Stitched together with red, yellow and royal blue felt, a little cape hangs off of a monitor in the Neonatal ICU. Attached to it is a note—handwritten—on a brown tag.

“Made with love for your little superhero, by nurse Stephanie T.”

The small gift is a gesture that makes even the weariest of spirits soar. Nurse Stephanie Treherne sews the capes in her off hours, and personalizes them for the babies waiting it out in the NICU.

Benjamin was one baby whose health problems concerned and strained his parents. Born at 32 weeks because of Michelle's high blood pressure which ultimately developed into preeclampsia, a condition that affects 2 - 8 per cent of pregnancies worldwide.

“It’s stressful,” said Michelle Campbell, Benjamin’s mother. “It’s a lot of tubes, a lot of wires."

But the cape, a token of encouragement from Treherne, mirrored Benjamin’s real-life “superpower”: his tenacity and fighter’s spirit.

“There was definitely some emotion upon seeing it,” Campbell said. “We hadn’t even encountered a nurse named Stephanie at this point, and it showed the staff—all the staff—is really looking over these kids.”

“When we saw the cape, to know that someone really took the time to handcraft it, it was just that much more special in today’s day,” explained father Chris Korres.

So far, Stephanie has handed out 100 personalized superhero capes to NICU babies—an idea she gleaned during a slideshow at a nursing conference.

“There was a slide that had a baby with a superhero cape,” she said. “First of all, it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, and it made me think: these babies really are superheroes.”

It’s a fact widely acknowledged by staff at the Jewish General, so Treherne’s effort to keep families strong is appreciated by all who experience it.”

“I know how hard our nurses work,” explained Dr. Apostolos Papageorgiou, chief of pediatrics and neonatology at the Jewish. “To spend time— extra time—to give to the unit, I appreciate it very much.

But Treherne says that acknowledging the little heroes is a given.

“It’s important to remember how special they are, and how special what we do is,” she said.

“There are some hard days, busy days, and it’s nice to go ‘oh yeah, this is why I’m doing this—good, let’s continue.’”