Some babies arrive with a whisper.
Johanna Frantziska Moneymaker arrived with a battle cry, one you couldn’t hear at first, but one her family and her care team felt from the very start.
Born at just 24 weeks, weighing 1 pound, 5 ounces, Johanna spent 163 days in the NICU at FMOL Health | Our Lady of Lourdes Women’s & Children’s Hospital.
Johanna was not meant to make this journey alone. Her twin brother, Bodie, did not survive, and Kristen says his memory remains inseparable from Johanna’s story. For their family, the NICU became the place where grief and hope existed side by side, as they mourned one child while fighting for another.
This is where that fight led, and where Johanna is now at 15 months old.
A Place of Peace in the Middle of the Storm
Most people expect a NICU to feel like a place of trauma. For Kristen, it was both harder and softer than that.
“Yes, it was trauma for me, the whole hospital was,” she says. “It was where one of my babies died and where the other one was fighting for her life every single day. But it was also a place of peace. Because she was there, in the best hands, the best doctors, the best therapists, the best nurses.”
Kristen walked through those NICU doors nearly every day. Of 163 days, she can count on one hand the ones she missed.
“It’s where I watched my daughter grow and thrive,” she says.
Kristen wanted to be hands-on for everything: the diaper changes, the temperature checks, the wipe-downs. With a background in medical schooling, she leaned in and learned the language of her daughter’s care.
“I wanted to know what was going on with my baby. When they were talking, I wanted to know what they were talking about.”
A Team That Told the Truth and Held Her Up
Johanna’s stay was not a straight line. She battled pneumonia, then E. coli in her lungs. For a long stretch, she stayed intubated far longer than anyone hoped. At one point, she was maxed out on the highest support the team could safely give her.
Then came the conversation no parent is ready for.
“They told me there was nothing else they could do medically. She had to do this on her own,” Kristen recalls. “Either she was going to come out of it and heal, or she wasn’t.”
What carried Kristen through was the team’s honesty. The NICU team never sugarcoated the reality.
“They told me how it is. Reality is reality. There’s no other way to put it,” she says. “And they didn’t have to soften it for me.”
That transparency built trust. So did the small, human moments, the ones that had nothing to do with charts and monitors.
“People always ask, ‘How are you? How’s the baby?’ You get tired of answering,” she says. “But I could walk into that NICU and just talk about something else. I could cry with them if I needed to.”
The Sound of Survival
After two and a half months on a ventilator, the team was finally able to extubate Johanna. For the first time, Kristen heard her daughter.
“She grunted and made her little baby noises. It was bittersweet, because she finally had a voice,” she says. “When she was intubated, you could see her crying, but you couldn’t hear her.”
Getting to hold Johanna and hear her after months of only looking meant more than a milestone. It meant her lungs were healing. It meant she was going to survive.
The next challenge was feeding. Johanna struggled to latch on to a bottle, and when the team brought up the possibility of a G-tube, Kristen asked for more time before making that call.
“My motto is you never know unless you ask. The worst they can tell you is no,” she says. “They were so accommodating. If someone didn’t have an answer, they’d go get the answer.”
That trust let Kristen make peace with a G-tube she was told didn’t have to be permanent. On October 24, 2025, Johanna went home.
Bedside Care You Can’t Find Anywhere Else
Ask Kristen why she keeps coming back, to NICU reunions, to visits the team when she’s in Lafayette, and she points to something deeper than medicine.
“You can go anywhere and get good treatment,” she says. “But you cannot get the kind of bedside manner you get here.”
She credits her faith first, and then everyone who kept that NICU running.
“Even housekeeping. Truly, without them, that NICU couldn’t run like the well-oiled machine it is,” she says. “All the way up to the neonatologists. I owe so much to all of them.”
Even now that Johanna is home, that bond hasn’t faded.
“They’re strangers when you first get there. They see a part of you no one else in your life gets to see,” Kristen says. “She’s not in the NICU anymore, but they’re still a part of her, and still a part of me.”
Where Johanna Is Today
Johanna is a spitfire. She wakes up with the biggest smile on her face and doesn’t slow down from there.
Here’s how far she’s come:
- G-tube removed in January, after going three months without needing it
- Off all medications, including her thyroid medicine
- Released from occupational therapy: she drinks from a cup and eats nearly everything (except grapes, which she promptly throws back)
- Exclusively breastfed until she started table food, remarkable for a baby who was intubated for nearly three months
- Cruising the furniture and chasing her big brothers, Aiden and Holden, around the house
Holden and Johanna are only 8.5 months apart, and their bond is something to see. It matters deeply to Kristen.
“Johanna will always be a twin, and Bodie will always be her twin,” she says. “He’s just not here.”
Johanna carries scars on her arms from IVs, blood transfusions and PICC lines, reminders of everything she endured. Kristen doesn’t see them as hard things.
“Every time I look at them, I’m in awe of my own daughter,” she says. “They show me she fought to be here.”
And that fight still shows in the way she looks at you.
“It’s almost like she remembers the NICU, when she spoke with her eyes because she couldn’t make a sound,” Kristen says. “She still does it. She still speaks with her eyes.”
She smiled. “My silly little miracle.”
A Word for the Parent Still Sitting There
For the mom or dad still living in those NICU chairs, frightened, hopeful, uncertain, Kristen has this to offer. “It’s a scary experience. I won’t sugarcoat it. But show up, not only for your baby, but for yourself. Open up to your nurses and doctors. They’re there to listen and help.”
Walking out those doors every day without a baby in her arms never got easy. But she always left with peace.
“I knew she’d be okay, because they were going to do everything they possibly could to get my baby where she needed to be.”
On September 19, Johanna will be recognized as an FMOL Health | Our Lady of Lourdes Geaux Hero during the UL Ragin’ Cajuns Football game against the University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, celebrating her incredible spirit and miraculous fight for life.
It’s a moment her family once could only pray for: a healthy, happy girl surrounded by the people who love her, standing as living proof of what faith, fierce determination and an extraordinary care team can do together. Johanna’s story does not end in the NICU. It carries forward in every smile, every step and every day she was never supposed to have.
We hope your family never needs a NICU, but it’s good to know what’s available — just in case. Across our health system, we offer access to the highest quality family-centered care.
- Acadiana: Our Lady of Lourdes Women’s & Children’s Hospital’s Level III Surgical NICU
- Greater Baton Rouge and Northshore: Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital’s Newton & Betsy Thomas Family Center for Newborn & Infant Intensive Care
- Northeast Louisiana: the region’s only Level III NICU at St. Francis Medical Center
