Heritage Snapshot Part 286A Transcontinental Mercy Flight

The $1.5 billion campus transformation now underway at Loma Linda University Health will include a new University Hospital and a major addition to Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital. The following story took place years ago, but illustrates that the Children’s Hospital, dedicated in 1993, is standing on an historical bedrock of science and compassion. Patients are sometimes unaware of the concern expressed for them behind the scenes. One afternoon, 3-year-old Raymond complained to his mother that he did not feel well. By 10 that night he was breathing with difficulty and had a temperature of 102 degrees. His parents decided to take him to a doctor. On the way to a local community hospital, Raymond's temperature jumped to 104 degrees and he began wheezing loudly. At the hospital, Raymond's physicians, thinking at first that he had a severe case of croup, put him inside an oxygen tent. But at 2 a.m. Raymond stopped breathing. The physician on call performed an emergency tracheotomy and decided to transfer him to Loma Linda University Medical Center, the only Level 1, Regional Trauma Center in the four Inland Counties. Here Raymond's illness was diagnosed as severe viral pneumonia. To aid his breathing, medical personnel connected him to a respirator and gave him the maximum safe amount of medication. During the next week Raymond's condition worsened. His physicians tried one kind of respirator after another until Raymond was using the most sophisticated respirator locally available. His physicians knew of only one other respirator that might work, a newly imported Danish model available only from a research laboratory in Rockville, Maryland. They would have to get it fast. Raymond's life depended on it. They telephoned the office of Congressman Jerry L. Pettis and asked for United States Air Force assistance. Within minutes a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter was diverted from a training mission in South Carolina to pick up the respirator at Andrews Air Force Base, near Rockville. Two hours later it was on a transcontinental mercy flight, the only cargo aboard a jet transport capable of hauling 64,000 pounds of freight. The big four-engine jet touched down for only 15 minutes and then, with 84,000 pounds of thrust, it thundered back into the sky in a race against time, heading at almost 600 miles per hour toward Southern California and the nearby Norton Air Force Base, at the time a Military Airlift Command (MAC) Base in San Bernardino. Just five hours later, the respirator was helping Raymond breathe. It was to be his life support for the next month and a half. During that six weeks his heart stopped beating twice. His lungs collapsed several times. He was given massive doses of medication and special nursing care 24-hours-a-day. Although he showed signs of recovery, Raymond was unable to cope with the intense pain and he regressed psychologically. He would not walk or talk. A child psychiatrist suggested to his mother that she take care of him as though he were an infant and gradually help him learn how to be a 3-year-old again. He responded encouragingly and was dismissed from the Medical Center three weeks later. It was a rewarding drama, satisfying because of the patient's recovery. Yet perhaps as memorable and impressive were the professional skills, the unlimited tender concern, the time and love expended on behalf of a little boy by a research laboratory in Maryland, a United States Congressman and his staff, the United States Air Force, air traffic controllers, physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, technologists, aides, and other employees throughout the Medical Center who kept asking, "How's little Raymond doing today?"