Tiny Septuplet, ‘The Peanut,’ Fought Uphill Battle for Life

When the sixth Frustaci septuplet was handed to him in St. Joseph Hospital’s delivery room Tuesday morning, respiratory therapist Lea Endress called it “the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever seen --almost a religious experience.”

The tiny boy known as Baby F--later nicknamed “The Peanut”--had silky-smooth skin, eyes pressed shut and delicately formed ears. But it was his size--nearly half that of his five siblings born minutes earlier, that filled the veteran medical technician with awe.

“I realized from the beginning, you are dealing with a one-pound human being,” Endress said of the baby boy born three months prematurely to a Riverside schoolteacher. “The lungs don’t even fully function at that stage. Yet he was still breathing and kicking.”

When Endress came to work early Friday, he learned that the critically ill infant, whose uphill battle for survival had most of the hospital staff and much of the world rooting for him, had died shortly after midnight, in his 64th hour of life.

“It hurt because I’m the one that helped to deliver him,” the therapist said Friday.

“Yes, he was a fighter--to a point. You see, these little babies, well, they just don’t have enough to fight with.”

One Baby Stillborn

Patti Frustaci gave birth to the septuplets by Caesarean section Tuesday at St. Joseph. The seventh baby, a 15 1/2-ounce girl, was stillborn. Her death was believed to have been caused by the mother’s increasingly high blood pressure before the birth.

Baby F, who weighed only 1 1/2 ounces more at birth than stillborn Baby G, died at 12:34 a.m. Friday in the neonatal intensive care unit at Childrens Hospital of Orange County, where his three brothers and two sisters remain in critical but

stable condition.

Dr. Carrie Worcester, director of the critical care facility, attributed the tiny boy’s death to cardiac arrest and respiratory failure brought on by prematurity and severe hyaline membrane disease, a common ailment of premature babies that causes their lungs to collapse as they breathe because they lack a lubricant in the air sacs.

The five surviving Frustaci infants also suffer from the lung disease and remained on respirators Friday. But Worcester noted that the five--called A, B, C, D and E by the order in which they were delivered until they are named by their parents--have passed through the most critical first 72 hours.

Repeatedly called “a fighter” by Worcester and his father, Samuel Frustaci, Baby F was never given more than a 50-50 chance of survival.

It was Worcester who dubbed the small but lively baby “The Peanut.” And it was Worcester who, on Friday, called the valiant infant’s death “a very sad event” for the doctors, nurses, therapists and medical support personnel at Childrens Hospital and adjacent St. Joseph, where Patti Frustaci remained under intensive care.

“To be honest, a lot of us really expected it (his death),” said Therese Cosan, 29, an intensive-care nurse in Childrens Hospital’s neonatal unit for 4 1/2 years.

“When they are that tiny, you have a gut feeling; you look at things a little bit on the pessimistic side,” said Cosan, who stabilized Baby A when she was brought to the intensive care unit shortly after birth Tuesday.

“But when they’re that tiny and they hang in there, you get an even greater satisfaction doing everything you can for them . . . You want to say ‘Come on kids, keep going.’ ”

“When they finally do expire, you have feelings of sadness,” Cosan said. “But it’s good to see them not suffer any more.”

Nurse Pam Minton, 26, was just ending her shift in the intensive care unit when Baby F took a turn for the worse Thursday evening.

Minton, who helped to rush Baby F through the long underground corridor from St. Joseph to Childrens Hospital Tuesday, said, “From the minute he came over, the (Childrens Hospital) nurses realized how little he was. And when a baby is that little, they usually don’t make it.”

“But we were all rooting for him . . . We want them all to live,” Minton said Friday.

“It’s real hard when you lose a baby. With him we were all kind of attached, already.”

Lung Began to Leak

She said it was apparent, from the change in the oxygen and carbon-dioxide levels in his blood, that the infant was deteriorating Thursday evening. Then the baby developed a leak between a lung and his chest wall.

“Up until then he had been doing well . . . He was a fighter, he was very active, his color was good,” Minton said.

Ending her own shift in the 28-bed critical care unit, Minton had the time to sit in a waiting area outside with the septuplets’ father, Samuel Frustaci.

“He’s overwhelmed by all of it, but I think he keeps it to himself,” Minton said of the 32-year-old industrial equipment salesman.

Endress said the public needs to remember that only in the last 10 years has medical technology grown sophisticated enough to keep such extremely underdeveloped, premature infants alive.

Nonetheless, even the experts like Endress look inward.

‘The Goods and Bads’

When he arrived at work early Friday and learned of his charge’s death, Endress said, “I had to stop for a minute. I sat down and looked at the goods and the bads of it.

“I reflected that he had gotten the best possible care. I feel sadness, I think everyone feels sad.

“But you can’t let it get to where it affects your care. We need to be on top of things in (the intensive care unit). In here, seconds matter.”

And on Friday, there remained five more critically ill Frustaci babies, along with at least half a dozen more less celebrated, but no less ill infants in that unit.

After talking about “The Peanut,” an emotional Worcester added, “The other babies up there need our energy, too.”