Word: oxygenate
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...full-term pregnancy, a woman's hormone balance changes drastically to bring on labor. By a mechanism not yet understood in detail, these same changes, transmitted through the placenta, prepare the baby for the 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...
...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 it impossible for the lung cells to take in enough oxygen from inhaled air and remove the carbon dioxide coming from the blood...
...Extra Oxygen. Because the membrane looks glassy, this condition is called hyaline (from the Greek for glassy) membrane disease. But the pathologist who does a post-mortem examination on a baby is the only man who sees the glassy membrane. If the baby pulls through his first three or four days-usually aided by extra oxygen in his Isolette, and sometimes by a forced-breathing tube pushed down his windpipe through a cut in the neck-the membrane presumably disappears. Along with it go the respiratory difficulties. A baby who survives this crisis usually suffers no permanent damage, and develops...
...Patrick Kennedy's case, the extra oxygen in his Isolette was not enough. Dr. Drorbaugh called in an imaginative Harvard colleague, Pediatric Surgeon William F. Bernhard, who has pioneered in the use of a hyperbaric (high-pressure) chamber to drench a patient's system with oxygen (TIME, Feb. 15). Developed by the Navy for training submariners and decompressing divers, the 29-ft. by 8-ft. tank has three compartments, can hold as many as seven doctors, nurses and technicians as well as the patient...
With its main door open, the chamber was at normal atmospheric pressure when a nurse picked up Baby Patrick and carried him inside, still in his Isolette. Drs. Drorbaugh and Bernhard went in too. Technicians locked the doors tight and turned on pure oxygen under pressure. Soon the baby and his squad of hovering attendants in an inner compartment were breathing almost pure oxygen at a pressure of three atmospheres. At this pressure, oxygen dissolves more readily into the fluid part of the blood (like carbon dioxide dissolving in water to make soda). The doctors hoped that this extra oxygen...