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From the Vladivostok
Two-week old Alyosha was in an incubator battling pneumonia when power cuts July 7 plunged the First River Children's Clinical Hospital and the surrounding area into darkness. Alyosha's life support system went down. "I can't tell you what we felt that moment behind the door of the intensive care unit," wept Lyubov Ivanovna, the boy's grandmother. "What a merciless hand, what a cruel heart one must have to cut air to a dying child!" The boy had undergone a complicated operation and was on life support with slim chances of survival. Doctors had done their best not to lose him. He had begun to show signs of improvement and had started to drink milk. For an hour and a half, doctors pumped air into the boys' lungs by hand. But Alyosha turned gray, and his kidneys failed. Six other sick newborns were in incubators at the time. Their conditions also worsened, and medical personnel made titanic efforts to sustain life in their little bodies. Altogether the hospital has 500 sick children and 100 mothers with newborns. Forty are premature babies who require special conditions to stay alive. "It's fortunate that the power cut didn't happen when somebody was on the operating table," said the hospital's Medical Chief Alla Mymrikova. "We have 200 surgery beds and do operations under emergency conditions round-the-clock." "I'm not even talking about the accompanying things -- no hot water, nonfunctional sterilizing machines, refrigerators and stoves in the cooking facility. All our activity depends on electric power," Mymrikova said. Alyosha died July 9. In his short life, he had never been pressed against his mother's breast. The reporter of the Vladivostok newspaper found the incubator empty. In a refrigerator lay a skinny body neatly wrapped in a blanket. "I can't affirm that the absence of electricity killed the baby," said Yanina Krayushkina, the physician on duty that night. "But that the cut-off of power to the artificial breathing device aggravated his condition and neared his end is certain. The device doesn't just supply oxygen, it regulates temperature, humidity and breathing frequency. Of course, an experienced doctor can support a patient's breath with the valve bag mask, but he isn't able to warm or humidify the air." Blame for the tragedy also lies with city authorities who didn't pay for installing a generator at the hospital. Construction regulations for this type of facility stipulate an emergency life support system with a generator, but the hospital doesn't have one. It was the first power cut at the hospital, but no one can guarantee it was the last.
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