Struggling but Full of Life : Neonatal Unit Gives Ailing Newborns a Place to Heal

Tiny, sickly babies struggle for life amid hissing respirators and beeping heartbeat alarms in Ventura County’s only intensive care unit for infants.

The 30 incubators at Ventura County Medical Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit are almost always full, with babies who were born early, addicted to the illicit drugs their mothers used, or just plain sick.

The unit’s two doctors and 75 nurses must work carefully with patients whose limbs are sometimes no thicker than a man’s finger.

The medical staff reaches through a tangle of hoses, tubes and wires connecting the infants to oxygen supplies, intravenous food lines and life-sign monitors--sometimes up to 11 monitors at once.

Here, on a recent morning, Dr. David Kasting tenderly placed a stethoscope against a two-pound premature baby girl’s heaving ribs to see how her lungs were developing nine days after birth.

“She’s doing a lot better than she was,” said Kasting, the unit’s director.

Two beds away, nurse Jenny Baarstad used a needle to draw a blood sample from a full-term baby boy born with a breathing disorder, the unit’s most common type of case.

The needle looked huge, like a soda straw would in an adult’s arm.

The boy wailed mournfully, his cries muffled by the clear, plastic incubator shell that kept him warm and fed him extra oxygen.

“Oh, I’m sorry, what a bummer,” Baarstad cooed. “I know, I know it hurts. Oh, honey.”

Last year, the unit added another 470 healthy babies to the thousands it has helped move from the delivery room to the outside world since its establishment in 1974.

Approximately 95% of the unit’s patients survive diseases and premature-birth disorders that once would have killed them, and most of the 5% who die succumb from birth defects, Kasting said.

Healing babies “is a very high-pressure area of medicine,” but extremely rewarding, Kasting said.

“You’re dealing with an individual who has a whole lifetime ahead of them, so there’s a lot of concerns and worries in making sure things are attended to,” he said.

“Babies can’t tell you what they’re dealing with (but). . .the responsiveness of a young individual to treatment is so rewarding, it makes up for the problems in communication,” Kasting said.

“Kids are amazingly resilient. . . . A devastating treatment that would affect you or me for weeks, they bounce back in a couple days.”

Kasting’s colleague, Dr. Lucinda Gaura, agreed.

“They’re extremely vulnerable, so you feel extremely protective toward them,” Gaura said.

“Their bodies are so small, their skin is so soft and they’re really cute,” she said. “You can do something for them in the first 10 minutes of life that can sometimes give them another 70 years of life.”

Although the work rewards the doctors, it frustrates them, too--especially with babies who are born addicted to the drugs their mothers used during pregnancy, Gaura said.

“We’re all pretty disturbed about the epidemic of parental drug abuse,” Gaura said. “It’s sad when you send a baby home to a lousy situation, and there’s no other options. It makes a lot of our efforts seem kind of futile.”

The unit’s work with its patients extends beyond stabilizing them so they can go home, Kasting said.

Volunteer cuddlers come in almost daily to hold the babies in warm arms when their parents and the medical staff are too busy.

A dietitian shows parents how to feed babies with digestion problems or special nutritional needs.

A neonatal social worker shows parents how to monitor their babies’ breathing and heartbeat with special equipment at home, and how to continue to aid their recovery.

And a physical therapist shows how to exercise the underdeveloped limbs of prematurely born babies, and how to set up areas in the home--such as cribs lined with blankets--that will help the babies feel secure, Kasting said.

The hospital also maintains a 500-pound, mobile intensive care unit for transferring babies to the unit from any hospital in the county. The $40,000 incubator is mounted on a gurney, with the capacity to feed a baby air and nutrition and monitor its life signs during transfer aboard an ambulance or helicopter, Kasting said.

Just 2 1/2 weeks ago, newborn Mariah Pensyl of Oxnard rode to the unit inside this transporter.

Born two weeks early at just under five pounds, she suffered from pneumonia and sometimes her heart and lungs stopped working, said her parents, Maxine and Matt Pensyl.

For several days after arriving at the neonatal care unit, Mariah received food through a tube in her throat. Another tube connected her to a respirator that helped her breathe.

But the tubes were finally removed and Mariah was diagnosed as being past the point of danger.

“She seems a lot happier,” said her mother, visiting her in the unit’s recovery ward last week. “It’s so nice to see her without anything stuck in her.”

Matt Pensyl said he was worried originally when the doctors who delivered Mariah at Community Memorial Hospital, a few thousand yards down Loma Vista Avenue, recommended that she go to the Neonatal Intensive Care unit.

“We were upset, we didn’t know how the county hospital would be,” he said. “But everybody’s really nice, and they do really great work.”

Others also praised the staff’s compassion for the parents.

“The doctors and the nurses were wonderful there,” said Marie Pando of Ventura.

Her son, Matthew, was born four months early, weighing less than 1 1/2 pounds and barely bigger than the hand of his father, James, she said.

Now he is 9 months old, weighing 13 pounds and continuing in good health, after doctors ushered him through eating and breathing problems that gave him “a lot of ups and downs,” his mother said.

“When you’re the parent of a premature newborn, you feel so helpless, and the support they give you emotionally is wonderful,” Pando said. “I feel he would not have made it without their care.”

Nathan Allen, born 12 weeks early at just over 1 1/2 pounds, is now 11 months old and healthy, thanks to the unit, said his mother, Shelley Allen of Ventura.

“His first month was real touch-and-go,” she said. “When I was in the delivery room, Dr. Kasting and his team were right there, and as soon as he was born, they got him, they worked on him and they got him right to the ICU.

“Had there not been the ICU, there probably would have been little hope,” she said.

Nathan spent six weeks on a respirator and fought off several infections before doctors allowed him to go home four months after his birth, she said.

“We’re really pleased with the work they do there,” Shelley Allen said. “The day I brought him home, I felt real choked up. I felt like I was leaving family.”

In fact, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit holds reunions of its young patients every few years. Another reunion is scheduled in the fall, by which time two more doctors will have joined the staff, Kasting said.

Marie Pando, for one, plans to attend.

“When you’re first there, you feel like the doctors and nurses are the parents of your baby,” she said. “I feel like they’re part of my family.”