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By Janina de Guzman
Two-week old Alyosha was in an incubator battling pneumonia July 6 when a 90-minute power cut to the First River Children’s Clinical Hospital shut down his life support system. Doctors rushed to his side and manually pumped air into his lungs. Alyosha’s kidneys failed, and he died July 9. The 11 other children in the intensive care unit survived. Whether the power outage hastened Alyosha’s death is unknown. Physician Yanina Krayushkina told reporters the situation aggravated his condition and hastened his end, but head physician Galina Berezina disagreed. The question now is what the hospital will do in the case of another unannounced power outage. Turning off the power to a hospital for 500 children and 100 mothers with newborns, without warning or explanation, is unacceptable, said Berezina. “What if someone was on the operating table?” The recent round of power outages has exposed the precarious situation of hospitals here, woefully unequipped to deal with power outages. Only two hospital facilities in Vladivostok have generators: the Krai Clinical Hospital and Maternal Ward No. 5. “Without a generator, a children’s hospital simply can’t exist,” said Berezina. “We have surgery, emergency and intensive care units. We absolutely need a generator.” Generators are compulsory for hospitals with emergency care, said Vladimir Ponomaryov, spokesman for the city health department. But, he said, the city does not have the finances. In March last year, power went out while a woman in Pogranichny was undergoing a cesarean section, and she bled to death while doctors phoned power suppliers and begged them to restore electricity. When First River Children’s Clinical Hospital opened in 1971, it didn’t occur to anyone that electricity could be shut off. “Before, hospitals were the top priority,” said Berezina, who once headed the city’s health department. “Such an emergency would sound at all levels. But there’s been dramatic change. Now we’re the lowest and most neglected.” Measures to deal with conditions that would paralyze medical personnel in other countries — water shortages, for example — are part of the daily routine in Vladivostok. That means heating water in teakettles to wash newborns, and sending older children home for baths. “We’re used to it, we’ve adapted,” said Gennady Shergin, director of the inpatient department at the Krai Hospital. Each section of the hospital has its own water reserves and batteries with stored energy. A generator was built on the hospital grounds last year. While unannounced power outages are rare, the unstable energy situation at Primorye energy supplier Dalnergo does not rule out the possibility of future incidents. “It’s scary. We’re waiting for this moment with fear and trembling. God forbid it happen again,” said Berezina of First River Children’s Clinical Hospital. Ponomaryov, of the city’s health department, said 10 generators had arrived recently in Primorye for distribution, but they will go to medical facilities outside of Vladivostok. Besides, they will come too late for Alyosha, the child who died after the recent blackout. “I can’t tell you what we felt that moment behind the door of the intensive care unit,” Lyubov Ivanovna, the boy’s grandmother, told the Vladivostok. “What a merciless hand, what a cruel heart one must have to cut air to a dying child!”
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