Seventeen years ago, a tiny baby girl, weighing just 2 pounds, 12 ounces, was born at the Cayman Islands Hospital. Summer Phillips, who entered the world at 28 weeks, spent nine weeks in the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Among the baby’s many challenges were underdeveloped lungs and an opening between the two major blood arteries leading from her heart, a condition known as patent ductus arteriosus or, more commonly, a ‘hole in the heart’. As time went by, her lungs grew stronger, and she underwent surgery to fix her heart condition at the age of 1 at the Miami Children’s Hospital.
That child who battled so hard against the odds is now in her final year at St. Ignatius Catholic School, and is using her talents to give back to the NICU that saved her life.
Phillips is an avid scuba diver and photographer, and blends her interests by capturing stunning photos of underwater creatures.
At the St. Ignatius annual bazaar late last year, she put some of her best photographs up for sale and raised $500 for the hospital unit. She said she wanted to get involved in some way with the NICU to show her gratitude, so chose to fundraise for it through the sale of her photographs. She presented the donation to the staff there last week.
Phillips says she learned to dive two years ago and gets in the water whenever she has the chance.
“I got my Open Water certification in early 2019, and then last summer I did my Advanced. I’m working towards my Rescue certification in February,” she told the Cayman Compass.
She got an Olympus TG6 camera as a gift shortly after getting certified, and was hooked.
“When I was diving, I saw these cool things but I did not have anything to capture them. One of my good friends was doing underwater photography and I saw how good she was,” she said.
Phillips took up diving and photography while recovering from an injury that made it difficult for her to continue the competitive swimming she had been taking part in for nine years. “I got into the diving and photography to replace the swimming,” she said.
She’s been undergoing treatment for her injury for three years – something that has influenced her choice of future career. She wants to be a physiotherapist, and plans to study the subject at university in the UK when she leaves high school.
It helps that her physiotherapist, Jen Littler of Align, is also an underwater photographer and the two sometimes dive together.
“I like being underwater, and how peaceful it is. You are weightless, that’s really cool,” she said. “You can go from seeing really big things to really small, macro-sized creatures.”
Her favourite subjects to photograph are the smaller animals, like shrimps, but she admits that she loves seeing and photographing turtles too.
Though she obviously has no memory of being in the NICU, she and her family talk about the experience and “how grateful we are to the staff there for all the hard work they did… and how grateful we are for having an NICU here on island”.
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