Saturday afternoons in the fall have always been my favorite
time of the year. Growing up in Ohio as a huge football fan, it meant spending
a few hours watching The Ohio State Buckeyes football team play. Last Saturday
was no different as I turned on the game at the pilots’ apartment in Belize
City, Belize. After a few quick touchdowns, I was feeling pretty good about our
chances of winning – when the phone rang with a request for a flight to
Dangriga to pick up a patient. My football addiction is often disturbed by
calls dispatching me to fly, so this didn’t come as a surprise. I was
especially relieved that the patient was in Dangriga, as it is only a short
flight, and I figured I could get back in time for the start of the second
half.
The flight medic arrived promptly, and we made a hasty
departure out of the municipal airport in Belize City. Twenty minutes later, we
arrived in Dangriga to meet our patient: a baby girl in respiratory distress.
She was intubated and unconscious, although just starting to wake up as we
loaded her into the airplane. The nurses from Dangriga and our flight medic
worked diligently on the hot apron for almost an hour getting the baby girl
stable enough to fly. Once I got the go-ahead from the medical professionals, I
quickly loaded up the worried mother and took off toward Belize City. After
leveling off at 1500 feet above the Caribbean Sea, I heard the medic say the
words that I dread the most: “TJ, the patient is crashing.”
I have heard those words many times before, and I can see
still the faces of the ones who did not survive the thousands of emergency
flights I have performed. I pray this sweet baby girl isn’t one of them. I
figure the only thing that has changed exteriorly for the patient is the
altitude. So I quickly descend to a few hundred feet above the choppy sea and, after
a few minutes, the baby stabilizes and we safely arrive in Belize City. At the
airport, we are met by our ground ambulance – which briskly takes the baby and
mother to the hospital.
After a few hours of cleaning, refueling and restocking the
medical supplies on board the aircraft, I stop by the hospital to check on the
baby and mother. I find them in the pediatric ward. The baby is resting, but on
a breathing machine. The mother is sitting on a plastic chair with her hands in
her head, completely exhausted from the day’s events. I spend a few minutes
talking with her and get her a street burger from outside, after hearing she hadn’t eaten all day.
