“The NICU’s where I feel most at home,” Hayley Good says.

This summer, Hayley Good will start working as a nurse in the same NICU she spent time in as a micro-preemie.

“I grew up knowing how the nurses saved my life,” says Good, 22, who graduated with a degree in nursing in May. “I was told that they tirelessly worked and advocated for me, even though they weren’t even sure if I was going to survive.”

Now, she’s looking forward to being able to share her unique perspective about what life can look like after the NICU with the parents of her patients.

“Being able to be that hope and light and just walk through the hardest part of their life with them is just very special,” she says.

In 2001, Good’s parents Heith and Pamela, of Amanda, Ohio, lost their first set of identical twin daughters at 23 weeks. “They did not survive the birth,” Good says.

A year later, they got pregnant again with another set of identical twin girls.

“We don’t have twins on either side of the family. They would always tell me, they felt like the Lord was giving them their twins back a year later,” Good says.

The nurse and her identical twin sister, Hillary, were born on June 9, 2002. Delivered at 24 weeks, Good weighed only 1 lb., 9 oz. Her sister only lived two days.

“She was so sick, she just didn’t survive,” Good says.

For about four and a half months, Good was in the NICU at Ohio State University Medical Center and also at the NICU at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, where she had heart surgery shortly after she was born.

She grew up knowing about the loving NICU nurses who not only took care of her and saved her, but also comforted and supported her entire family.

“A lot of the nurses really tried to wrap my parents with just comfort and love and just caring for me to their best of their ability because they didn’t know what was going to happen,” she says.

Another thing she grew up knowing? She wanted to become a nurse to pay it forward. “That’s all I wanted to do,” she says.

On May 4, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Cedarville University. She starts work in the NICU at Nationwide Children’s in Columbus on July 7.

“The NICU’s where I feel most at home,” she says.

As she prepares to begin the next phase of her NICU journey, Good knows her own history has prepared her the wide range of emotions in store.

“I think the NICU, it can be very exciting and you just think of how exciting it is to care for babies, but also it is the difference between a baby thriving and a baby dying,” she says. “And so I think you are that middle ground and you get to care for both the thriving child and the one that might pass away. And I think you have the opportunity to care for the whole entire family.”

And as “hard” as it is for families navigating the NICU, Good hopes that she can be living proof that “there’s hope.”

“It happened to me, and my parents were in that spot and they didn’t know what was going to happen,” she says. “I think in the NICU it’s really hard for them to grasp and imagine that their kid will be able to go to high school and college and graduate and be successful.”

She adds, “that’s what I’m most excited for, to be able to share my story and show them that there is possibility, that it could be possible for their child too.”