More babies....

This past week has been pretty ridiculously full of flying. After quite a long stretch of no flying at all, it poured in over the last few days. In a period of 6 days, I flew about 30 hours, which is quite a bit. And 9.7 of those hours came in one marathon day. We had some interesting flights, but by far the most exciting was a flight that we had to Gweta, a small village just on the north side of the Makgadikgadi Pans. We received the call around 7:30 am on Monday, and were told there were two premature babies who needed to be taken to Francistown. When we arrived at Gweta, the paramedics discovered that one of the babies had stopped breathing and arrested, and was very blue from lack of oxygen. They quickly began attending to the baby, administering CPR and giving him oxygen. We waited on the ground about 20-30 minutes before the baby finally was stabilized and we could take off. While the little guy was still having a tough time of it (he apparently arrested at least once more on the way to Francistown), he made it to the hospital alive and breathing, and hopefully will survive to adulthood. It felt good to know that had we not arrived when we did, the baby would have assuredly died. While our flights may often help prevent more serious complications in patients and avoid things like amputations, this was one of the flights where our being there clearly helped save a life, which is pretty fulfilling. Then, about an hour after we returned from that flight, we got a call from Maun hospital, where two stretcher patients (sisters) involved in a car accident needed transport. When we got to Maun, the paramedic determined that we needed to take the patients separately so that he could better tend to the fairly serious head injury of the one patient (with two stretchers in the aircraft, the medic would have to kneel in the aisle to attend to the patient). So we took the first to Francistown and then returned for the second, a shattered femur. It was quite late by the time we got to Francistown with the second patient, and we had to spend the night in Francistown. Like I said, we had gotten the first call at 7:30 am, and didn’t get to bed until around 12:30 am, so it was quite a marathon of a day. That was the day with 9.7 hours of flying. Between that day, a good three days of flying at the end of last week, and a flight on Tuesday, we’ve kept pretty busy on the air ambulance flight side of things, which I’ve enjoyed.