She's seven years old and she has such an amazing personality. She's the
youngest of five. She's so funny, she's crazy, and she's really the
littlest girl. Oh yeah that's in the biggest personnel absolutely. Yeah we
took her to her pediatrician on Saturday morning to give her Clairton and
Albuterol and thought maybe was it it was asthma. She didn't have asthma but
that's what they gave her.
We received on Mother's Day that morning a phone call from a nearby hospital that
they had this little girl who had profound septic shock and
I need to get over to that hospital. I'm really worried that this young girl may
die. I jumped out of the ambulance and got to the emergency room and walked
into an extremely difficult and adverse situation with a young girl who now was
saturating about 40%, was on four different medications for her blood
pressure, and looked dusky and gray to a point that it was evident to me that she
would likely die if there was not an intervention. And we hurried
to Children's Hospital. Immediately I stepped out of the room and met her mom
and her dad who were sitting on the floor outside the emergency room and I
got down on the floor with them and I introduced myself and I said that
bringing her back to Children's she could die in the ambulance but that's her only
shot at life and we would need to put her on a machine called ECMO just
support her.
Caroline's heart and lungs together even at the time she arrived were already
showing evidence of advanced failure which was why she was converted onto
ECMO so quickly. When she arrived Caroline had an infection that caused an
injury to her lungs and virtually shut down her
cardiovascular system meaning her heart was no longer pumping blood effectively
around her body. She was getting decreased oxygen delivery to her organs
like her brain and her kidney all of these things are incompatible with life
if they go on for long enough.
Caroline's lungs couldn't take in the appropriate oxygen and release carbon
dioxide in the appropriate fashion. Her heart couldn't pump, this machine could
do that for her.
It was incredible like the first day when she opened her eyes was just she
had been on a paralytic for so long that you freaked, you know. You don't talk to
her, see her eyes for months, yeah it's crazy. When she opened it was such a
relief even though she was still really sick it's just knowing that she was
there. She was still there. Man this kid is a fighter that we need to transition
her off of a breathing tube when she was ready and strong enough to really take
in deep breaths and blow off her carbon dioxide. That's when we transitioned the
breathing tube out and she just she took off. That was it. Within two weeks she was
walking. She's walking against the furniture and then all of a sudden she's
you know I went to the bathroom all by myself.
I think Caroline is a really wonderful example of why we use ECMO because we
can see a child who was healthy suffer an absolutely devastating disease course.
And we can see her healthy again. And when you take care of patients as sick
as Caroline you fully realize that you need these machines but you need the
people and the people to all work well and collaborate well together here.
At Children's this is what we do day in and day out. Having
those capabilities are what makes us unique in this region and makes us one
of the institutions in this country that can provide this level of care. One of
the amazing things about the CVI is the the sort of breadth and scope of both
research and its applications within the clinical population that we can support.
Because if you look at any disease that any child has who spends even a single
night in St. Louis Children's Hospital there are opportunities to better
understand how did this happen, why did it happen, and if we can understand those
how can we prevent it from happening either to other children or to benefit
the child who is spending the night with us to a swift recovery.
I tried to keep everybody's name. Yeah he kept a book of everybody's and the nurse.
There are over 40. Over 40 doctors and over 70 nurses yeah that interacted with Caroline.
A little thank-you for only doctors and nurses and made me feel better.