Page 1 of Doc Rock
Chapter 1
Mai
At two fifty-five am, the harsh sound of her phone ripped Dr Maisie Jones from a deep, dreamless sleep, and she was out of bed before she even realised what woke her. Grabbing her pink-rimmed glasses from her bedside table, she shoved them on and answered the call.
As the Junior Doctor spoke, she pulled on her pink scrubs and dashed out of the house.
By three in the morning, Mai was driving to Kookaburra Creek Base Hospital to look after a baby born eight weeks premature via emergency caesarean section.
At the hospital, Mai found her Registrar, Tanya, doing her best to hold the baby on CPAP, a facemask that gave a little bit of positive pressure into the baby's lungs to help him breathe. But one look at the poor little thing—who was blue around the edges with saturations far lower than they should be—told her they needed to intubate the baby now to get him stabilised.
When she'd first started paediatric training, babies as small as this one terrified her, but now, if you weighed more than four kilograms, you were huge.
"Tanya. We're going to intubate this baby. He needs surfactant,"Mai said to the young doctor standing beside her.
"What do you want me to do?' Tanya sounded relieved that she no longer had to make decisions for the tiny little boy.
"You've done great so far. You put a cannula in, and I'll prepare for intubation."Mai gave the junior doctor an encouraging smile.
"Okay, boss,"Tanya said and set about her assigned task.
"Miriam,"Mai said to the nurse in charge of the night shift, "We're going to intubate this young man. Please can I have a size-zero blade and a two-point-five uncuffed tube.
"No problem."The nurse gestured to the equipment she'd already laid out.
Mai opened the drawer of the intubation trolley and retrieved the drugs she needed."Do we have a weight?"she addressed the nurse again.
"Yes. He's one point eight kilograms."
"What was the gestation?"Mai wracked her tired brain. They'd told her, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, information fell straight out of her head.
"Thirty-two weeks," Miriam supplied.
"Okay. And you said it was an abruption?"
"Yeah,"Tanya confirmed."Mum presented with pain to birthing suite. The baby was in distress, so they went to theatre."
Mai nodded. An abruption, where the placenta separated while the baby was still inside, was a medical emergency. This little man was lucky his parents didn't live too far from the hospital and went there when his mum experienced pain.
"Access in,"Tanya said as she flushed the cannula she had just inserted into one of the baby's minuscule blue veins.
"Does this little man have a name?"Mai enquired as she checked her equipment one last time before they began the intubation.
"No. The parents haven't chosen one yet,"Tanya said.
"Is Dad around?"Mai asked.
Tanya shook her head."No, he's still in theatre with Mum. She was hysterical, so he couldn't leave her to come with us."
Mai gently touched the baby's face."Don't worry, little man, we'll look after you."
They worked efficiently to secure the baby's airway and administered the surfactant. Mai huffed a sigh of relief when he started to pink up, and his saturations improved.
Hopefully, his only problem would be his immature lungs, as at thirty-two weeks, he wasn't ready to breathe for himself. If they'd had any warning of his imminent birth, they would have given his mum steroids to help his lungs develop, and then maybe he wouldn't need ventilating now.
Once Mai was satisfied her newest and youngest patient was stable, she let exhaustion seep back in, rubbing her eyes blearily. Nights like this made her feel old, even though she was only thirty-eight.
"I'm going to sleep in the on-call room for a couple of hours before we start rounds in the morning,"she said wearily.
