Little Miracle Baby

One day late in June, I did a refresher for the two students I’d most recently trained at work in the use of the electronic charting system. I thought it might make more sense after they’d been using the system for awhile, and I could tell that some pieces of information were making sense to them for the first time. In the afternoon, the staff chaplains had our monthly meeting, and in the evening, Tom and I watched half of the Democratic Presidential candidates debate online. (That is, we watched the whole thing; half of the 24 candidates were debating.)

My right knee at that point had been hurting for about a week, which can happen if I slack off on my exercises, or perhaps for no discernible reason at all. I’ve been in physical therapy for this at least three times over the years. My father reminded me that the original injury likely was one I received at age 23 or 24, when I worked for PG&E, in the general construction department, when I fell off a telephone pole and got a lot of big slivers and also gave my knee a good thump. The co-worker supervising my pole-climbing practice said, after I fell, “Get back up the pole, Bugwalk!” Today I would say, “No, I won’t!”, but back then, I followed instructions, and fell maybe four times in a row. There was a worker’s comp claim, and it was determined that PG&E was at fault, and in fact permanently responsible for my knee, though I suspect if I called them up and asked them to pay for physical therapy, it would be an uphill battle.

Usually my knee feels better as soon as I get back to my stretching and strengthening exercises, and this time was no exception. In fact, my knee felt so much better that one day at work, I walked up the stairs from the second floor to my unit, on the tenth floor, with no ill effects. Accordingly, after lunch, I did the same thing again, and by the time I got to the tenth floor, I was in excruciating pain, which refused to budge, no matter how faithfully I did my exercises. The night Tom and I watched the debates, I could hardly walk. One thing that made it noticeably worse was sitting down; every time I stood up again, there was a sharp uptick in pain.

Once in a while, I get extremely dizzy, which I attribute to stress. Toward the end of Clinical Pastoral Education, I had three or four days in a row of dizziness, and the night Tom and I watched the debate, I suddenly got extremely dizzy just before bedtime. During the night, I sat up for some reason or other, and noticed that I still felt awfully dizzy.

At 2:10 a.m., my work pager went off: a dying baby was in need of baptism. I was genuinely afraid I was going to fall while making my way to work and end up in the ED myself, but somehow I got there, painfully folding my knees to get into a cab and painfully extracting myself again at the hospital. It was the worst possible night for the pager to go off: both sitting and standing were problematic.

The baby in question was one day old and had already coded (stopped breathing) at least once. The doctor had explained to his parents that he would not live. I performed the baptism and then I prayed for the baby, saying, in part, something like, “Of course we pray for a miracle, but if we can’t have the miracle we want, we give thanks for this miracle: that this baby is alive and breathing right this minute.”

Later I was kind of slapping my forehead over that: so often clinicians have to temper a family’s hope for a miracle—why on earth did I introduce the idea myself? Also, it was kind of stupid to give thanks for the breath of a baby when that baby was only breathing due to being on a ventilator, and would die once the ventilator was disconnected. However, the parents seemed comforted.

I spoke with the doctor while we waited for other family members to arrive to hold the baby for the first and last time. The doctor said that during his residency, 80 babies a year died. He studied how to help families with bereavement and learned that it’s important for family members to see the efforts to revive a patient who has coded. He talked about how, even if they know a baby will die, they give the baby a couple of days on life support, to give the parents a chance to start to come to terms with saying goodbye.

I asked him what he does to care for his own emotional well-being and he said that he doesn’t need to do this frequently, but now and then, it’s essential for him to go unburden himself to one of his two or three best friends.

Three days later was my next work day. I was sure the electronic health record (EHR) would say that the baby had died at the age of one or two days, but the baby was still alive. I went to visit, and found the baby doing well, with thrilled family members at his bedside. When I told a nurse this story, she cooed at the baby, “You little miracle baby!”

Update: this baby, who was “cold and blue” upon arrival at NICU went home “in good condition” a couple of days ago.