| |
Lauren Kerr’s second trip to Children’s Hospital Boston’s Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) program, which turns 25 this year, was as a video intern for the Critical Care Division. But her first visit to ECMO came almost immediately after she was born, 19 years earlier. “My mother still hadn’t started labor on her due date,” says Lauren. “During a check-up, the doctors saw signs coming from me that they didn’t like.” Her mother was rushed by ambulance to a hospital in nearby Portland, Maine for an emergency c-section. It turned out that Lauren wasn’t breathing due to meconium aspiration syndrome, a condition in which a baby’s intestinal waste leaks into the amniotic fluid. This could, in turn, obstruct her airway and cause inflammation of her lungs.
Lauren spent three days receiving ECMO, getting oxygen therapy to clear the contamination from her lungs, allowing her to breathe normally. A week later, she was healthy enough to go home, only needing to come back every three months. These check-ups stopped when Lauren was 3, and she didn’t think much about Children’s over the years. “I think I came to one of the annual ECMO reunions, but I only remember it from the pictures my mom took,” she recalls. “We used to get the invitations, but we’ve moved since then, so eventually the mail from Children’s stopped finding us.”
That changed in 2008 when Lauren was preparing to start her freshman year at Colby College. “Out of the blue, we got another invitation to an ECMO reunion, just as I was leaving for school,” she says. Lauren’s mother sent an RSVP to Nancy Craig, RRT, supervisor for the Children’s Respiratory Care Unit. Craig remembered working on Lauren’s case in 1990, and began an email correspondence with her mother to see how Lauren was doing.
“My mom asked Nancy if she knew of any internships at Children’s,” Lauren says. Craig recommended that Lauren write a letter introducing herself to Traci Wolbrink, MD, clinical fellow in the Critical Care Division, who is working on a video project called PICU Without Walls. The videos present hands-on demonstrations of general critical care procedures by Children’s nurses, therapists and doctors. The curriculum, developed for use in developing countries, is tested at National Pediatric Hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The goal is to distribute them to providers around the world at no charge.
Lauren has spent the last few months filming and editing these videos, covering topics like asthma and pharmacology. She’s also worked on dubbing them into other languages, beginning with French. “I actually speak some French, so I’m lucky that was the language we started with,” she says.
One of the highlights of Lauren’s return to Children’s came when Wolbrink asked her if she wanted to revisit the ECMO Program. “It was humbling, and more than a little mind-blowing,” she says. “There was a baby in ECMO who was born healthy, but contracted H1N1. And while I was visiting, Dr. Wolbrink paged a doctor from surgery, who she thought might have worked on my case.” That doctor turned out to be Jay Wilson, MD, director of Surgical Critical Care, and director of ECMO since 1989. “I certainly remember working on Lauren’s case,” says Wilson, who was the doctor who most likely inserted Lauren’s catheter when she was a newborn. During their reunion, Wilson took the opportunity to check that Lauren’s scar had healed well during the last two decades. “I’m starting to hear from a lot of these kids as they grow up,” says Wilson.
“The whole experience has been fascinating,” says Lauren, who returned to Colby in September. She’s now a sophomore and International Studies major, but her work with Wolbrink seems to have sparked other interests. “I’ve always loved film, but this has been my first experience in actually making it,” she says. “It’s been a cool learning experience.” Lauren is also grateful to have had the chance to revisit her past at the ECMO Program. “I don’t know how many babies have been saved by ECMO in 25 years, but I’m glad to be one of the ones who got to come back and say thank you.”
|
|
|
|
