NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Talk about a full circle moment.
In 1961, Martha Lott was the first baby to be put on a new life-saving ventilator that helps babies born prematurely. Now, she is a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt — the same place where she was saved.
If you want to see more of Martha at work in the NICU, watch the player above.
"My dad happened to be in med school at the time, they came to him with the X-ray and said, 'You know how this works, can we try it?'" Lott said. "Dr. Stahlman literally said 'If this doesn't work, I will never try it again.' And it worked, and here I am." Martha was born two months premature and had little chance of survival without the help of Dr. Mildred Stahlman, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt.
Dr. Stahlman, who died at 101 years old on June 29, revolutionized the care of premature babies and is credited with saving thousands of them around the world. She was also Martha's godmother.
"Dr. Stahlman had been working with doctors in Sweden and engineers here at Vanderbilt, and they had built a baby-sized polio machine," Lott said. "To my knowledge I am the first baby that was ever put in a ventilator, and the difference between this and anything else they had done respiratory-wise for a baby was the machine did inhalation and exhalation for me, which is what gives the babies lung support until that surfactant comes in."
Dr. Stalman's machine is credited with changing the outlook for thousands of premature babies who were born with underdeveloped lungs.
When Lott was a baby, they called it hyaline membrane disease. Now, it's respiratory distress. Lott says without Dr. Stahlman and her research, the world of neonatal medicine would not be what it is today. She was truly a pioneer in her field.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
