High-Tech Healing

She should have been at her high school dance. Instead, this teen was near death. Could a new kind of virtual medicine save her?

By Lisa Collier Cool

From Reader's Digest

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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.