When you think about a sterile hospital environment, you don’t often envision that items from the outside world will be used. In the case of this young baby, however, who was only 1.1 pounds at birth, it is an outside implement that saved her life!
Baby Pixie was born in Plymouth, Devon by emergency C-section. When a baby is this small at birth, one of the concerns is keeping the temperature at acceptable levels. In order to keep Pixie’s temperature from dropping, she was put inside of a plastic bag from Tesco. This plastic bag worked like a greenhouse, helping to keep the young baby alive.
The cesarean section took place at Derriford Hospital because Pixie had stopped growing inside of the mother. As you can imagine, the news of what was taking place with the baby was quite stressful.
On top of the stress of what was taking place with pixie, the mother was also in danger because her blood pressure was extremely high. In an effort to bring her blood pressure down, they played Ben Howard songs.
After Pixie was born, there were 10 doctors working with her and they used the sandwich bag immediately to help keep her warm. She was named Pixie because of her small size at birth.
Several months later, Pixie is now over 7 pounds and is doing very well. As the mother says, “It’s amazing, because we couldn’t even imagine her being there.”
The plastic bag may very well have saved her life because when a baby is born prematurely, their skin is thin and this could lead to rapid heat loss. The plastic bag likely saved her life, but it wasn’t the first time that they were used in this way. It was started in Zambia, because the doctors in that country needed an inexpensive way to keep premature babies alive.
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