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Adrianna Mancini is a slightly shy 12-year-old with a talent for drawing, a love of animals, dance and rollerblading, and a penchant for computer games. ("I have to put a limit on that," says her mom, Toni Mancini.) After school, you might find Adrianna creating clay figurines of Harry Potter characters for a school project, hanging out with her younger sister, Marcella, or checking her favorite website, neopets.com. But this sweet, normal kid, who plans to be an artist and a veterinarian one day, didn't get a normal start in life. Far from it: She is lucky to be alive.When Toni Mancini went into labor on a February evening in 1994, she was just over five months pregnant. Most women would be concerned about delivering a baby so early, but Mancini was downright terrified. Six weeks from finishing a program to become a neonatal-care nurse at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, Mancini knew the risks of a premature birth better than most. It was 8 p.m., and Mancini was caring for a two-year-old who was suffering the chronic effects of prematurity himself, when she felt the first precipitous contractions and was rushed to a hospital bed.
The struggles of that two-year-old, as well as of all the other children Mancini had worked with -- the respiratory problems, the brain damage, the jaundice, the potential for blindness, the infections and the high risk of death -- haunted her as she took the bed rest doctors had prescribed. She went into labor two weeks later. When Adrianna was born at 6:10 the evening of March 9, she was disturbingly small, weighing just 24 ounces, with translucent skin and a tiny pinched face. She had only a minimal heartbeat.
Adrianna's Apgar (activity, pulse, grimace, appearance and respiration) score was a 1. Healthy infants usually score above a 7. At two hours old, Adrianna's prognosis was poor, with a less than 50 percent chance of survival. Mancini, a practicing Catholic, was advised to have her infant baptized immediately.
Dr. Thomas Shaffer of Temple University in Philadelphia was called in to assist Dr. Jay Greenspan, a colleague at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. They huddled to determine a course of action. Mancini learned about an experimental process called liquid ventilation that Shaffer and Greenspan were working on. The distraught mother was told about a breathable fluid that could help ease her child's respiratory distress. A doctor compared it to the liquid featured in the movie The Abyss -- where a breathable liquid lets the hero visit with aliens at crushing ocean depths.
My daughter's fighting for her life, Mancini thought. What are we doing talking about science fiction? But when the doctors reduced Adrianna's prognosis to just a five percent chance of survival, Mancini didn't hesitate. She and her husband agreed to the strange experimental procedure.
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