Saving the Smallest
What medicine can do now for babies born too soon.
Published in DukeMed, Spring/Summer 2006. Download PDF file here.
Of the hundred odd nights they spent in Duke Hospital’s intensive care nursery, the one Jim and Tara Glandorf learned that their son was showing signs of kidney failure may have been the worst.
Aiden had weighed just two pounds when he was born at 26 weeks with twin sister Olivia, who was even tinier but much stronger than her brother.
Modern medicine had already saved their young lives more than once. Both had spent time on special ventilators and received surfactant, a drug specially developed to open up their immature lungs — a therapy Duke neonatologists helped make possible.
Aiden had also weathered two spinal taps to test for meningitis and survived bleeding in his brain, a serious and common problem in extremely low birth weight infants.
But that night, Aiden turned a shade of gray, and “My husband just lost it,” says Tara. “We thought we were going to lose our son. A doctor came in and didn’t say anything, but just put her arm around Jim. There were many babies in the nursery that needed attention; it just meant the world to us that she would do that.”