One thing I found invaluable during our stay in the NICU was the copy they had of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine - Diseases of the Fetus and Infant by Avroy A. Fanaroff and Richard J. Martin.
This is a medical volume used by the Neonatologists as a reference guide. Surprisingly some sections are very easy to read, while others are laden with medical terminology and are quite hard for the layperson to follow. For example, the section on metabolic and endocrine disorders is extremely complex, whilst the section on transfusions is quite easy to read.
I liked it as it helped keep things in check, explaining conditions that our baby was facing, how they are diagnosed, how they can present, how they can be treated, risks for that treatment, alternatives etc. Sometimes the doctors wouldn't mention all the risks to us, or alternatives, so it was nice to be able to point to a section in the book and ask them to explain a bit more in depth.
Its an expensive book to buy, so I'm glad our NICU had a copy of it that they let us read.
Another book we had access to was Neonatology: Management, Procedures, On-Call Problems, Diseases, and Drugs. While nowhere near as comprehensive as the book above, its much more affordable, and I found it useful when I wasn't really interested in skimming over pages and pages of tables, statistics, or historical information and just wanted the nuts and bolts type of information. Again sometimes over my head as a layperson and not a medical professional but quite readable generally.
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