A new baby should come home to lullabies. When they arrive in intensive care instead, music therapy means the lullabies come to them.
In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Noah's Ark Children's Hospital in Wales, your support funded music therapy sessions that bring calm, connection and comfort to babies and their families.
The NICU is unlike anywhere else.
Alarms. Fluorescent lights. The constant, necessary hum of machines keeping tiny babies alive. Parents who’ve barely slept, sitting beside incubators, holding the hand of a baby they longed for, frightened in a way they did not know fear could feel.
Into that environment, every week, comes music.
Not recorded. Not played from a phone. Live music, played by a specialist therapist who listens first to the rhythm of a baby's breathing, the sounds they make, the pace of their world. And then she builds the music around them.
Baby Kendra is Rebecca and Alexis's third baby. Her older siblings were born overdue after uncomplicated pregnancies. Kendra's arrival was very different.
Rebecca's waters broke at almost 30 weeks. She was rushed first to Bridgend, then to Bath, the nearest place with a NICU bed for a baby so small. Kendra was born at 31 weeks and 2 days. Within a week, she had been transferred back to Bridgend. But when attempts were made to move her onto lower breathing support, her progress faltered. Tests revealed she had two congenital heart defects requiring open heart surgery in Bristol. The operation lasted eight hours. Then came the intensive care unit, and over a week of anxious waiting before Kendra was well enough to come off the ventilator.
Then another blow. As a consequence of her body working so hard to compensate for her heart, Kendra had developed chronic lung disease. Weeks more apart, while her breathing improved.
Within the first few weeks of her life, Kendra had been a patient in neonatal intensive care units in Bath, Cardiff, and Bridgend, and in the paediatric intensive care unit in Bristol. She had barely known anything except clinical settings. Beeps. Alarms. The sounds of machines.
Rebecca says:
"It's the small and the big things that hit you, from choosing how and what you feed your baby to introducing them to family and friends. There were things I took for granted with my other children, like going to a baby group or just taking them out for a walk in the pram, that I haven't been able to do with Kendra. There are parts of being a mum that are taken away from you while you're in hospital and that's really hard."
And then music therapy arrived.
"When we were first offered music therapy here at Noah's Ark, I didn't think much of it, but it turned out to be the most lovely experience. Kendra was a bit apprehensive at first but now I can see her visibly relaxing during the sessions. She becomes very alert and watches music therapist Becca's every move. She's even started reaching out for the instruments she likes best."
"It's amazing to watch her really enjoy something after all she's been through. Witnessing that impacts on my happiness too, so it's like therapy for us both. Kendra has only really lived in a clinical setting, so instead of hearing the sound of her siblings playing, she's heard beeps and alarms. The music therapy sessions somehow take us away from that for a while. They give us time to bond and just be a mum and her baby enjoying something together. During a stressful and difficult time, it's given us both happiness."
Rebecca, Kendra's mum
The therapist responds. She follows the baby's lead and creates something that meets them exactly where they are.
"We have loved our visits from the music therapist. She tunes into the children's breath to lead the music."
Parent, Noah's Ark NICU
Even the smallest, most fragile patients respond. Their bodies soften. Their breathing settles.
100% of NICU staff agreed that music therapy sessions are valuable to the families they work with.
For a parent in the NICU, the arrival of a music therapist is the arrival of something human in a world that can feel overwhelmingly clinical.
Your support makes that possible.
