A Gift of God in the Hands of a Pediatrician
By Dr. Robert L. Goddard Jr., a surgeon from Duncanville, Texas who served at Karolyn Kempton Memorial Christian Hospital in Togo
My attention was drawn to the delivery room as I heard the hustle and bustle of medical personnel. I looked through the curtain at a limp blue newborn who had just been passed into the hands of the pediatrician. Gingerly he began to work against all odds. Hearing a faint heartbeat through his stethoscope, he was spurred on to intubate and assist the baby with breathing
The mother lay on the delivery table looking with longing eyes toward her newborn. Were her worst fears going to come to pass? She had lost one newborn earlier. People came by consoling her, at times speaking as though she had already lost this one. But the hands of the pediatrician kept working against all odds, rubbing the baby down with a blue surgical towel, trying to stimulate her to breathe.
After the mother was moved to the ward, the pediatrician continued to work with the infant. Dripping with sweat, he called for more lights to warm the baby. Time wore on. As a surgeon, I watched the hands of the pediatrician, fascinated by his delicate work as he placed an IV in a threadlike vein in the baby's hand. People often talk about the hands of a surgeon, but as I watched the hands of the pediatrician, I felt as if my hands were all thumbs.
An hour later, the baby was still limp and listless, but the heartbeat continued as we wordlessly appealed to the Lord to save her. Because the pediatrician assisted her breathing, the baby was slightly pinker now. To break the silence, I asked about her APGAR status. "We're still at three," he said. The APGAR scale goes from zero (dead) to 10 (healthy). This little baby had been a one after one minute, a three after five minutes, and still three after an hour.
By now we both feared making the decision of whether to continue. Even when she began to draw an occasional spontaneous respiration, we wondered if prolonged hypoxia had caused irreversible brain damage. We placed her in an incubator and wondered if our next call would bring the news that her breathing had stopped.
The day's work required that we move on. I went to the clinic to help triage the many sick kids who had been brought in, then went home for lunch and a few minutes of rest.
At 2 o'clock I looked in the incubator, and to my amazement she was thrashing all four extremities wildly and crying at the top of her lungs. Then the pediatrician, Dr. Russ Ebersole, arrived and said, "The angel of life must have visited this baby while we were at lunch!" We had witnessed a miracle.
A few days later I observed the mother beaming from ear to ear, holding her little one in her arms. "What is her name?" I asked. She turned to the nursing staff and replied, "I'm waiting for the doctor to name the baby."
After consulting with the staff for some language advice, I said, "Mawena-Gift of God."
Reprinted from On Call, Spring 2004, by permission of Samaritan's Purse © 2004.
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