The NICU, My Sanity, And The Wild History Of The Coney Island Baby

3:17 AM. St. Jude's NICU. November.

I was wearing my husband Dave's oversized grey hoodie that smelled distinctly like stale Dunkin Donuts and absolute panic, just sitting there staring at the translucent skin of my son Leo's tiny chest rising and falling inside his plastic box. The monitor kept doing that double-beep thing that sends your heart straight up into your throat, and Brenda, the night nurse with the faded Snoopy scrubs who I'm pretty sure is an actual angel sent from heaven, was trying to convince me to go sleep in the awful vinyl chair in the corner.

I couldn't sleep. Obviously. So I was doom-scrolling on my phone in the dark, which is always a phenomenal idea when you're heavily postpartum and traumatized, and I stumbled down this weird internet rabbit hole about something called a coney island baby.

Like, literally. Babies at Coney Island. Next to the sword swallowers and the bearded ladies and the guys selling questionable hot dogs on the boardwalk.

Apparently, in the early 1900s, hospitals basically just gave up on premature babies. They thought they were "weaklings" and just... left them. But this eccentric European guy named Martin Couney set up an exhibit called "The Infantorium" on the boardwalk. He imported these fancy steel and glass incubators from France, and people would pay 25 cents to walk through and look at the tiny babies. And that admission fee paid for their round-the-clock medical care.

He saved like 6,500 babies this way.

I was sitting there in this sterile, million-dollar spaceship of a hospital room, listening to the hum of the machines keeping my three-pound kid alive, realizing that modern neonatology basically started as a freak show attraction. It completely broke my brain. But it also made me feel weirdly connected to all those terrified mothers a hundred years ago who handed their tiny, fragile infants over to a guy in a top hat just hoping for a miracle.

Body temperature is basically black magic

Our pediatrician, Dr. Miller, who has the exact bedside manner of a very sleepy golden retriever, tried to explain to me why Leo couldn't just wear a normal onesie and a hat like a regular newborn. He drew this messy little diagram on a napkin showing how premature babies have zero brown fat.

Which makes sense when you think about it, but at the time I was just so tired I couldn't process basic physics. At all. I guess Martin Couney knew this in 1903, which is why those French incubators had water boilers and thermostats built into them. Without fat, they just freeze.

When Leo finally hit five pounds and graduated to an open crib, the nurses told us we could bring in our own clothes. Oh god. I wept. I literally stood in the hospital hallway and sobbed into Dave's shoulder because putting clothes on him meant he was becoming a real person and not just a medical patient.

I had brought this Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao. I'm going to be totally honest with you, I bought it originally just because it was a nice gender-neutral sage green color, but it ended up being the only thing that didn't leave angry red marks on his paper-thin skin. It's stupidly soft. Like, buttery soft, with no scratchy tags, and it stretches just enough that we didn't have to contort his fragile little arms to get it on him. We ended up buying six of them. Anyway, the point is, keeping them warm is terrifying because you're constantly paranoid they're either freezing to death or overheating, and I still check his room thermometer like twelve times a night even though he's four years old now.

The germ anxiety that completely ruined my sanity

Okay, so apparently the Coney Island facility was scrubbed spotlessly clean, and the nurses wore these stiff white starched uniforms, and Couney used filtered air to keep the incubators sterile. Which is great. Fabulous for him.

But let me tell you about the utter hell that was my germ anxiety when we finally brought Leo home.

Dr. Miller had casually mentioned that getting RSV for a preemie is a "very serious setback," and I somehow translated that to mean "if a dust mite looks at him wrong, he will perish." I completely lost my mind. I became a total dictator. I made Dave strip down in the garage and shower in the freezing basement bathroom before he was allowed to come upstairs. Every single time he left the house.

My hands were literally bleeding. Just cracked, raw, bleeding knuckles from washing them with antibacterial soap ninety times a day. If a package arrived, I'd wipe it down with bleach like it was radioactive waste. I bought this massive air purifier that sounded like a jet engine taking off in our tiny living room, and I'd just sit there listening to the hum, staring at the front door, convinced the mailman was going to breathe too heavily and send respiratory droplets through the mail slot.

The absolute worst moment was Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law, who's a very sweet woman but wears enough Chanel No. 5 to choke a horse, came over to drop off a casserole. She didn't even want to come inside. She just reached for the doorknob. I slammed my hand against the glass storm door like a maniac in a horror movie and screamed "DID YOU SANITIZE!?" through the glass. She looked at me like I was possessed. I mean, I was. I was possessed by the pure, unadulterated terror of keeping this tiny human alive outside the hospital bubble.

You can't live like that forever, obviously. Eventually, you just have to accept that germs exist and barricading yourself in the house while aggressively boiling every plastic nipple you own is not a sustainable lifestyle.

The whole milk production panic

If you're mixing formula powder at 4 AM, god bless you, you're doing great, fed is best, end of story.

But in 1903, formula wasn't a thing, so Couney had live-in wet nurses. If he caught them eating a hot dog or drinking a beer, they were fired on the spot. He was hardcore about breastmilk.

In the NICU, I was tethered to this yellow hospital-grade breast pump that made this awful, rhythmic "wump-wump... wump-wump" sound that I still hear in my nightmares. My milk didn't come in for five days. Five days of pumping air and crying while Dave awkwardly patted my back and offered me lukewarm apple juice.

When it finally did come in, I was producing these pathetic, microscopic little drops of colostrum that the nurses would suck up with a syringe like it was liquid gold. It's so much pressure. You're sitting there, completely hollowed out by the birth, terrified for your kid, and trying to force your body to make food while staring at a brick wall. It's awful.

(By the way, if you're currently trapped under a sleeping infant or strapped to a pump in the dark, wondering if you'll ever wear normal clothes again, Kianao has a really beautiful collection of soft, organic baby clothes that you can browse right here while you're trapped. Just saying.)

Touch them even when it's terrifying

Back in the day, mainstream doctors thought preemies should be totally isolated so they wouldn't get infected. Couney told his nurses to take them out and hug them and kiss them.

Now they call it Kangaroo Care. Skin-to-skin.

Dr. Miller told us we needed to hold Leo against our bare chests as much as possible. Something about regulating his heart rate and his vagus nerve? Honestly, I barely passed high school biology, but apparently it stabilizes their breathing and helps them gain weight. It's basically magic.

But nobody warns you how scary it's to hold a three-pound baby with tubes coming out of his nose and wires stuck to his chest. You feel like you're going to break them. The first time Brenda unhooked Leo's tangle of wires just enough to lay him on my chest, I held my breath for what felt like ten minutes. He felt like a little bird. Just this tiny, warm, fragile little bird.

Bringing the boardwalk home

When we finally got discharged—which is a whole other trauma because they just let you put this medically fragile infant in a Honda Civic and drive away into traffic—I went a little crazy buying "developmental" stuff.

I bought the Wooden Baby Gym because Instagram told me I needed to do Montessori from day one. Honestly? It's just okay. I mean, it looks gorgeous. It's totally aesthetic and didn't make my living room look like a primary-colored plastic explosion, which I appreciated. But Leo literally just stared at it for the first three months like it had deeply insulted his ancestors. He just laid there. Eventually, around six months, he figured out how to bat at the little wooden elephant, but don't expect your kid to be immediately obsessed with it.

What DID actually save our lives, much later on when the molars started coming in and he turned into a feral biting creature, was the Panda Teether. I don't know what kind of wizardry they put into that silicone, but it has these little bumpy textures on the back that he would just gnaw on for hours while I desperately chugged coffee. You can throw it in the dishwasher, which is my main requirement for any object entering my house at this point.

Looking back at those NICU days, and the days right after we brought him home, it feels like a fever dream. A blur of alarms and baby monitors and hand sanitizer and sleep deprivation.

But whenever I feel like I'm failing at this whole motherhood thing—like when Maya colors on the wall, or Leo refuses to eat anything except dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets for a week straight—I think about Martin Couney.

I think about those parents standing on the Coney Island boardwalk, handing over a quarter, hoping against hope that their tiny, fragile baby would make it.

We're all just standing on the boardwalk, aren't we? Doing the absolute best we can with whatever wild circumstances we're given, hoping our kids turn out okay.

If you're in the thick of it right now, trying to figure out how to dress your tiny fragile bird without scratching them, check out the organic essentials that actually got us through it here.

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The messy, honest FAQs about surviving this phase

Why the hell did a sideshow run incubators instead of a hospital?
Because the early 1900s were wild, honestly. Mainstream medicine was super influenced by eugenics back then, so doctors literally thought premature babies were genetically inferior "weaklings" who were supposed to die. Martin Couney wasn't even a real doctor (he faked his credentials, which is hilarious and terrifying), but he actually cared enough to use the European incubator tech, and the only way to fund the massive expense of running them was to charge tourists a quarter to gawk at them on the boardwalk. It's so messed up but also a miracle.

How do I stop obsessing over every single sound the monitor makes?
Look, you don't. Not for a long time. I wish I could tell you there's a magical meditation technique, but for the first six months Leo was home, every time the HVAC clicked on, my heart stopped. You just have to ride it out. Your brain has been conditioned by trauma to react to beeps. Talk to a therapist if you can, because NICU PTSD is incredibly real and nobody warns you about it, but also give yourself some grace. You're exhausted.

Is skin-to-skin really that big of a deal or is it just crunchy mom hype?
I thought it was crunchy hype until I watched Leo's oxygen saturation numbers literally climb on the hospital monitor when they put him on Dave's bare chest. The science is seriously wild—your body temperature will physically adjust to warm or cool the baby, and the sound of your heartbeat keeps stable their breathing. It's not just bonding; it's actual, verifiable medical intervention. Plus, it's the one time you get to just sit in a chair and have an excuse not to do dishes.

What do preemies really wear when they finally get out of the incubator?
Almost nothing at first. They're so incredibly sensitive to temperature and texture. Preemie clothes from big box stores always felt stiff to me, which is why I got obsessive about organic cotton. You want something with no tags, flat seams, and enough stretch that you don't have to bend their little arms backward to dress them. Wrap style tops or super stretchy necklines are the only things that won't make you both cry during a diaper change.

How do I deal with family members who don't understand my germ paranoia?
You blame the pediatrician. Always blame the pediatrician. Don't try to explain your feelings or ask nicely. You just say, "Dr. Miller said under no circumstances can anyone come inside without a flu shot and washed hands, sorry, doctor's strict orders!" People will argue with a terrified mother, but they usually won't argue with an imaginary strict doctor. Lie through your teeth if you've to.