From Shocking Symptoms
For weeks, Stephanie Heater had been looking forward to the January 2005 dance at her performing arts high school. But when the big day finally arrived, her party clothes sat forgotten in the closet. Stephanie, then a 17-year-old senior, woke up shaking with chills and vomiting repeatedly. Her temperature had soared to 104 degrees. Her parents, Michele and David, gave her some Motrin to reduce the fever. But that didn't help. Too sick to get out of bed, Stephanie slept for a day and a half, missing the Snowball Dance. Then her hands turned cold, white and clammy.
Worried that Stephanie might be dehydrated, Michele and David took her to an urgent-care center near their home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. From there, she was sent to Lehigh Valley Hospital (LVH)-Muhlenberg. Her blood pressure was dangerously low, and veins in her arms had collapsed. Having seen another teenager with similar symptoms a year earlier, the ER doctor made a rapid diagnosis: Stephanie had toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal bacterial infection linked to tampon use. "Hearing we could lose our child hit me so hard that I almost fainted," Michele says. "I broke down in tears and said, 'Oh, my God. I thought it was the flu!'"
The ER doctor knew Stephanie needed specialized attention and monitoring and that she had to act quickly. She contacted the on-duty tele-intensivist (a doctor who uses high-tech equipment to monitor a case from a remote site). In LVH's state-of-the-art ICU command center eight miles away, Matthew McCambridge, MD, a specialist in the care of critically ill patients, pulled up Stephanie's electronic chart on a computer screen. "I could see she needed life support. If we'd sent her to a pediatric ICU in Philadelphia, she would have died on the way, because her lungs and kidneys were failing." He advised an immediate transfer to nearby LVH-Cedar Crest, home to one of America's most advanced adult ICUs. But even with the best of care, her chances of survival were only 50-50.
Real-Time Recovery
Stephanie was rushed there by ambulance while her terrified parents followed in their car. Within ten minutes, she was in an ICU bed, surrounded by the latest medical technology. The "eye in the sky," a remote-control camera mounted on the ceiling, let Dr. McCambridge zoom in on the tiniest details from the off-site command center. He watched Stephanie's eyelids flutter shut as the teen drifted into a medically induced coma while powerful antibiotics, steroids and sedatives dripped into her deflated arteries. Via two-way audio speakers, he helped talk the residents through complex procedures, including heart catheterization and the setup of a specialized ventilator. He also ordered kidney dialysis. An array of monitors sent real-time digital readings to his computer screen so he could make immediate adjustments in treatment.
"All night long, alarms went off because her blood pressure was unbelievably low," Dr. McCambridge recalls. For his entire shift, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., he never left Stephanie's virtual bedside. Sitting at his white desk in the command center, which resembles an air-traffic control tower, he tracked her condition on eight computer screens as two critical-care nurses helped monitor 71 other ICU patients. "She was our sickest patient, and we fought to get her from minute to minute, then hour to hour."
Michele spent two weeks camped in the hospital waiting room, while David cared for the couple's 15-year-old son and visited daily. "At first, all we did was cry and pray," says the stay-at-home mom. Little by little, Stephanie improved, and on day ten, doctors brought her out of the medical coma. After getting off the ventilator, she was alert enough to greet Michele one morning with a cheery "Hi, Mom!" Weeping for joy, Michele replied, "Hi, sweetheart."
On January 30, 2005, Stephanie went home. When she returned to school, a week later, the halls were draped with banners reading "Welcome back, Stephanie!" She graduated in June 2005 and sang her favorite songs at the ceremony to thunderous applause from friends and family. Although she doesn't remember most of the details of her illness, she wanted to meet the doctor who'd watched over her. Later that year, she visited the command center. "I thought the eye-in-the-sky camera was really cool," says the teen, who now works for a phone company and plans to start college this September. "I hugged Dr. McCambridge and thanked him for giving me my life back."