Our Members - Their Stories
The Power of talk
10 Sep 2024
By Nathan Hart
Our daughter was born prematurely and spent eight weeks in NICU and SCBU – but we were just relieved she was alive.
The Dad Pod podcast episode details our journey to this point for friends, family and anybody else living with Cerebral Palsy to hear.
My wife (Hannah) and I knew that our daughter would live with Cerebral Palsy early in her life, but we made the difficult choice to keep it quiet telling just our immediate family, information we shared only with key people for many years.
We didn’t want to put her in a box, instead approaching this challenge with an optimistic outlook.
Why? We assessed the information during our appointments with medical professionals and specialists and decided to focus on our daughter’s milestones (or inch-stones as is more the case) without the ‘noise’ of people heaping sympathy on us.
The reality of having a child that had been born with unseen imperfections was emotionally difficult, and all brand new to us so we had to learn fast.
There was still much to work towards and achieve, especially in those formative 1,000 days, so we chose to focus on working for our daughter’s development.
The big goal was getting her standing and walking on her own.
At 6 years and 4 months of age, she finally did it.
So, when I was asked by my friend and former colleague Bryce Casey from The Rock’s Morning Rumble radio show (also a parent of a NICU premmie) to tell our story on his Dad Pod podcast, we felt like it was time to talk and celebrate our daughter and our achievement as parents.
Parenting is difficult, but we hope you can take encouragement or helpful information from hearing our journey.
You can listen to Nathan on the Dad Pod here:
Rova: www.tinyurl.com/bddx779x
Apple: www.tinyurl.com/4jwdk48f
Spotify: www.tinyurl.com/57ax8ttk
* Nathan is also the Executive Producer/Researcher for The Cerebral Palsy Podcast. You can read more about it here.
This article was originally published in the September 2024 edition of The Review magazine.
For more information:
Melanie Louden
Communications Manager
melanie@cpsociety.org.nz
Mobile: 022 087 819
