WalkAmerica - 2002

Preemies step out for March of Dimes
 
By Tim Smith

The usual image of a premature baby isn't very pretty. Inside a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit there are incubators inhabited by frail-looking infants, tethered to ventilators, tubes and monitors.

Parents are waiting nearby, counting the hours, days and maybe weeks before they can actually hold their loved one. Hard-working, attentive primary care nurses are not far away, caring for these tiny fighters as they battle to eventually breathe on their own, open their eyes and be freed from the lifelines made necessary because of being born far too soon.

But as is underscored by the March of Dimes, which for this year's WalkAmerica is using "Be a Hero for the Tiniest Babies" as its theme, quite a welcome fight is being waged to alter that image.

Walks on Saturday in Plymouth and next Sunday in Troy, Detroit and at Metro Beach (all beginning at 9 a.m.) will be populated with the usual walk teams. There will be teams from corporations, health-care groups and volunteer-minded folks who just want to do their part to help March of Dimes raise research money to reduce problem pregnancies and enhance the health of all babies.

But given this year's walk focus, a very fitting team will get together at Hines Park in Plymouth: 20 former preemies and their families, who make up the Preemie Stars.

Among those families will be the Blackers of Livonia, whose children Katie and Danny have served as regional ambassadors for WalkAmerica since the mid-1990s. My daughter, Elizabeth (born at 1 lb. 14 oz. at 25-weeks gestation in 1994), also will help put face and a smile on the proceedings.

Admirable as it is, it's one thing for Compuware or Little Caesars employees to collect pledges, wear T-shirts and take on the walk route. It's another, according to Laurie Blacker, for actual beneficiaries of March of Dimes research to get out there, too.

With the Preemie Stars, believed to be the only walk team of preemies, that mission becomes "much more personal," she added.

Tim Smith is a staff writer for the Observer and Eccentric Newspapers. He also is author of "Miracle Birth Stories of Very Premature Babies - Little Thumbs Up!" which features the Preemie Stars. He can be reached at (248) 901-2589.