are also aware that it does happen. A CuddleCot can help those parents by giving them more time with their child. It’s still not enough time, but it will help.
The whole family attended Friday’s dedication ceremony, including Hannah, now seven, and Gretchen, now four, as well as baby brother Brandon, born ten months ago.
About Ashlie’s Embrace
Ashlie's Embrace provides comfort to grieving parents after stillbirth or early infant loss by increasing awareness of CuddleCots™ and making them available to parents through medical facilities. For more information, visit AshliesEmbrace.org.
Visit Northwest Health's Facebook page to see more photos of the family.
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