BABY ER : The Heroic Doctors and Nurses Who Perform Medicine's Tiniest Miracles - Hardcover

Humes, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068486410X ISBN 13: 9780684864105

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

A portrait of life in the neonatal ICU at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center offers an inside look at the doctors, nurses, patients, and parents who live, work, and survive in this dramatic setting.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Humes, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for specialized reporting and the PEN Center USA award for research nonfiction, is the author of five other books, including Mean Justice, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court, and Mississippi Mud. He lives in Southern California.

Reviews

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Humes (Mean Justice; etc.) spent a year observing life inside the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach, Calif. In this heart-stopping account of medical prowess, triumph and tragedy, Humes writes about 11 critically ill premature babies (seven of whom survive). According to the author, premature births are on the rise for a number of reasons, including the wide use of fertility treatments, which have resulted in many more high-risk premature multiple births. Many premature births, however, are unanticipated; in some cases, it is unclear why they occur, while in others, a mother's drug addiction or undetected genetic disorder plays a role. The author portrays both the commitment and skill of the medical professionals who perform technologically advanced surgical and treatment miracles on newborns who often cannot eat or breathe on their own, singling out the indispensable role of the overworked and underpaid neonatal nurses, who provide not only physical care to infants, but also emotional support to the parents. Humes is also clear about the economic realities of neonatology, "a growth business"Awhich he attributes to insurance companies' fear of denying coverage in the face of negative publicity and huge public support for this special and specialized area of medicineAand NICUs' resulting profitability, "which is why they are being scarfed up by Wall Street medical conglomerates." Readers who are drawn to tales of medical emergencies and victories will take to this title. There will be a 20-city radio satellite tour and local publicity in southern California, where the author resides. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

By concentrating on infants in the ER, Humes adds uniquely to the literature on that most emotional of medical theaters. Humes' daughter was in the ER for "seven terrible days," and what he saw and felt moved him to write about the doctors, nurses, parents, and children who come to a baby ER--specifically, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Miller Children's Hospital, Long Beach, California. Miller's NICU offers two major features: a new, "step-down" arrangement, in which babies can be moved to a less intensive area of the NICU when they become stronger, and an administrative arrangement controlled by doctors. Humes describes the varied NICU experiences of several babies and their parents; some end happily, some don't. His accounts of the relationships between parents, nurses (the backbone of the staff), and physicians are empathetic and never soap-operatic. The people he portrays are real, and Humes' treatment makes them appealing. Meanwhile, the administrative problems and takeover pressures he also portrays provide lessons in contemporary medicine, good and bad. William Beatty
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Admission History and Physical:

Allman, BB
Day of Life: 1
Days in NICU: 1
Condition: Critical

Robert Allman races down the hospital hallway, following the plastic embossed signs leading him toward his son, a baby born far too soon, a frighteningly motionless child who had been swept from the delivery room inside the heated acrylic case of a premature-infant transporter, bound for something called the "Nick-you." That was how the nurses pronounced it, turning the acronym into words, confusing Robert until his stress-fogged mind pieced it together. Nick-you...NICU. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

How could he have forgotten that? They had told him about the Nick-you, showed it to him, readied him for it -- though that brief tour seemed a lifetime ago, which in a way it was. His son's life had not yet begun back then. Now the baby was here. And everything was going to hell.

Robert thought he was prepared for this moment, but he wasn't, he realized, not even close. Both he and Amalia had been lulled by nine uneventful days of hospital bed rest, her leaking amniotic fluid and premature labor stopped in its tracks by powerful drugs. They were buying precious time, the doctors said. Every extra day in the womb meant the baby's survival chances would increase. Each day they held out without rushing to the delivery room, each day Amalia spent confined to bed twenty-three hours a day like some prisoner in solitary, meant two fewer days in the Nick-you for the baby, the doctors said. If they could somehow hold out for six weeks, they'd be home free: The dangers and uncertainties of premature birth would vanish like a nightmare at daybreak.

And it had looked for a time as if that might happen. Amalia Allman had been determined to keep that baby in, by sheer force of will if necessary. She had always been the strong one, Robert would say, the one who had grown up first and had helped him do the same. Whereas he would have gone stark raving mad, she had settled in with her books, her cross-stitching, his Game Boy, camped out for the long haul. When she had made it past the first forty-eight hours, a nurse had told her she was over the hump: Half the premature labor cases never made it to this point -- she was doing great.

But today, day ten, out of nowhere, the contractions had kicked back in with a vengeance, excruciating and insistent, unstoppable this time despite the IVs, the breathing exercises, the prayers. The delivery had been awful. Despite the baby's half-normal size, his shoulders had been turned in such a way that he had gotten stuck. The neonatologist had stood poised at the foot of the operating table to receive him with a blue warming blanket in hand, exchanging worried glances with her nurse as the obstetrician struggled to extract the little boy. The fragile baby had been bruised from head to toe in the process, his head pulled into a frightening cone by the force of the vacuum extractor used to wrest him from the womb. He had cried, but just for a moment. Then the neonatal team had gone to work, the cries silenced by a plastic tube and the sudden, searing flow of pure oxygen down his small windpipe.

Now all Robert could think of were the stuffed animals he hadn't had time to buy, the baby's room that was nowhere near ready, the sheer normalcy of their shattered plans, all of it contrasted with the image of that tiny bruised baby -- oh, God, he was so bruised -- who hadn't cried or moved or even looked quite real as he entered the world. He and Amalia had barely gotten a look at him. Holding their son had been out of the question: He was headed to Baby ER.

Now Robert simply wants to find him, the vivid cartoon characters and nursery verse adorning the corridors of the children's hospital passing by in a surreal blur. "Go," Amalia had told him as they stitched her up, "I'll be fine. Just go. Stay with him." And so he dodges visitors and gurneys, desperate and helpless and alone, running toward his new son, toward the unknown.

Copyright © 2000 by Edward Humes

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068486410X
• ISBN 13: 9780684864105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336