In a teaching hospital, the faculty member ultimately responsible for a patient’s care, supervising trainees at various stages, is the attending physician.
For short, we’re called “attendings.”
Short answer: A neonatologist is a critical-care physician for newborn babies.
Longer answer: “Neonate” means “newborn” and “-ology” is “the study of.”
The medical definition of “neonate” includes babies in their first 28 days of life, but some babies will stay in the NICU for many, many months before they go home.
Neonatologists “study” babies in that we oversee their medical care. Newborn intensive care is truly a multidisciplinary team endeavor. So, as the attending, I’m the one who gets to pay attention to everything that’s going on, listen to everyone’s perspective, and make sure that each baby’s care makes sense in their “big picture.”
To become a neonatologist (in the US) usually takes — after completion of elementary, secondary, and undergraduate schooling— four years of medical school, three years of pediatric residency training, and three more years of neonatology fellowship training. That’s 10 years after graduating from college. Which means I was a few months shy of 32 when I finally finished training. And at that advanced age I finally started to realize two things. First—those pre-med expectations of eventually “knowing everything” were woefully inappropriate. And second—practicing medicine was really going to mean “practicing”. For the rest of my working life. (Still coming to terms with that.)
“Contemplative spirituality is a way of seeing. The English word contemplation comes from the Latin… [contemplare] …which means to look at, to gaze attentively, to mark out a space for observation. Contemplative practices are those that create margin to pay attention to and to observe our life.” - Phileena Heuertz in Mindful Silence: the Heart of Christian Contemplation (p. 7)
So it’s possible to be contemplative even in the NICU—or, really, anywhere. That’s the beauty.