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Caitlyn Medalen has come full circle. As a newborn, she spent the first days of her life in Trinity Health’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Now, she has returned to the unit, only this time she’s on the other side of the bassinet.

Medalen joined the NICU nursing staff in February after receiving her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Minot State University. “During orientation, my fun fact was that I had been a baby in the NICU, and now I get to be a NICU nurse,” she said.

She also had a show-and-tell item – an old photo of her dad cradling her in his arms as he rocked his infant daughter in the newborn ICU. That photo set off a light bulb for Karen Zimmerman, Trinity’s Chief Nursing Officer and Vice President of Patient Care Services. She proposed recreating the photo of Caitlyn and her dad prior to the unit moving out of Trinity’s legacy hospital campus.

On an April morning in the NICU, a grown-up Caitlyn and her father, Chad Vogel, took their places in one of the unit’s rocking chairs and a camera captured the moment. “I think it’s really sweet,” Medalen said. “I spent my first few days here and now I’ve been able to work here these few months before moving to the new hospital. It’s a full-circle moment.”

Chad Vogel says his memory of Caitlyn’s time in the NICU is a mixture of elation and worry. “What I remember is the excitement and also the concern that she was in the NICU.”

She wasn’t a NICU patient for long, however. Caitlyn spent just a week in the unit due to a respiratory condition known as apnea, a disorder characterized by a temporary cessation of breathing. “I was term; I just didn’t want to breathe all the time,” she said.

Her decision to pursue a nursing career was possibly influenced by her NICU experience. “In my job interview, I recalled how I used to dress up my dolls. Sometimes they would be my patients and I would pretend to take care of them.”

More likely, though, she was inspired by her mom, Marlene Vogel, who was an ICU nurse and house supervisor with Trinity Health for 20 years. “I did all my clinical rotations throughout Trinity Hospital, so I got to see the different units she worked in. NICU is the one that stole my heart.”

Moving to the new Healthcare Campus and Medical District is bittersweet for Medalen, and she’s glad she got to work in the legacy NICU for a time. “It’s cool that I’ll get to work in both places,” she said. “Before moving in, we had orientation and toured the new campus. There was a lot to absorb. Fortunately, we have a good team here that I get to learn from.”