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 Respiratory Distress Syndrome
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I will just do two more slides, and then we will stop, because it is five past one. This just gives you an idea of what it is like if you are born at 24 weeks, what your life is like for the first 12 weeks of life. It is not fun. This kid was born at 24 weeks. She weighed 610. She had to be resuscitated at birth. She had RDS, she required mechanical ventilation, she then got pneumonia after she had a trial of extubation, which is very common. But, fortunately, she only needed the ventilator, initially, for a short period of time, and she went on to c-pap. Then as time went on, because she did need to go back on the ventilator because of pneumonia, she developed nectrotizing tracheal bronchitis, pulmonary interstitial emphysema, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and ventilator dependency, which she needed until she was 8 weeks old, when she weighed 1,344, twice her birth weight. She finally got off the vent at 8 weeks onto a canula, but then she had endless obstructive apnea and needed c-pap until she got to be 12 weeks, 2,000 grams, probably ready to go home. So, going home, her pediatrician would be worried about airway hyper-responsiveness. This kind of baby would have a high chance of coming back to the peds floor with wheezing and reactive airway disease. She probably still has some inflammation of her upper airway, which can cause stridor if she were to get a virus. So, life isn't happy, and even though we run around and say "oh, we can save babies who weigh a pound and a half", this is a hard life, and you know, not everybody's convinced that it's the right idea, but I just wanted to give you that sense.