Death has lost its sting

Oh… do I ever have a story to tell you!!

This story starts in a third world country… the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere to be exact. A place called Haiti. A place where food can be scarce and soap is not in many households. But let’s zero in… because this story takes place at a beautiful haven of hope and peace and life. A compound built to save sick babies from the devastations of poverty-stricken illnesses. Let’s take one more step closer to the story… we’ll go inside a pharmacy on this compound that hosts more supplies than I dreamed could exist in a third world country. A pharmacy that acts as an exam room, an area for medical resources, and, most importantly on this particular day, a make-shirt pediatric emergency room.

A baby was noted to have dark urine yesterday morning. This baby is relatively healthy since arrival, and had not even suffered from malnutrition in his early days. But dark urine is a bad sign to display because it means that dehydration probably already exists. We tried giving him a bottle of Pedialyte because we wanted to check his urine for perhaps an infection and see just how concentrated this baby was. But the urine sample didn’t come fast enough and we realized this baby was in need of an IV fast. Babies have a curve with dehydration- often by the time you see pretty obvious signs, they are on the slippery slope of quickly fading from your hands. Amy and I started looking for an IV, but his veins had already essentially disappeared. We kept trying to find a vein and going for whatever we could, but nothing was working and he started to stop responding well.

The situation had turned ominous and we both knew it. But just in the nick of time, in walks Jenn. We elected her to be the official pain-inflictor for the next precious moments and we desperately continued searching for an IV. If you can keep a baby crying and conscious, you have much better odds of coming out alive. She flicked fingers and toes and kept that baby crying relatively strong. What is incredibly interesting is that every time she’d look away and lose eye contact, that baby would start to go unconscious. It just blows my mind to understand JUST how incredibly important eye contact is to a baby. I seriously wonder if we didn’t have her keeping eye contact and inflicting pain on the baby if we would have just lost that baby. Jenn saved the day! But let’s continue on because this story is not close to being over yet…

Just days before, a wonderful doctor (Jeff Monda) had brought us something called intraosseous IVs for situations exactly as critical as this. This baby was essentially coming in and out of life… but neither Amy nor I had ever put an intraosseous IV in before. This type of IV has to go all the way into the bone marrow in just an exact spot on their tiny legs. This baby needed this IV or he was not going to make it, so we pulled out the big, terrifying needle and prayed to God to help us. I calculated it out the best I could and pushed it into his leg- from what I could feel, I thought it maybe went in. Let me preface this with that I was shaking--- like REALLY shaking. Adrenaline pumping. Life or death. Here we go….

As I pulled the needle out to see if I was in the bone, my hand could barely steady the needle enough to let go of it to set it done. We attached the flush and attempted to see if we were in, but it didn’t flush super easy so I tried pulling it out a little bit… just that tiny bit of messing with it made it come right out and we depressingly realized we might not have many options left now. Amy grabbed another intraosseous IV and pushed in his other knee.. at this point, this baby was getting sternal rubs every other second to keep him totally leaving us and keeping his heart going. The IV flushed decently and we felt like the world was going to be okay… so we hooked this IV up to fluids and started the bolus—seconds later, we realized the IV was infiltrating and we had to pull it immediately. As depressing as it was to have lost those IVs, we realized that the pain had done him a world of good in terms of staying with us. So we went back to searching for anything… ANYTHING to start an IV in. NO such luck.

Moments were getting more and more threatening. We hadn’t given up, what options did we have left? This baby’s eyes were rolling back and he’d just be gone essentially. Jenn stayed with him and kept giving him sternal rubs and flicks everywhere she could find that was painful. Then… then it happened….

(Now let me start with this next part of the story is very true, just slightly exaggerated in true Sanguine fashion………..!)

That moment had come when we knew that baby didn’t have any fight left. We all knew it. We knew if we didn’t get that baby fluids at that moment, it was it. Survival is a fight hard won sometimes. That moment held a mixture of honest prayer, tearing open another intraosseous IV package, and suctioning out the vomiting that also comes with those final moments. I leapt across the pharmacy, needle out and ready to discover bone marrow once and for all… uncalculated. Unprepared. It felt like it went in, but so did it the times before….. I pulled the needle out and saw no blood. My heart dropped…

But then… then it happened! Bone marrow slowly crept out of its hiding place and showed its crimson face… It had worked! The final ninja moves to barely make it in time had actually worked! By this time, our supplies were so scattered and disorganized that it seemed impossible to find what we needed to get him a bolus. But Amy did it… at the exact second when the bone marrow was about to exit the catheter, she handed me exactly what I needed to hook up a bolus of fluids.

We still had to keep giving him sternal rubs to keep him breathing---- moments felt like seconds, or it could have been seconds that felt like moments… I’m not sure how long it was until the bolus worked and he stopped rolling his eyes back. But I do know this… moments turned into hours of holding this intraosseous IV in place… on that cold pharmacy floor, Jenn sat holding the baby and I sat holding the IV in place while Amy stood up on a cabinet so the IV bag of fluids could have the highest pressure to get into this baby fast. In that room there was three girls… just 22, 23, and 24. Barely out of college. Hardly qualified to anything close to what we do sometimes. But God uses us, despite our weaknesses and inexperience, to do things that we’d never do on our own otherwise.

This next picture is an adorable picture of Amy's faithful hand serving as a pillow for this baby to rest on for quite some time and Jenn's hand serving as a faithful hand to cling to for the baby's next precious moments of life....

For 6 hours we stayed with the baby. We were not losing that baby that day. Once we had him stable enough, we all had a good ol’ Haitian bottle of Coca Cola and rice and beans and laughed and felt relieved as we talked. I’m not sure if this is exactly correct, but that baby had died several times over earlier that morning. You can't help but laugh out of relief that that he survived such a violent episode. Finally after some time, we finally found a single vein in his scalp to start an IV on. As soon as we had that one, I had to switch over the fluids pretty quickly. As soon as I disconnected the fluids from the intraosseous IV, the bone marrow started seeping its way towards the exit. I (as the story goes..) yelled for Jenn to quickly pull it… According to rumor, she didn’t know how to pull it out, but urgency in my voice told her to make her move quickly. And she did. All was well.

So there it is… The infamous story of a day better spent! The story of ninja moves and life actually defeating death! The story of three college age girls in a third world country praying away the demons of fatality. But most of all, it is the story of a baby that God shed His blood to save… it is a story quite appropriate for Easter as that baby found life “after” death because of a God who has long since destroyed the sting of evil’s ultimate kiss.