Canadian country musicians are pitching in to help make a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) a reality in the East Kootenay region.
A concert fundraiser ‘A Night for NICU,’ will be held on June 15 at the Fernie Demolition Grounds, with country artists like Meghan Patrick, JoJo Mason, Aaron Pritchett, Kelly Prescott, Jason Blaine, and Chad Brownlee, and a few other surprise guests.
The music festival aims to raise $1.8 million for the Warm Embrace Campaign to build a Tier 3 NICU at East Kootenay Regional Hospital in Cranbrook, which would support newborns in critical condition through intubation and incubation, and oxygen support. Funds would also go towards training medical staff to work with premature babies.
The event will help fundraisers get closer to the $3.16 million target needed to start the project.
The evening of entertainment was jointly organized by Bearspaw Community First, Kootenay East Regional Hospital District, The Festival Company, East Kootenay Foundation for Health and the provincial government.
When The Festival Company’s CEO Billie-Jo Aasen was approached by Bearspaw co-founder Ian Benson about hosting the festival, she immediately knew it was something she wanted to get involved with.
Aasen has a personal to connection to the cause, having twin daughters who were in the NICU in Vancouver for eight months. She delivered them premature at 30 weeks, and one of the girls was still quite small, with a missing kidney, a twisted spine, a clubbed foot and a hole in her heart.
She spent her days in the hospital with them, as they underwent a series of surgeries.
“You put on such a brave face for it and you’re in survival mode,” she said.
“I had to learn to be really patient with myself because it’s trauma and it does rob an experience. You go through everything, from being scared, to being angry, to being quiet, to being really really loud about it,” she added.
Aasen said she was lucky in the fact that she lives only 10 minutes away from the B.C Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. Residents of the East Kootenays aren’t so fortunate.
“Anyone below 35 weeks cannot deliver [in the East Koots], so their families have to be air lifted,” Aasen explained.
“You have families that have been transferred to Kelowna or Kamloops. They have to go and get a hotel, eat out, live away from their families while going through this premature journey. It’s extremely costly to be able to do that.”
And because babies need to spend months in the NICU, mothers often spend significant time apart from their families, at a time when they need more support from their loved ones.
“Families are ripped apart. A lot of the times it’s just the mom by her self spending an extortionate amount of money,” she added.
While Aasen has organized many concerts, this one hits particularly close to her heart.
“Because I have a personal connection to it, I would say this is the most special show I’ve ever done,” she said.
