NICU Nurses Adopt A Baby They Cared For
This is a love story on a few levels.
A pair of Nebraska nurses who married after meeting in their hospital’s NICU added another member to their family when they adopted a preemie patient.
Taylor and Drew Deras are NICU nurses who fell in love and tied the knot in 2020 after working together in the NICU at the Methodist Women’s Hospital in Omaha. The next year, they met baby Ella in the NICU when she was born at just 23 weeks. Drew told GMA, “She was at the very edge of being able to survive, essentially.”
The Derases took care of Ella for eight months before being transferred to another hospital’s NICU. “There [were] times where the doctors would tell us, ‘Watch her. I don’t know if she’ll make it through the night tonight.’”
But Ella proved to be a fighter beating the odds, starting eating from a bottle and got better. But then the Derases learned she was going to become a ward of the state. Taylor knew she wanted to step in: “So it was, I loved her as my patient, and then once we became foster parents, I loved her as my own child.”
Ella was released in April 2022 and they because her foster parents until she officially became their daughter on National Adoption Day last November.
