Medicine: The Little Mouse

Little Denise McWhorter was only a few minutes old, but Pediatrician Spencer Snow could see that she was in desperate trouble. She had trouble breathing, and she could not swallow; she seemed to be drowning in her own saliva. In an effort to ease the difficulty, Snow slid a tube down the baby’s throat. It stopped short, and X rays confirmed the diagnosis: little Denise has a connecting passage between her esophagus and her windpipe, and the upper section of the esophagus ended before it reached her stomach. Further examination showed that there was no opening at the lower end of the baby’s digestive tract. The X rays also suggested an abscess blocking a perforated small bowel. The big question at Salt Lake City’s Latter-Day Saints Hospital was: Would little (4 lb.) Denise live long enough for a hastily assembled team of doctors to attempt an operation?

Wads of Trouble. “We’ll try to keep her breathing,” promised the anesthesiologist. “We’ll try.” At 2 a.m., three hours after she was born, Denise was carried into the operating room. As soon as he sliced into her abdomen. Surgeon Robert Beveridge saw that her troubles were even worse than he had suspected. “Her organs looked as if someone had just wadded them in his fist and thrown them in there,” he said. He drained off the abscess that was blocking the infant’s small bowel. Next Beveridge sewed a tube into the wall of her stomach so that she could be fed. After that, he performed a colostomy —looped part of the colon (large bowel) outside the baby’s body so that she could get rid of waste. Somehow, Denise was still breathing when Beveridge closed up her abdomen. But the operation was only half over.

Beveridge made another incision in the baby’s chest so that he could join the two separated sections of her esophagus—but the sections were too far apart to be sewn together. All the surgeon could do was close the opening between esophagus and windpipe, and bring the end of the upper section of the esophagus outside the neck to provide drainage; Denise would depend on the stomach tube for feeding. At 6 a.m., the second incision was closed. Denise was soon able to take in and dispose of liquids.

Pounds of Health. After the operation, Denise dropped to 3 lbs. 12 oz. Then she started to gain. Beveridge promised her mother—the wife of a truck driver and the mother of two normal daughters—that Denise could go home when she weighed 5 lbs. At 5 Ibs. 2 oz., he finally consented. By last week—2½ months after the operation—Denise weighed 6 lbs. and seemed to be thriving. She is not yet out of danger, but Surgeon Beveridge is confident enough to have set up a tentative schedule for further operations. By the time Denise is one, he hopes to open her digestive tract and close the colostomy; when she is two, he will rebuild the esophagus by transplanting a loop of her intestines. Beveridge now admits: “I really never thought Little Mouse would last.”