Wednesday, February 29, was a day that Sophie would never
forget. Walking back from spending the night in the parents’
lounge, she looked through the windows of Pod C. Three nurses
stood over Danny’s incubator examining his hands and feet.
Sophie had seen this before when Kim was looking for a place
to start an IV. But three nurses? Not a good sign. Sophie limped
over as quickly as she could. She’d gotten rid of the crutches, but
her ankle was far from healed.
“What’s going on?”
Kim pulled her aside and told her that Danny was okay but
needed a little more oxygen than normal. She explained that
he was anemic; his red blood count was low. It was not unusual
in NICU babies. Between all the blood tests they drew and the
normal physiologic drop in every baby’s hemoglobin at about this
age, it was to be expected. In Danny’s case, though, his anemia
was bad enough to cause problems with his oxygen level.
“Basically, Sophie, he needs a blood transfusion.”
“A blood transfusion?” Sophie repeated, not fully grasping
what Kim was saying.
Kim nodded.
“Okay.” Sophie tried to speed up her mental processing. “I’ll
give him my blood. I don’t want him to get some stranger’s blood.”
“Unfortunately, you can’t do that. It’ll take too long. It takes
days for direct donation, and Danny can’t wait days.”
“Isn’t there something I can do?”
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“Not really, Sophie, other than try not to worry. Blood these
days is super safe. It’s screened for everything—HIV, hepatitis,
West Nile, you name it. He’ll be fine.”
Sophie was skeptical but had little choice given Danny’s need
for more oxygen. Kim had been gradually dialing up the oxygen
concentration just in the last fifteen minutes. She agreed to the
transfusion, then called and left a message on Adam’s voicemail.
There was another baby in the pod who also needed a
transfusion. Sophie saw the same thing happening with that
baby—nurses searching for IV sites on the baby’s feet and hands,
and one of the nurses discussing it with the parents.
The transfusions on both babies took four hours—a slow
infusion of only a fraction of a unit of blood. Kim and the other
nurse monitored their patients closely, initially checking their
vital signs every fifteen minutes.
“We do this,” Kim explained to Sophie, “to make sure Danny
doesn’t have an allergic reaction. But don’t worry, he’s handling
it fine.”
Both babies did well during their transfusions.
Until the following day.
Danny started having frequent episodes of apnea. He stopped
breathing, causing his alarm to go off, and either Sophie or
Kim, or any nurse who was nearby, would give him a firm pat on
the back to remind him to breathe. These episodes began hap
pening every ten minutes. Within an hour, his apnea alarms were
going off every two to three minutes.
Frustrated and worried, Sophie sat at her baby’s incubator,
biting her nails. “I thought the blood was supposed to make him
better, not worse,” Sophie snapped at Kim.
Over the next two hours, Danny needed increasing amounts
of oxygen to keep his oxygen levels up, until finally the medical
team decided to put him back on the ventilator.
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Sophie called Adam. “You’ve got to get here now. Danny’s
taken a turn for the worse.”
“I’m on my way.”
Sophie fumed. She was livid at Kim.
“Is this what the blood did to him? Made him worse? I never
should have agreed to the transfusion.” She looked around the
pod. “And why is that other baby doing so great?” She pointed
in the direction of the other baby. “Did he get the same blood?”
“I don’t know.” Kim tried to comfort Sophie, but all that
came out was “I don’t know why Danny is doing this. And the
doctors don’t understand either.”
“Maybe it’s an allergic reaction? Did anybody think of that?”
“It’s not. That would have happened while he was getting the
blood, not now,” Kim patiently explained.
Sophie took a deep breath in and blew it out hard. “I’m sorry,
Kim. I shouldn’t be mad at you. It’s just . . . just so horrible.”
The doctors ran tests on Danny. They ran cultures on his
blood, his urine, his spinal fluid. They poked him with needles,
examined him from head to toe, and still were unable to come up
with a reason why he wasn’t getting better.
The other baby showed signs that the blood had helped him.
But not Danny. Somehow, the blood had made him worse
