A Miracle of Faith

by Dino Recchia, MD, FACC

It was another Saturday night on call for my large cardiology practice. Patients called with worries about the way they were feeling and looking for guidance on what to do. Emergency room doctors called about patients with heart disease in their ER that they felt needed my expertise. Nurses from the hospital called throughout the night with a host of patient issues needing to be addressed. This experience had been part of my life since the days of my internship in the late 1980s, and the night began like so many had before. Little did I know what that night held in store for me.

I received a call from an emergency room physician who was faced with a young woman having a heart attack. She was in shock with very low blood pressure, and she was having severe chest pain. This hospital did not have a cardiologist on staff, and this woman needed the specialty care I could provide, and he wanted my advice. He also needed to know if I would accept her transfer to our hospital. I told him that I would certainly accept the patient and recommended he administer a potent drug to try and dissolve the blood clot that was likely to be causing her heart attack. I felt this was the fastest way to stabilize her condition until she could be transferred by helicopter to our facility for more invasive treatment.

The doctor thanked me for my input and then said those words which changed the whole tone of the conversation, “I thought you should know that she is three months pregnant.”

This fact now made it clear why there was more anxiety in his voice than I had been used to hearing over the years of interacting with him on similar cases.

Dealing with a pregnant patient who is critically ill always leads to a great deal of angst for physicians since the effects on the fetus of many treatments are simply not known. I told him that if we could not stabilize her condition we would lose two lives instead of one. I felt we should go forward with the treatment I had recommended, and I would take responsibility for the outcome.

He then hit me with the second punch of the one-two combination to be delivered, “I don’t know if this changes things, but she already has an appointment to have an abortion next week.”

I was silent for a moment trying to process this new piece of information. How did it fit in with my treatment recommendation? Was it going to change my approach to her case? My mind stayed on the medical issues at hand, avoiding the tendency to make a moral judgment which could cloud my ability to deliver the best medical care for the situation. I stood by my recommendation to administer the treatment I felt had the best chance of saving her life and the life of her baby. I assumed responsibility for the decision and told the ER physician to go ahead and start the drug and arrange for her immediate transfer by helicopter to our hospital.

It would take about an hour for her transfer to occur, and during that time I began reflecting on how I would handle the situation based on my training and experience. Having spent time years ago at an inner city ER during my medical training, I had seen countless numbers of young, underprivileged girls who would come in complaining of abdominal pain or menstrual irregularities not knowing they were pregnant. When I would inform the girl she indeed was pregnant, the response was all too frequently, “Do you know where I can get an abortion?”

I certainly didn’t agree with abortion, but I felt it wasn’t my position to decide what was right for that young girl. This approach served me well during my medical training and facilitated my dealing with difficult moral issues. There were so many other patients to deal with that this was an expedient approach that didn’t bog me down emotionally. Moral baggage of this type was the last thing you needed when trying to deal with the multitude of decisions a doctor makes in a day.

My patient, I’ll call her Susan, arrived in the coronary care unit and had stabilized during the transfer. My treatment had worked to stabilize her condition, and she was going to survive her heart attack. I reviewed the published medical literature regarding the potential harm to the fetus of the various medications commonly used in managing patients with Susan’s type of heart disease and devised a treatment regimen using drugs I felt would have the least potential harm to her unborn child.

Susan was doing well, and on any other day I would have moved on to the next case, but this time it was not to be. I was plagued by a single thought that I could not get out of my mind – Susan had a child growing inside her who was scheduled to die next week.

The child had no advocate to speak on its behalf. No one to articulate all the wonderful possibilities for this life that was going to be "terminated" at the appointed date and time. The moral relativism which had served me so well in the past was now rapidly crumbling. I realized that there indeed was an absolute truth here and it was horrible. The truth that a human being had been tried, convicted, and now sentenced to death having committed no crime other than being conceived and having not a single word uttered in their defense. This truth stared in to the eye of my mind and I could not escape it no matter how hard I tried. The thought kept haunting me hour after hour. I felt I had to do something. I had to be the advocate for that unborn child.

The next day I tried to talk to Susan about her decision to have the abortion.  I told her I had fashioned the treatment she received to minimize the risk of hurting her baby. I also told her she would need to postpone any surgical procedure for about a month until her heart healed and she could not have her abortion as scheduled. She would be even further along in her pregnancy by then and I doubted the abortion clinic where she had her appointment would even do the procedure anymore after finding out what happened to her.

Unfortunately, she had no interest in discussing any of this and told me she simply couldn’t have this baby at this time in her life. Her mind was made up and she would find someone who could do the abortion at a later date in her pregnancy. In a feeble attempt to make my point I resorted to a phrase I frequently use on my teenage kids, "The easiest thing to do is usually not the right thing to do." My words fell on deaf ears. I brought it up again the next day in the presence of Susan’s mother but her mother became angry with me and sternly stated there was no way Susan was having this baby. 

I felt as if I had failed that little child and was being tormented by the thought that I could do nothing to save this precious life. Given that I was running out of time, I decided when I examined Susan before discharging her, I would pause for a moment with my hand on her abdomen and pray for her unborn child.  I went through with my plan and she was discharged in good condition the next morning. She left the hospital and had made plans see a physician at a medical center a few hours away who was willing to do the abortion at a later point in her pregnancy. I can not describe the feelings I had in my heart. I couldn’t stop thinking about that little child sleeping in a warm, secure place hearing the comforting heartbeat of its mother, completely unaware of the fate which had been bestowed upon it.

A little over a week later I received a page from my office stating there was a doctor on hold wanting to speak with me. I didn’t recognize the name and after we were connected he identified himself as an obstetrician specializing in high risk pregnancies. He was seeing Susan in consultation because she had decided to keep her child and he needed my help in managing her through the remainder of her pregnancy. I was stunned. A chill ran down my spine at the thought that perhaps my actions and prayers had in some way influenced this decision. I offered my continued help in her care and offered a silent prayer of thanks on behalf of myself and that little child. My faith grew an immeasurable amount through this experience and I was reminded of the words Jesus spoke:

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." - Matthew 7:7-9.

Post Script:
I saw Susan for her first visit a month after her heart attack and she was doing well. She came with her husband who had never come to visit her the entire time she was hospitalized. She looked happy and at peace with the “glow” of being with child and I could see the happiness in her husband too. We had a nice visit and just before she left I told her I needed to see her again about a month before her due date. I asked her what day her child was expected to be born and was astonished when she said, “October 22nd” – my birthday! At that moment I felt God put the finishing touch on the beautiful story He had written between Susan and I. Someday I will tell her all of this when I feel the time is right. I am sure God will let me know and until then I continue to pray daily for all the unborn who are at risk of being killed through abortion.