NICU reunion

"How are you!?!" Allan Espina yelled Saturday when he saw Juli Poe and her quadruplets for the first time since they were born five years ago.

Espina wasn't a long-lost friend or a relative but actually one of the nurses who took care of Poe's four fraternal quads - Abigail, Zane, Fred and Gavin - when they were born at Odessa Regional Medical Center's neonatal intensive care unit. The hospital threw a "birthday party" for them and about 100 other children Saturday afternoon at Progressive Park, where the children, their parents and the nurses - who took care of the children when some of them were barely larger than a adult's fist - took time to catch up with each other.

Nancy Stark, the neonatal unit's director, said many of the children and their parents would get to know the nurses very well as they remained hospitalized, often for more than a month as the children remained in the unit.

"It's really the nurses the parents of the children remember," Stark said. "We thought it would be really exciting to bring the kids and the families together."

ORMC spokeswoman Jacqui Gore said the party collectively celebrated all of the babies' birthdays. Most of the former neonatal unit patients attending are now 4 or 5 years old, though the unit has been around for more than 30 years.

The kids had several bounce houses, cake and a clown at Progressive Park while the nurses said hello to some of them.

Becky and Jeff Jones' 4-year-old son Jordan spent the first 18 days of his life battling an infection in his underdeveloped lungs after he was born five weeks early. Though they hadn't seen Jordan's doctor early on Saturday, Becky said they came across Sanjay Patel on Christmas.

"He was pretty shocked to see Jordan," she said. "Just to see him healthy and running around is a miracle."

Poe, of Midland, said her children were all born after only 27 weeks - about 13 weeks premature. Poe herself was at ORMC since the 23rd week of her pregnancy, while her children were there between eight and 10 weeks.

And Espina got to see how they have grown up five years later.

"Words cannot express the happiness," he said after meeting them. "Four or five years ago they were teeny, tiny babies."