Stephen Kimber's book IWK: A Century of Caring for Families has been nominated for the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction. Here is an excerpt from the case study "Is Everything OK?"
Alex Gillis in the operating room
“The baby does seem much better now,” the nurse explained into the telephone. “His blood values are up. His white cell count is much better. His platelets too. But Dr. Gillis…we’re very worried about this baby.”
Alex Gillis was puzzled. What could be wrong?
It was a sunny summer Sunday morning in the late 1970s. Normally, Gillis, an avid golfer, would have been on the course, but he’d had some patients to see. Including that premature infant on whom he’d recently performed emergency abdominal surgery. During rounds, he and Eli Rees, the head of the neonatal intensive care unit, had examined the baby.
“The boy was very ill,” Gillis recalls. “His blood values were low, he was anemic, his platelets were low, [and] he was having trouble coping with the ventilator” that was breathing for him.
Gillis and Rees quickly agreed the baby needed a transfusion of fresh whole blood. But it was Sunday morning so getting it would be complicated. Someone would have to contact the Red Cross. It would have to find an appropriate donor. The donor would have to come in, donate blood….
Given that the baby weighed less than four and a half pounds and needed less than a shot glass of fresh whole blood for a transfusion, it seemed way too involved.
“What’s his blood group?” Gillis asked the nurse.
O-positive.
“I’m O-positive,” Gillis said. “Why not get it from me?” And that’s what they did.
A few hours later, Gillis was in the hospital’s Medical Records Department—closer to escaping for his round of Sunday golf—when the nurse paged him.
Very worried about this baby?
“What’s the problem?”
“Well,” the nurse began, trying to keep the laughter out of her voice, “the baby looks very good but every now and then he wakes up with a startle and starts shouting, ‘Fore!’”
For more information on the Atlantic Book Awards, see atlanticbookawards.ca
Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 1:24PM 
