When Laura and Angela met, they were both, separately, going through the toughest experience of their lives. But their blossoming friendship quickly ensured that they wouldn’t have to go it alone anymore.
Both women were spending their days in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) of the Tufts Floating Hospital in Boston. Both had delivered premature baby boys: Kellan (Laura’s at 25 weeks) and Kyle (Angela’s at 29 weeks). Premature infants, like as we saw in the case of the 'rescue hug', usually need a lot of extra medical support before they’re ready to leave the hospital.
The women describe their bond as almost instantaneous. “I need some support,” remembers Laura, “and nobody else is going to understand besides that woman that’s sitting right next to me.”
They started out as two worried moms staring at individual incubators, but quickly came to rely on one another for support throughout the process of nursing their tiny baby boys to health. Kellan was in particular danger at first, barely weighing more than Lenny, the one-pound baby born four months too soon.
Now, 18 years later, the women are still best friends — in fact, they’re practically family. Their boys Kellan and Kyle, now healthy young men, were raised as brothers, and grew up calling the other’s mom"Auntie."
Laura and Angela shared vacations, holidays, and birthdays, building almost twenty years of friendship out of the illness and recovery of their little boys, and now their sons are carrying on the tradition. We hope that there are many more years of friendship to come!
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