Heritage Snapshot: Part 86

One afternoon three-year-old Raymond complained to his mother that he did not feel well. By 10:00 that night, he was breathing with difficulty and had a temperature of 102 degrees. His parents decided to take him to a doctor. On the way to a local community hospital, Raymond's temperature jumped to 104 degrees and he began wheezing loudly. At the hospital, Raymond's physicians, thinking at first that he had a severe case of croup, put him inside an oxygen tent. But at 2:00 a.m. Raymond stopped breathing. The physician on call performed an emergency tracheotomy and decided to transfer him to Loma Linda University Medical Center. There Raymond's illness was diagnosed as severe viral pneumonia. To aid his breathing, medical personnel connected him to a respirator and gave him the maximum safe amount of medication. During the next week Raymond's condition worsened. His physicians tried one kind of respirator after another until Raymond was using the most sophisticated respirator locally available. His physicians knew of only one other respirator that might work, a newly imported Danish model available only from a research laboratory in Rockville, Maryland. They would have to get it fast as Raymond's life depended on it. They phoned the office of Congressman Jerry L. Pettis and asked for United States Air Force assistance. Within minutes a C-141 "Starlifter" was diverted from a training mission in South Carolina to pick up the respirator at Andrews Air Force Base near Rockville. Two hours later it was on a transcontinental mercy flight, the only cargo aboard a jet transport capable of hauling 64,000 pounds of freight. The big four-engine jet touched down for only 15 minutes and then, with 84,000 pounds of thrust, it thundered back into the sky in a race against time, heading at almost 600 miles per hour toward Southern California. Just five hours later, the respirator was helping Raymond breathe. It was to be his life support for the next month and a half. During that six week period, his heart stopped beating twice, his lungs collapsed several times, and he was given massive doses of medication and special nursing care 24 hours a day. Although he showed signs of recovery, Raymond was unable to cope with the intense pain and he regressed psychologically. He would not walk or talk. A child psychiatrist suggested to his mother that she take care of him as though he were an infant and gradually help him learn how to be a three-year-old again. He responded encouragingly and was dismissed from the Medical Center three weeks later. It was a rewarding drama, satisfying because of the patient's recovery. Yet perhaps more memorable and impressive was the unlimited tender concern, the professional skills, the time and love expended on behalf of a little boy by a Congressman and his staff, the United States Air Force, physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, technologists, aides, and other employees throughout the Medical Center who kept asking, "How's little Raymond doing today?" Patients are sometimes unaware of the concern expressed for them. On one of Raymond's worst nights, a housekeeper tiptoed into Raymond's darkened room and stood at the foot of his bed, unaware that the boy's mother was sitting nearby. He gazed at the unconscious child for about five minutes and said softly, "Kid, if I only could, I'd give you my lung." But he had only one lung himself.