Cassidy: I'm Cassidy Miller and I'm from Marriott, Ohio.
I have my son Hunter Miller, he was born at 28 weeks.
We've been here at Nationwide Children's Hospital for eight and half months.
In the midst of all this, my husband has been deployed.
He left us about five weeks after Hunter was born.
Cassidy: I've heard of The Sounds of Love thru Nationwide Children's, they plays choirs
and meet everybody's parent mail box here at the NICU and listed the details that you
can record a cd for your child.
I'm Going to sing you some more songs, how about rock a by baby?
[Mom singing Rock a By Baby]
Suzanne: Good morning, how's Hunter doing?
I'm Susan Lynch and I'm the clinical director of CCBPD.
BPD stand for Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia and it's a form of chronic lung disease that affects
premature infants.
Sounds of Love program was started at Nationwide Children's seven years ago by one of our music
therapist and it continuous to be run by our parent advisory team here in our ICU's, and
it allows the family to record with their own voice, either reading books or singing
lullabies so their babies can have their family's voices near their cribs for up to four hours
a day.
[Record Plays: Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away so he said to his mother}
Susan: Some studies have shown a calming effect on the baby, on their heart rate, on their
ability to have good oxygen saturations, which is a measure of their stability.
It also shown benefits for parents' visitation and bonding, and it allows the parents to
have a sense of contributing to the baby's care on the daily basis.
We will be studying the effects of our Sounds of Love program.
So we're hoping that we were able to show that our babies have a reduce length of stay
due to this program.
The Nationwide Children's has one of the largest neonatal systems in the country and we would
like to expand our program to include all the nurseries in the Nationwide Neonatal System.
Cassidy: Hunter is taken to my husband's voice since he was about a day old.
Having that Sounds of Love and Hunter being able to hear dad's voice while he's deployed
and gone, I think comforts Hunter.
I think with this cd I have noticed that it calms him, it suites him, when he gets upset
and cries, we talk to him or sing to him, he really settles down.
And I'm very glad that Nationwide Children's has offered something like this to us.
It's been a life saver to me, to know that Hunter can still hear dad's voice while he's
not here.