Born to Be a Doctor?
Dr. Feizal Waffarn still marvels about the premature baby girl born 17 years ago, tipping the scales at 2 pounds, 1 ounce, and the slim chance that he and other specialists gave her of surviving.
Michaela Jobes was delivered at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian on Feb. 19, 1981, 2 1/2 months early, under the most trying of circumstances. Her mother had gone into labor while on a flight from London to Los Angeles.
Shortly after her birth, Michaela was transferred to UCI Medical Center’s neonatal unit, where she went into cardiac arrest and was revived by nurses.
“It was a premature birth. Her heart stopped. She was at risk for brain damage. Frankly, it didn’t look good for Michaela. I wanted to make sure that her mother was aware of the possible consequences,” Waffarn said.
Waffarn was not optimistic about Michaela’s chances for survival, and if she lived, her quality of life. After arriving at UCI Medical Center in Orange, she dropped to 1 pound, 7 ounces.
Seventeen years later, Michaela, now a Carlsbad High School senior, is back at UCI Medical Center. But this time the honor student is on a three-month internship, learning about new technology that has greatly improved the survival chances of premature babies, and moving one step closer to her dream of becoming a doctor.
Michaela not only survived, she flourished. In addition to being an honor student, the slender, blond young woman is an athlete. She runs sprints and hurdles in track and has played basketball, soccer and softball.
As she walked through the neonatal unit with Waffarn and the nurses who care for the “preemies” hooked up to respirators and monitors, Michaela said she cannot picture herself in an incubator, fragile and helpless without the medical staff who perform miracles every day.
“I think, ‘No way was I that small.’ But I spent the first four months of my life here. . . . When I arrived, my size was small, but now I would be considered one of the bigger premature babies,” Michaela said.
Waffarn, professor of pediatrics at UCI and chief of the medical center’s neonatal unit, said Michaela is the first of the hundreds of premature babies he cared for over the last 25 years to seek him out as an adult.
“It gives me goose bumps to remember her as she was and see her now as a beautiful young woman. After her mother checked her out, I didn’t see her again until a few months ago, when she asked if she could visit me to talk about a school internship she wanted to do. I was overwhelmed,” Waffarn said.
Sunday was the second weekend of Michaela’s internship. Commuting from her San Diego County home to the medical center, she spends between six and eight hours on Saturday or Sunday as part of her three-month school project. Michaela said she has to deliver a research paper and presentation in front of classmates and teachers by February.
On Sunday, she got to review her five-volume medical file, which doctors kept during her four-month stay at the neonatal unit years ago.
Michaela said her mother, Valerie, “has always made me aware of what I went through when I was here.” Looking at her hospital records was an opportunity to peek into a part of her life that until Sunday was nothing more than a story that others have told her.
Over the years, Michaela said, she often thought about her near-death experience as a premature infant and wondered if she should go into medicine. Occasionally, she would visit the nurses who cared for her in the neonatal unit, and she sent them Christmas cards and photographs of herself.
It was during a visit two years ago that she decided to aim for medical school, Michaela said.
“It really hit me then. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I want to work with these kids and give them the same chance at life that I got,” she said. “I want to major in biomedicine or bioengineering. I’m ready for the challenge, because I’ve always been one to challenge myself. My life began in a difficult way, and I’ve never taken the easy way out.”
