Kabe's Story

Nobody held me when it mattered most. I stood in a hospital corridor, listening through a door to obstetricians arguing how to deliver our son at 25 weeks, ready to help my wife until I was told to wait in the lift lobby.

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When he was wheeled out, red and the size of a coke can, I was handed consent forms and told to sign for procedures I didn't understand. "Please just do whatever you think is best," I said. No one checked whether I'd eaten, slept, or understood what was happening.

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Days later my wife was screened for postnatal depression before discharge. I stood beside her, silently scoring higher than she did, and told myself I'd deal with it later. Six months in NICU, and I still hadn't dealt with it.

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That's the system's gap: no chaperone for the non-birthing parent, no equivalent screening for fathers, no one tracking Maslow's basics: fed, housed, informed, while we absorbed trauma. Small, structural things would have held me: a check-in, a briefing on what happens next, a support worker who found us before day three.

But what held me wasn't the system. It was peers, and Ronald McDonald House, where dinner became a check-in with other parents. It was the NICU Dads group, other men who didn't need the context explained. Peers held me because they'd been where I was; the system, stretched to two or three support workers for hundreds of families, was too thin to reach everyone in time.

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I don't think the answer is choosing between the two. The system can't replace peer support, but it can stop being the reason fathers go unheld: a form, a duty of care, a patient ID, so that by the time peer connection arrives, we're still standing, ready to support our family.

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Now, I am working hard to be a part of the solution, supporting the NICU Dads Project at The Kids Research Institute Australia and that has been made possible by funding from Healthway. The vision is for every NICU family to have access to the same type of peer support along with other changes that will help fathers and families of the future.