Mom thanks Samaritan staff for helping save adopted son

MOSES LAKE — By all accounts, it was a pretty uneventful day in the mother-baby unit at Samaritan Hospital. It was so quiet nurse Tiranna Bone and midwife Nicole Anderson were hanging out after Anderson’s shift, just talking, for about 45 minutes.

They were doing a little reminiscing, Bone remembered, “do you remember that one time when this dramatic thing happened, and that time that happened,” and similar stories. After a while Anderson left – but came back in a hurry, and with a baby.

“She was crying and screaming, ‘help me, help me, please God, somebody help me.’ And she put him on the warmer,” Bone said. The baby was very premature; in fact he was still in the amniotic sac.

At first, Bone said, she wasn’t sure what exactly what she was looking at. But it became clear pretty quickly – a newborn in need of help, and a lot of it.

“There he is, and he’s moving,” Bone remembered saying.

The baby was very sick, and the team that took care of him in those first minutes wasn’t sure he would make it. But the boy and his adoptive mom visited Samaritan Wednesday to thank the obstetrics team that saved him.

“I called code,” Bone said, meaning a patient needed immediate aid. It was late, and there was a chance that not all the needed specialists would be in the hospital. But the pediatrician was still in the building, so was the respiratory therapist, so were the other specialists. “We had all the help that the we needed,” Bone said.

The boy was transported to Sacred Heart Medical Center, where he spent four and half months in the neonatal intensive care unit. He had a lot of medical problems, including the possibility of cystic fibrosis. “They (his care team) didn’t think he was going to make it,” his adoptive mom Peggy said. They weren’t sure he would ever walk unaided. They weren’t even sure he would learn to sit up. “He chose to live,” Peggy said.

He was in a foster home when he met her.

Peggy is a family practice physician who had started the process to qualify as a foster, then adoptive, parent at a Spokane agency. But she hadn’t quite finished it. The baby's babysitter brought him to the hospital where Peggy was working, and while she was treating him, she learned he was a foster child, and a little bit of his story.

Peggy couldn’t get him out of her mind, she said. A devout Christian, she went to a concert about a week later and encountered a worker from the adoption agency handling the boy’s case.

“I met this baby last week,” Peggy said she told the social worker, and began to describe him. The social worker knew just who she was talking about.

The baby left the hospital in March 2016. He still has a lot of medical problems, but he’s improving, and the cystic fibrosis is responding to treatment. He not only learned to sit up, he can walk and even run, which he proved when he met the team at Samaritan. “He has far surpassed any expectations,” Peggy said.

The family is moving out of the area, so Mom wanted to thank the Samaritan team before they left. The Samaritan team had a pail of toys for the baby. Peggy and the Samaritan team exchanged stories, and some tears.

“Thank you for my son,” Peggy said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.