INTO LONE STAR STATE
Hospitals evacuate most at-risk
Urgent preparations for Hurricane Harvey’s wrath touched some of Texas’ tiniest residents yesterday, when 10 neonatal intensive care patients at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi were airlifted 350 miles away from the catastrophic storm’s path.
A phone call at 11:30 a.m. Thursday from Driscoll’s hospital chief to the head of Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth kicked off a frantic, 17-hour race to get the smallest and sickest patients to safety before the massive, Category 4 hurricane slammed into the Lone Star State, Cook Children’s Transport Director Debbie Boudreaux told the Herald yesterday.
The risk of a sudden power outage knocking out monitors and ventilators was one hospital officials weren’t going to take, Boudreaux said, and a lengthy ambulance ride was out of the question for the delicate days-old infants.
“You can’t move anyone that quickly when they are that sick or that tiny,” Boudreaux said. “If your power goes out at home, you’re going to lose all your vital tools, so to speak. With the babies — especially the babies who are so fragile — they are on all that highly technical medical equipment driven by power. If the power goes off, they would not be in a very good situation.”
A team of nurses, respiratory therapists, paramedics and pilots with the hospital’s Teddy Bear Transport team rushed from midday Thursday into the early hours yesterday to fly the tots oneby-one or two-by-two to Fort Worth — a 56-minute flight.
“It was the orchestration and making sure we got all the patients out before the storm came and the airports were closed down,” Boudreaux said. “We didn’t want anyone to be stuck there.”
Boudreaux, whose welloiled team does 3,800 transports a year and always jumps at an opportunity to airlift children in need, said: “You do this because you love what you do and you have a responsibility to those children.”