Our Intended Goals and road-map from the heart!
In the photo above, we took our cats and used photoshop to make a content piece to share that we were expecting a child. We didn't know the gender yet so we just called it "baby p" for our first initial of my last name. We anticipated a date close to our expected due date but our child was born in December of 2016. The intended goal of a March 2017 baby was cut short and all our hopes of a normal baby with fat rounded feet were over. The child was a small 1lb 13oz baby girl who couldn't even cry, she was red and ended up full of wires in the nicu. The preemie paradox company would only be imagined years later once Mike decided to open the company to serve an area of the preemie community I felt was lacking. This what I meant for an intended goals.
Our preemie paradox legal pages are written for lawyers and marketers who deal with contract law. We of the preemie paradox would like to add this page as a more readable version of our intentions. We know that intentions are weighed and figured in when trying to find out what a person or group are trying to do. We of the preemie paradox want you to know we have the best intentions when serving our preemie community!
Lets start off with the money?
The preemie paradox is not a 501c3 or other non profit. We did look into it but I did not want to ask those who were hurting in the nicu for money. Plus it seemed rude to always be asking for funds knowing that post nicu care was ridiculously expensive and money is tight for most nicu parents. In most states you can spend the greatest percentage of donations on salaries for your non profit board or director with no promise of anything to show for the money. So why are most nicu help groups non profits? We decided on an advertising model where the preemie paradox was a for profit business that used sponsors and advertisers to make their ends meet. We felt that offering paid courses was a great way to make money for the company and allow for family to buy a nicu parent greater knowledge when the nicu parent took our course. We knew this meant more work for us and there was a chance that no one would buy anything but we took a chance. With this model we must earn our money by making content that the audience and community finds attractive and meaningful. We didn't want to perpetually ask and beg for money to feed our non profit, we want to be proactive and design a system where the listening audience can be entertained for free but products and services wold pay to be listed in front of them.
Now what about the care?
The preemie paradox is not a professional institution or certified clinic. We do have professionals and we do feature professionals on our blogs and show but these professionals are talking in general for a wide audience. Any specific action or illness can be talked about in great detail and depth in a scientific way but none of our content from the preemie paradox should be taken as a replacement for seeing a professional. When you see a clinic or institution with a professional, then a person can get confidential information that fits your personal criteria for care, this system was designed for the professional to require your personal care angle that is consistent with the nature of the patient. The preemie paradox could never assist in the professional treatment of anyone so we call our area of care "entertainment" since a person can "entertain" and position or care angle as fitting their area of interest. This way a person who listens to our shows or reads a blog post can bring the information to their professional or clinic to entertain the possibility that their issue may be similar to what our content revealed. All of us were probably read to as a child and seen numbers and letters from our non professional parents before a professional teacher taught us how to red and do math, we take this analogy to show how you don't have to be a professional to talk about the issues of prematurity and nicu/picu life.
The Preemie Paradox care angle!
Now that we have established from the article above has shown that the preemie paradox is not a professional institution, we can talk about how we do plan to care for our community! We define care as a verb - "serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk" from the oxford dictionary. The preemie paradox content talks about our opinions on best practices for parents inside and out of the nicu/picu. The preemie apprentice courses cover our opinions on how to do subjects like how to set up your milk and pumping station for example. We cover this topic as an engineer and show how to set up a milk or formula station so that the flow of material goes from left to right so that you never get clean and dirty containers mixed up and that you can always tell where you are in the process. The preemie paradox also has many more courses on a wide area of topics so that several problems facing preemie parents are covered. Our Preemie paradox live show is another area of care, we feature well known researchers and nicu professionals who know their field of study well who talk to us on our show. These live show are never to be considered as a replacement for seeing a professional even if the guest happens to be a professional. These live shows are merely to talk to the preemie community about issues facing preemie parents. The preemie paradox support page has many reminders and information you can copy and paste into your phone. You can also print them off, laminate, and hole punch them so a parent can carry the list they feel is important to them to the nicu or other place you need to carry your list to. Why do this? parents are under a lot of stress when they have a child in the nicu/picu and see many specialist once they get out of the nicu/picu. This stress makes you forgetful and causes problems prioritizing important matters over merely urgent matters. The preemie paradox feels they can offer clarification in areas that cause problems to preemie parents.
The Preemie Paradox long term view
The preemie paradox never intends for the company to end. After the cast of the show and current members are tired of their positions, they will be replaced by new and better members and so on. We intend for the preemie paradox to go on forever since there will always be a nicu/picu full of infants. The combination of the opioid and drug epidemic and the ability to now save premature children earlier will add more numbers to the nicu/picu and therefore more parents affected. The rise of single and non traditional parenting will also bring challenges to the complexity of preemie life. We still see how the training of nicu/picu staff is trained to prefer the mother of the child over the father and tell her all the possibilities that can go wrong, traumatizing her with no options other than watching helplessly as the staff works as her replacement. The preemie community needs the most up to date and modern system of care, and there will always be a need of a place where the conversation on best practices can take place. The preemie paradox plans on being a place for the conversation to take place. Once a preemie parent, always a preemie parent. The nicu/picu never goes away!
