Word: lungfuls
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Young James McCIain was pathetically small and weak when he started his family's procession into the Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa three years ago. The boy had suffered since birth from a narrowing of the valve between his heart and lungs, and a hole in the septum (wall) between the right and left upper chambers of the heart. Surgeon Joe Burge Jr. hooked the ten-year-old up to a heart-lung machine, closed the septal defect and widened the valve. Though still short, Jimmy is now a sturdy fifth-grader...
...first word to reporters was that mother and child were doing nicely. But in the operating room, doctors knew differently. The President's son was suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung ailment common, and often fatal, to premature babies. Within minutes after the birth, the doctors called for Father John Cahill, an Air Force chaplain, who baptized the baby Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. Then began a desperate fight to save the infant's life...
...Children's Medical Center, doctors suggested a radical move: put Patrick in a huge hyperbaric pressure chamber that would force oxygen into his lungs (see MEDICINE). This hyperbaric chamber had been used in 28 open-heart surgery cases during the past 17 months-but never for a lung ailment. The President agreed...
...superhuman feat of changing from an aquatic parasite, drawing oxygen from its mother's blood, to an in dependent air breather. If pregnancy is too short, these hormone triggers work weakly or not at all. The preemie delivered by caesarean has an especially urgent need for efficient lung-clearing reflexes, be cause the fluid in his lungs at the moment of delivery is al most certain to be contaminated with blood from the operation...
Ironically, as long as the baby lived, there was no way for even the most expert pediatricians to be sure what was happening in his lungs. They could tell whether the lungs were sufficiently inflated. (They were.) If there was a rattle in the stethoscope, they could be pretty certain of pneumonia. (There was none.) But the most likely and most life-threatening development was one that the doctors could not see and had no way of detecting for certain in a living patient: the development of a mysterious membrane around the inside walls of the lungs, which makes...