Hospital celebrates arrival of heart-lung machine

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Four hours after Adon Stewart was born, his lungs were so clogged he had to be wheeled across a bumpy carpark and connected to a risky, last-resort treatment.

It was a normal birth, but his lungs were choked with meconium - a baby's first faeces, which are sometimes passed during birth.

"His lungs were stuck together. He couldn't breathe at all," his mother, Dorothy Stewart, said of the 1999 birth at National Women's Hospital in Auckland.

He was put on a standard oxygen Machine for four hours, but his lungs still failed to expand, so with gas tanks and other equipment he was wheeled across to nearby Green Lane Hospital.

There he was plugged into a machine - an extra-corporeal membrane oxygenator - which can take over from the body's heart, lungs or both. Connected through blood vessels in his neck, he stayed on it for 12 days before his lungs were free enough for him to progress on to a ventilator.

Mrs Stewart, of Glen Eden, said: "I knew such a lack of oxygen could give him severe brain damage."

But Adon, now aged 3, escaped with only slight lung damage.

"That's minor.

"You wouldn't believe it ... the energy level he has is phenomenal.

"At kindy he runs around non-stop."

He was at a function at the Starship children's hospital yesterday to mark the purchase of a new oxygenator machine, hopping about and hugging half the people present.

Green Lane had only one of the machines.

Staff yesterday welcomed the second, costing about $100,000 and purchased by the Starship Foundation using money donated by Mercury Energy customers.

In the past, a second machine has sometimes been brought from Hamilton and patients have faced delays.

The existing Green Lane machine will shift to the new hospital at Grafton in December when the heart unit is split into facilities for adults and children.

The new one will go to the children's heart unit at Starship.

Starship's intensive care director, Dr John Beca, said treatment with the machine was highly invasive and carried many risks, including death.

"This is a treatment of last resort. It's only used after all other life support treatments have failed.

"What you're trying to do is buy more time for a patient to get better, whose heart and/or lungs have failed. It was used on newborns with lung failure, children after heart surgery, when the heart was often weak, and for children and young adults who suffered the sudden failure of their heart, lungs or both.

Laurence Koelmeyer, 23, was the first to receive the treatment in Auckland, after a 20m fall through a carpark roof on Princes Wharf in 1993 left him with broken bones, damaged organs and collapsed lungs.

It had saved his life, he said yesterday.

Starship Foundation spokesman Andrew Young said Mercury customers had donated $202,000.

The remainder after buying the oxygenator would go towards purchasing a $2.5 million x-ray machine for the children's heart unit.

The oxygenator

* The extra corporeal membrane oxygenator does the work of the heart and/or lungs.

* It can pump the blood and, through a semi-permeable membrane, add oxygen and remove carbon dioxide.

* It is similar to heart-lung machines used in surgery, but patients can stay on it for up to six weeks.

* Using it is a treatment of last resort.

* Up to six patients a year, mainly children, are treated on it at Green Lane Hospital.

* They have an 80 per cent to 90 per cent chance of dying. The treatment converts this into survival chances of 80 per cent for newborns and 50 per cent to 60 per cent for others.