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What can happen when everything goes right.
"EXCELLENT! THAT'S GREAT. I'M VERY
HAPPY TO HELP OUT," SAID MICHAEL BLACK, MD, UPON HEARING THAT AN
NYT-TV VIDEO-JOURNALIST WANTED TO FILM HIM THE FOLLOWING MORNING.
Black, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, would
be operating on a three-month-old baby girl the crew had followed
since she arrived at Stanford by ambulance and was admitted to the
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital neonatal intensive care unit
-- the NICU. "Open-heart baby" as she became code-named by the crew,
had a condition known colloquially as a "hole in the heart." The
blood vessels between her heart and lungs had formed abnormally
and blood from the lungs, instead of entering the left chamber of
the heart, was coming in through the right chamber and only leaking
into the correct chamber through the hole. As a result, oxygenated
and unoxygenated blood were mixing, starving the rest of her little
body of oxygen.
The video-journalist Kat Patterson and I rendezvoused
at 6:30 a.m. for the surgery. She filmed the two anesthesiologists
wheeling the young patient out of the NICU accompanied by her parents
and two other family members, while I hung back trying to stay out
of the shot. In the operating room, baby Rodriguez was being prepared
for the operation ahead. Tubes and monitors were attached all over
her body while the operating room nurses, Alicia Barnes and Sharon
Grover-Inman, readied the surgical instruments and accessories.
My job was to watch Kat to make sure she didn't get in the way while
she was filming, or brush against any of the sterile materials.
Actually, Kat had filmed surgical operations in the past and understood
sterile procedure and the importance of not touching anything. The
two of us survived the four-hour operation without embarrassing
ourselves, unlike the cardiologist who almost took the sterile drapes
with him when wheeling the echocardiography machine out of the room.
Black seemed relaxed and friendly in front of the
camera, explaining procedures and pointing out critical features
during the surgery. The operation went well -- its success vividly
confirmed by Black when he pulled back the baby's drapery to reveal
her skin, formerly sallow, glowed a healthy pink.
Two weeks later she went home with her parents, no
longer "open-heart baby," but just a happy, healthy child. -- KRISTIN
WEIDENBACH
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