By Eugenia Klopsis
The New York Sun
Copyright 2007 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC
All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: Klopsis is an emergency medical technician on an ambulance in Brooklyn. This column details her observations and experiences. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.
A call comes in to back up medics on a small, dead-end street in Sunset Park. It’s a pediatric job, a “diff breather.”
I read the computer screen mounted between our seats. “A 3-month-old baby,” I tell Bronson.
“Damn it,” he says. His wife is due in two weeks, and he’s jumpy. He hates pediatric jobs because they remind him of everything that can go wrong with a newborn.
I check the computer screen again. I’ve never heard of the street. Neither has Bronson. I check our map as he starts driving in what we figure must be the general vicinity. I narrow it down to a small box on my map labeled M4.
It takes us nine minutes to find it, and Bronson drives past it two times as the street sign is in an awkward spot.
The medics aren’t there yet. “Maybe they got lost,” I say.
Two police officers meet us at the curb and tell us the mother is bringing the baby out. I ask them, “What happened?”
One cop shrugs. “The baby appears fine. But what do I know?”
The mother brings the baby out. She’s Mexican and speaks no English. I show her into the ambulance, and a neighbor who speaks Spanish accompanies her to translate.
I look at the baby. “She seems very small for a 3-month-old,” I say.
The neighbor says the mother was feeding the baby formula when the baby suddenly gasped for air, turned white, got stiff, and coughed up some formula. The mother got nervous and dialed 911.
But the baby seems fine. I suspect “new mommy syndrome,” the unofficial term for when new mothers panic and call for help when none is really needed. Then the neighbor tells me the baby just got out of Lutheran Hospital 10 days earlier. Apparently, she’d been born at 27 weeks, which is just over 5 months, and weighed only 2 pounds at birth.
“She was in a box,” the neighbor says.
I take this to mean the baby had been isolated inside a vent and given synthetically produced surfactant - a substance found in the alveoli of the lungs that prevents them from collapsing. Infants born before 7 months are unable to produce their own surfactant.
The neighbor tells me the baby has had several medical problems and takes a bunch of medications. The mother shows me a list. One medicine is a diuretic normally given to older patients with heart and kidney problems.
These are serious organs to malfunction in a newborn. “So the baby is really 9 months, gestationally,” I say to the neighbor. She blinks at me. I rephrase the question. “She was born three months ago, right?”
The neighbor translates for the mother, then translates for us, “Si. I mean yes.”
“At five and a half months. And she just got out of Lutheran 10 days ago. So she’s just 9 months old.” People assume a baby viable outside the womb at 5 months means a healthy baby. That’s usually not the case. This baby is probably going to have mental handicaps as well as serious physical ailments.
As we listen to the neighbor tell of a kidney operation the baby has already had, Bronson grows paler.
At a pause in the conversation, I clap my hands and say, “Well, let’s go to Lutheran!”
Bronson stands there, frozen. “Let’s go, buddy,” I say, slapping his back. Then I whisper to him, “Get your ass behind the wheel and get this bus rolling.”
I call off the medics who, for some reason, still haven’t shown up. Then I strap the mother onto the stretcher, cradling the baby in her arms.
Throughout the ride, the child appears fine: breathing normal, skin color good, pulse fine. When we get to Lutheran’s pediatric ER, the nurse unwraps the baby and I see a huge growth at her belly button - an umbilical hernia. Apparently it’s not serious, but this, too? On top of everything?
Bronson goes to wait in the ambulance. I leave the ER, get into the bus, and finish writing up my paperwork. Bronson says nothing, just stares out the windshield, looking grim. There’s nothing more disturbing than a sick child.
“Anything can go wrong,” he says, the tension of a soon-to-be new father clenching his jaw muscles. “Anything can happen.”