CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jamie Michetti is thinking back to that gorgeous spring day in Charleston, South Carolina, just one month ago, when her fiance became her husband.
Thinking back to one very specific, very special, but also very hectic memory from that day.
It was a couple of hours before the 5 p.m. ceremony — which would be held on the banks of the Ashley River, beneath the centuries-old live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens — and it was time for Jamie to be photographed with Camille, the 2-year-old she’d asked to be her flower girl.
The bride-to-be was thrilled things had fallen into place to make this moment possible. If she was having a hard time staying in the moment, though ... well, who could blame her?
“One, it’s my wedding day and I have so much happening in my head,” explains Jamie, 28, a Charlotte nurse who lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina. “Two, it wasn’t like we were able to break apart and get pictures together alone. It was literally the entire wedding party, my whole family, Camille’s family, all the photographers — everybody was there with us.
“So it was very chaotic ... and I didn’t really have a chance to have that full-circle moment, where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I took care of her from when she (weighed) a pound, now she’s 2 years old and she’s in my wedding.’”
But Jamie did have that moment when she got the proofs back from her photographer; and she’s is having it right now as she reflects on that brief photo session; and for the rest of her life she’ll have it in the back of her mind nearly every time she thinks of Camille, the once-tiny-and-often-sickly preemie she helped nurse to good health inside Levine Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit over the course of five months in 2019.
After all, Jamie never saw this coming. Never planned to develop this kind of bond with a patient when she started working in the NICU at Levine nearly three years ago.
It just sort of happened, she says.
And — for the purposes of her role in Jamie’s wedding — Camille just sort of happened to have the perfect last name:
Flower.
‘Are you sitting down?’
Neal and Stephanie Flower, who met as teenagers and were wedded in September 2008, spent the first several years of their marriage enjoying the freedom afforded to couples who don’t have children, visiting so many Caribbean islands that they eventually lost count.
When they finally did decide to add to their family, however, the challenges turned out to be plentiful.
In the summer of 2018, an infertility specialist gave the couple a less than 3% chance of getting pregnant naturally, and after trying and failing with a few other more-affordable and less-invasive treatments, they made a plan that they would start pursuing the adoption route at the beginning of 2019.
“We just didn’t want to spend 20 grand,” Stephanie says, explaining why they passed on in vitro fertilization, “when there are so many other kids via adoption that need love and affection and would never have that otherwise.”
Then, that fall, came a wildly unexpected plot twist.
Stephanie had gone to see her urologist late one afternoon because she was experiencing pain she thought might be associated with a chronic bladder condition she deals with, but the physician suspected a recurrence of kidney stones she’d had a while back, so he referred her to the hospital for an X-ray the next morning. As a precaution, he had Stephanie take a pregnancy test.
A few minutes after she arrived back home in Kannapolis, a nurse called from the office.
“‘Are you sitting down?’” Stephanie remembers the nurse asking.
“‘We were about to throw your test away ... but there was a faint line. We need you to come back. Please don’t go get that X-ray.’”
She went right back for another test. The line on the next one was clear.
When Stephanie returned home for the second time, she went straight to her craft room, where she had a leftover blank gray onesie from a project she’d done recently for a friend. Using heat-transfer vinyl, she quickly designed one that featured the logo of Neal’s favorite NFL team — the Dallas Cowboys — and the words “Daddy’s Lil Fan.”
“I think I stood there for — it felt like forever,” Neal recalls of the moment he walked into the room when he got home from work. “At least 30 seconds. She was probably like, What’s he doing? But I was trying to figure out, like, ‘Uhhhhhhhhh, I don’t think we know any Cowboy fans that are having babies, so what — what — OH! Oh, this — wait a minute, this is for us!?’”
They wrapped themselves in each other’s arms, and wept as they laughed, still in disbelief.
They would go through those same motions at Stephanie’s first check-up, at eight weeks — when they learned the shocking news that they were having not one baby, but two.
‘They can’t defend themselves’
Jamie didn’t set out to care for babies when she entered Carolinas College of Health Sciences after moving to North Carolina from upstate New York a decade ago.
In fact, upon graduating in December 2016, she started a six-month residency in the surgical trauma ICU at what is now Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center near uptown Charlotte; then after that ended she transitioned to Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary surgery (which deals with cancer and diseases in the pancreas, liver, gallbladder and bile duct) at the same hospital.
Jamie soon realized that she wanted to be back in an intensive care unit, and since a part of her had also wanted to do pediatrics, she took a shadowing opportunity in the pediatric ICU.
There, she found herself drawn toward the infants, and that was when she decided to pursue a change to the neonatal ICU.
“Maybe it’s that they don’t have a voice,” Jamie says of what attracted her. “They can’t defend themselves. I think it takes a certain type of person to be able to take care of that, and to read what a baby needs instead of being able to just hear a person talk and tell you what they need.”
She was hired to work NICU at Levine Children’s Hospital in the fall of 2018. It immediately felt like the right fit.
Her personal life was also falling neatly into place: She had been dating a guy from back home — Tommy Lawrence, an Army veteran and her older brother Rob’s best friend — for coming up on two years, and all signs were clearly pointing toward the couple eventually tying the knot.
A little more than six months later, on April 3, Jamie met Camille.
‘The first time I saw my girls’
April 3 was way, way earlier than Neal and Stephanie expected to be welcoming their twins into the world.
They had to be taken out of Stephanie’s womb at 26 weeks and five days — more than 13 weeks prematurely — via emergency C-section because doctors had found that Camille’s placenta was not seeping up nutrients, immune molecules and oxygen molecules as Stephanie’s blood flowed through her uterus. Instead, Camille’s placenta was resisting them.
As a result, over the course of the evening, Stephanie recalls, “Camille’s heart rate was dropping in and out, and they had deemed that it was going to be safer for her outside than inside.”
Charlotte Marie Flower was born at 9:41 p.m. She was about as small as preemies get: 1 pound, 13 ounces and 13 inches long.
Camille Lee Flower was born at 9:43 p.m. She was even smaller: 1 pound, 7 ounces and 12 inches long.
The girls’ conditions were so critical that they were whisked off to the NICU before Stephanie could hold them. The next day, Stephanie was so overwhelmed by medical staff visits, and calls and texts, and nausea that she didn’t see her daughters in the flesh until around 4 p.m.
By that point, Jamie — whose schedule includes three back-to-back 12-hour night shifts per week — had already spent several hours around Camille, having helped out with the younger twin’s care the night the girls were admitted into the NICU, while other nurses tended to Charlotte.
That second night, Jamie asked specifically to be assigned to Camille.
Before the end of her shift, she’d signed up to be Camille’s primary nurse.
‘That was the hardest decision’
Camille was the one Neal and Stephanie had been more worried about.
Because of the placenta issue. Because she was smaller and would need to fight harder. Because her breathing situation was more tenuous, Charlotte having graduated to being off of her ventilator while Camille was still on one.
But not even two weeks after they were born, the couple was blindsided by devastating news: An aggressive infection that started in Charlotte’s bowel had rapidly become so severe that it was causing both brain bleeding and brain damage.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Within days, doctors informed them that the damage to her brain was irreversible.
“Basically, we needed to take some time and make some decisions,” Stephanie says. “But it wasn’t suggested that we keep going because it was gonna get worse and then it was gonna be painful for her — the pressure on her brain, it was just gonna take its toll on her little body. ...
“We definitely didn’t want her in pain and we didn’t want her to suffer, or anything like that ... so we took her off support and —” Stephanie’s voice breaks as she tries to fight back tears “— she was in my arms and my husband’s arms when she passed away on April 20.”
The tears start to flow.
“That was the hardest decision. And the next day all we wanted to do was stay in the bed and sleep, and just really shut the world out. But you couldn’t, because Camille was still there fighting. And when I say she was fighting, she was fighting.
“All I knew at that point,” Stephanie says, her voice hardening again, “was that I couldn’t lose another child.”
‘I was so nervous’
The whole idea behind having a primary NICU nurse is simple: It provides consistency in care for the baby and his or her family.
In one example of how that could be beneficial, say if a nurse works with the same baby day in and day out, that nurse might be able to recognize and react to behaviors, cues or warning signs more quickly and easily than a nurse who’s less familiar with the child.
Jamie had never signed up to be a primary nurse for a baby before Camille, and to some degree, she says, she was simply following an impulse. She can’t explain it. She just felt a connection.
This would only, naturally, wind up making the connection stronger. After all, while babies can have multiple primary nurses — making it possible to bridge the gap when one has days off — anytime Jamie was on duty, she was taking the lead in caring of Camille.
And Camille needed a lot of care.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
One of the most significant of her various preemie-related ailments was patent ductus arteriosus, an opening between the two major blood vessels leading from the heart that is supposed to close shortly after birth but didn’t in Camille’s case. It can lead to major heart problems later in life; in the short term it was affecting her lungs.
Camille spent two months on a ventilator. She was strongly considered for surgery to close the opening, but it was ultimately considered too risky given her small size and weakness.
Over time, the issue resolved itself. She seemed to finally be in the clear. So on July 8, Camille was discharged after living the first three months of her life in the NICU — then was readmitted just a few hours later because she briefly stopped breathing and turned blue at home.
Back at the hospital, it was found that she had been silently aspirating her milk. Eventually, she started throwing up everything she ate and was in danger of dehydration. The diagnosis — pyloric stenosis — required emergency surgery to open a channel from her stomach to her small intestine.
It took a month to get her to settle into a workable feeding routine.
Like Stephanie had done from the start, having almost completely set aside her job as a home-based travel agent, she would sit there at the hospital next to Camille’s bedside from morning to night every day. Then Neal would join for an hour or two after he finished his workday as a network engineer for Spectrum before they headed home to Kannapolis from Charlotte. Three nights a week, they would still be hanging around when Jamie would arrive for her 12-hour Camille-watching shifts.
Over time, Jamie practically became part of the Flower family.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
As soon as Jamie would start her night at Camille’s bedside, Stephanie would give her a blow-by-blow recap of Camille’s day. And after Stephanie and Neal went home, Jamie could set her clock to the nightly phone calls Stephanie made to the hospital — one right before bed at 10 p.m. and another when she woke up in the middle of the night to pump, both just to make sure Camille was OK.
Jamie came to love, in particular, the nights when she would give Camille bubble baths and slather her with lotion. She started referring to them as “spa nights,” and joked with Camille’s parents that when Camille grew up, she would take her out for actual spa nights.
But at the same time, Jamie came to dread losing her fragile patient, too.
“There were so many times that I would go home,” Jamie recalls, “and I was so nervous that I would come back to work and Camille wouldn’t be there. That’s how touch-and-go it was for her at one point.”
Finally, on Sept. 1, 2019, at just short of five months old, Camille was discharged from Levine Children’s Hospital.
Two things happened:
First, Stephanie and Jamie exchanged numbers.
Second, after Camille was gone, Jamie cried.
“I took care of her all the time, and then all of a sudden ... she wasn’t there anymore,” Jamie says. “In a way, I felt like I’d sent my child home.”
‘How cool of a story would that be?’
The Flowers had established close relationships with several of their NICU nurses, including Jamie, and after bringing Camille home, Stephanie kept in touch — and kept them updated privately on Camille’s development — via occasional calls and regular text messages. She also became friends with them on Facebook.
That October, while scrolling through her news feed, Stephanie saw a vacation photo Jamie had posted showing the nurse wrapped in her boyfriend Tommy’s arms as they kissed while standing on the deck of a cruise ship at sunset.
Stephanie grabbed her phone and shot Jamie a text: “Girl, I thought you were gonna come back engaged! That photo is just so romantic!”
Jamie laughed. Not yet, she explained. But she suspected it wouldn’t be much longer.
“Well,” Stephanie wrote, “when you do get married, I have the perfect ‘Flower’ girl for you.” She punctuated the text with a wink emoji.
“I just thought that was the cutest idea,” Jamie recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘How cool of a story would that be?’”
She had no nieces, no little sisters or little-girl cousins. Camille could be a shoo-in for the job when the time came, she thought.
Not a month later, Tommy was down on one knee, sliding a ring onto Jamie’s finger.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
‘Will you be our flower girl?’
Camille turned 1 year old on April 3, 2020, at pretty much the height of COVID-19 in terms of restrictions on people being out in public. So there was no party. In fact, everyone was so preoccupied with the pandemic, apparently, that Camille — who was still not quite on the growth chart, and doing all kinds of therapy to stimulate her development — only received a single birthday card.
It was from Jamie.
She signed it: “Remember you are a fighter and you can and will do anything you put your mind to! I love you tons! Auntie Jamie.” She punctuated her signature with a heart.
Then in June, the Flowers discovered that a family vacation to Isle of Palms would be coinciding with a trip Jamie and Tommy were taking to the same S.C. beach. Stephanie insisted they all get together. Jamie hardly needed her arm twisted.
When Jamie and Tommy arrived for their visit, she came bearing gifts — and another card. This one read:
“A cute little girl as perfect as you will bring us so much joy when we say ‘I DO.’ Will you be our Flower Girl?”
‘You could tell there was a bond’
Camille has, by the way, finally caught up on the growth chart and no longer needs any type of therapy except for speech. But due to COVID, Neal and Stephanie have not been able to get her socialized much at all in the interest of mitigating her risk.
So while under normal circumstances they probably would have gotten Camille together with Jamie several times leading up to the wedding, her reunion with her former NICU nurse a couple of hours before the ceremony last month — on May 15 — marked the first time they’d been together in months.
Needless to say, Camille’s parents had concerns about whether Camille would react to Jamie, and how the photo session would go.
Stephanie also had talked to Jamie beforehand about the likelihood that Camille wouldn’t last until the ceremony — that Camille had a very strict schedule, that she gets cranky if she doesn’t eat at a certain time, and that when it’s nap time, it’s nap time. Those things were always going to be a factor, and as much as Jamie loves Camille, the order and timing of wedding events were as immovable as that nap time.
In the end, Camille indeed did not last until the ceremony.
Jamie and the Flowers both rolled with it. Once the terrible twos kicked in mid-afternoon, Camille’s grandparents scooped Camille up and took her back to the hotel. Jamie initiated a backup plan that earned her older brother Rob some laughs when he stood in for Camille, scattering flower petals while coming down the aisle as a groomsman.
Jamie was completely fine with it.
By then, she’d already gotten what she wanted the most out of her chosen flower girl: a few beautiful photographs of the two of them together in their white dresses.
And while Jamie wasn’t able to fully appreciate the full-circle-ness of the moment when she was in it, the Flowers certainly did.
“Knowing the whole story behind it, it was really touching and inspiring,” Neal says of watching Jamie with his daughter during the photo session.
Stephanie agrees, but would go even further. Given all of the forces at play, she says, the photos are amazing artifacts in more ways than one.
For one, due to her preemie background, Camille is immune-compromised, and the only people she’s been around during the pandemic are those “we know are careful, vaccinated, medical providers that are masked,” Stephanie explains. “Otherwise, she’s not around anybody socially. So I spoke with Jamie before, I was like, ‘I just don’t know how she’s gonna act around more than three or four people.’”
On top of that, she continues, “historically, if Camille is around anybody, she’s not gonna let them hold her.
“But she gravitated toward Jamie — she wanted to look at her bouquet, she wanted to look at her jewelry — and when I handed Camille from my hip to Jamie’s hip ... she went right into her arms. So the fact that Camille was allowing Jamie to hold her, and the fact that she didn’t want to get down, was a huge thing.
“You could tell that there was a bond. That there was a mutual love between the two of them. And it just — it definitely made me emotional because it solidified that —”
Stephanie’s voice starts to tremble.
“That people like Jamie — nurses like Jamie — loving my daughter when I couldn’t be there are ... what got me through that 151 days.”
“To see that illustrated two years later,” she says, “was really powerful.”
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