When paramedics found her, the newborn infant, wrapped in plastic and stuffed in a freezer for hours, looked like a lifeless rag doll.
She had no vital signs, no pulse. Her purplish skin was cold and stiff.
“It looked like a dead child,” said Dr. Nathan Anderson, the emergency room physician on duty at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn Friday when the child was brought in. There seemed little hope.
But on Tuesday, the infant was sucking on a bottle in the neonatal intensive-care ward of Loyola Medical Center, a seemingly normal baby ready to leave the hospital in a week. Although questions remain about her long-term prospects, doctors seem optimistic.
“So far we have a normal brain-wave test, normal brain scan, she looks great,” said Dr. Jonathan Muraskas, a Loyola neonatologist.
That the baby survived her ordeal is a miracle, but not one borne of futuristic science and medicine. No experimental techniques or equipment were used to save her.
Instead, a small team of doctors and nurses used heating lamps and warm water baths to revive the infant from the depths of hypothermia, the physiological condition of low body temperature. A normal body reading is about 98.6 degrees; the baby was a stony 61.
Doctors have a fair understanding of hypothermia and how exposure to severe, prolonged cold slowly brings the body’s functions to a dead stop. If caught in time, a person can be brought back from what doctors describe as a state of suspended animation.
“I would say that’s one of the lowest temperatures ever recorded for a successful resuscitation,” said Dr. Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and hypothermia researcher at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny General Hospital.
Authorities are not saying much about the baby or its mother, who lived in Berwyn with her two other small children in a large brick bungalow-style house.
The mother, who authorities have declined to identify, has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Police and prosecutors won’t release information until the Cook County state’s attorney’s office decides whether to file charges in the case.
Police and paramedics found the little girl Friday morning after the mother was treated for vaginal bleeding by Dr. Anderson. He said it was obvious that she had just given birth, and he started asking her questions about where her baby was. Very shortly, a staff member was on the telephone to police.
More Top Picks Black Plusdecker 12v Max Drill Driver Bdcdd12c
When paramedics Scott Dreyer and Steven Gregory arrived at the house, police already were there, but had not found the infant. It was Dreyer who opened the freezer.
“Inside was the garbage bag,” he said. “It still felt soft.”
Inside the plastic bag was a bloody towel. Inside the towel, the newborn.
“My first thought was: `How can anybody do this?’ ” Gregory said. “But you really don’t have time to be horrified. You’ve got to do your job.”
There have been scores of dramatic recoveries from hypothermia, including the celebrated case of 4-year-old Jimmy Tontlewicz, who fell into icy Lake Michigan in 1984. Submerged for at least 20 minutes, the boy had no apparent heartbeat or respiration when rescuers brought him out. He survived because the intense cold practically shut down his system, limiting the demand for oxygen.
Some hypothermia victims have survived underwater for as long as 48 minutes. But experts say they can’t find a case comparable to the baby’s. Nor can they completely explain it.
Bailes, one of the doctors who treated Jimmy Tontlewicz, said the Berwyn baby’s case is astounding for several reasons. First, infants are born with inadequate temperature regulators, making them extremely sensitive to cold. Second, all known cases of deep hypothermia involve being submerged in water.
Researchers have theorized that the water triggers a mammalian diving reflex in which blood is diverted away from the arms, legs and surface areas of the body and held in reserve to protect the brain and the heart.
“This is very unusual because we haven’t had much experience with people being stuck in freezers where they are not completely immersed in cold fluid,” Bailes said.
Because the doctors said they’ve never dealt with an infant in this situation, they extrapolate from adult hypothermia cases and basic knowledge of neonatology to explain the infant’s survival.
Perhaps being an infant-a hardy, otherwise healthy newcomer-helped the little girl, they say.
“There is a belief that the neurological system of a baby, being undeveloped to a large extent, is more resistant to certain kinds of insults,” said Dr. Stephen Fernbach, a nationally prominent neonatologist from Santa Clara, Calif. “Being born is not an easy thing and I think that nature protects babies by making them more resistant.”
Dreyer was more succinct: “It was like a miracle.”
After Dreyer and his partner made their awful discovery, they began treatment on the way to the hospital by placing a tube down the baby’s throat to deliver oxygen. They also put the baby on a heart monitor but didn’t get a reading. There was only some sporadic electrical activity.
Having five minutes’ warning, Anderson and the rest of the emergency room staff were ready. Though they weren’t experts in hypothermia, they knew what to expect: a lifeless body. But while there was no heartbeat, there was still the minimal electrical activity.
“We knew we had a chance, but this was my first experience with this,” Anderson said. “We’ve handled cold people before and sick newborns, but this was a cold newborn.”
Doctors attached a ventilator to the baby’s windpipe to pump in oxygen and draw out carbon dioxide, and they kept working on her heart.
The team brought out everything it could find to begin the warming process. The child was put on a heating pad and blankets and covered with warm packs. Warming lamps were turned on. Tubes of warm water were run through her stomach and bladder as well.
It was a slow process, but her temperature climbed a bit every 15 minutes from the icy 61 degrees. The electrical activity improved and became a slow heartbeat. She started gently moving. Her skin lightened from purple to blue to pink.
After two and a half hours, her eyes were fluttering and she was trying to cry.
“It was a slow progression,” Anderson said. “The extreme drop in temperature suppressed all body function. Her heart, her brain, her muscular functions, all nervous function was suppressed. The point she didn’t cross was losing all cardiac activity. But even if she had, we would have warmed her to look for spontaneous resumption because somewhere deep in the brain or heart there might be living cells.”
MacNeal doctors were in touch with Loyola, which operates a neonatal intensive care unit. Muraskas and an ambulance brought the baby to Loyola to continue treatment. At Loyola, doctors warmed the baby from about 90 degrees to normal and treated her for internal bleeding, one of the many bodily reactions to hypothermia.
Neonatologists say doctors won’t know about possible permanent damage until the baby is at least nine months old.
Anderson has treated sudden infant death syndrome and every other imaginable tragedy of an emergency room and when the nearly frozen baby arrived in his care Friday, he didn’t blink. He just went to work. But he said it wasn’t just another case.
“Babies are such precious things, such helpless things,” he said, brooding over the apparent “sense of betrayal” that allowed the baby to suffer in a freezer. “Babies aren’t just regular people. They’re special.”
More Top Picks Sponsorship