Sometimes God allows you to function and think beyond your normal abilities!
Got a call after midnight about a 3 hour old baby who was referred from another hospital with severe breathing difficulty.
I saw the baby and thought he had a pneumothorax – air leaking out of the lungs and into the chest – on the right side.
Its not a very straight-forward diagnosis, but for some reason I was sure of it.
I called the XRay people to the ER itself (normally we admit them and then take the XRay) and also convinced my consultant that we should admit the baby althhough they didnt have much money to pay.
We quickly shifted the baby up and soon the XRay images were available – it was indeed a pneumothorax.
The treatment was an emergency as baby had severe breathing difficulty. I quicklty informed the consultant and yold me I wanted to drain it with a needkle and then insert a tube. He told me to go ahead and seemed confident that I would face no problems.
Although I have done it many times in older children, I’d done the procedure only a handful of times in the Newborn Nursery.
Anyway, we did it and the procedure ws uneventful and the baby improved quite dramatically.
I felt relieved.
Guess who was guiding my hands?