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

From the Author:

BABY E.R. owes its origins to the worst week my family has ever experienced – the seven terrible days in 1992 our newborn daughter, Gabrielle, spent in neonatal intensive care.

Without fully realizing it, we had entered medicine's most cutting edge, the most amazing part of the hospital you'll never hope to visit – the NICU. We stood vigil there, obsessively reading Gaby's chart, asking the nurses and neonatologists endless questions, and watching everything, no matter how hard, even the spinal tap they gave our daughter to test for encephalitis, until she finally came home.

At the time, it never occurred to me to write about this experience: It was too personal, too traumatic. But years later, while giving a talk about a book I had written on the children of juvenile court, I was asked what could be done to make that ailing system work better. My answer was that it moved too slowly, taking months to intervene in the lives of young people in crisis, when hours were called for. It needed to work more like an emergency room, acting quickly to save our troubled children. As I uttered these words, I realized I knew a place that DID work that way to save children, a fascinating, dramatic place that is in every way the antithesis of the bedraggled system of justice I had been immersed in: the neonatal unit that had saved our daughter.

Six years after Gaby's stay there, I returned to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach, California, this time as an observer, where the staff, patients and families shared with me their insights, experiences and lives. The doctors, nurses and others who work there opened the doors for me without conditions, offering an unvarnished look at what they can and can't do. The parents I spent time with shared their incredible moments – good and bad – with measures of candor and courage I will never forget. BABY E.R. is their story.

Visit BABY E.R. at EdwardHumes.com

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.

About this edition

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