Lindsay's triumph
On a warm morning in July 2007, Lindsay, an athletic 12-year-old from the far south suburbs of Chicago, woke up with flu-like symptoms. Her temperature soon soared to 104 degrees, she developed a rash and could barely move. Lindsay's mom, Michelle, brought her to the emergency department at their local hospital.
Little did they know it at the time, but Lindsay was suffering from a serious bloodstream infection – one that almost turned fatal.
After examining her, doctors called Children's Memorial and described her symptoms to Tony Olivero, MD, a fellow in the hospital's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) , who ordered a helicopter to transfer her immediately to Children's Memorial, a 50-mile trip that took only 15 minutes by air.
“Time was certainly of the essence,” says Tina Q. Tan, MD, an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases, who was one of the initial medical team members to treat Lindsay. “It was the ability to transport her by helicopter that probably saved Lindsay's life.”
When Michelle and Lindsay's 16-year-old sister, Kayla, arrived at the PICU (Lindsay's father, Kevin, was en route from downstate Illinois), Anoopindar Ghuman, MD, a hospitalist on the PICU team, and chaplain Monica Isaac took them aside and told them Lindsay was very, very sick. “I could tell from their tone that something very bad had happened,” says Michelle. “They wouldn't let me see Lindsay, and I started crying and eventually passed out.”
The reason the family wasn't able to see Lindsay was because at that very moment doctors were feverishly working to resuscitate her.
Watch a video about Lindsay's experience, including interviews with doctors and family.
During the flight to Children's Memorial, Lindsay suffered a sudden drop in her blood pressure leading to
cardiopulmonary arrest . Just as the medical team that included Olivero, and other PICU fellows Brian Joy, MD, Raj Basu, MD and charge nurse Mary Iafelice, RN, met the helicopter at the hospital's rooftop heliport, Lindsay's heart stopped beating. She was resuscitated, but on the way to the PICU she went into cardiac arrest a second time.