Juan Jorge Gershanik

Juan Jorge Gershanik was a neonatologist at Memorial Medical Center whose work with critically ill newborns depended heavily on specialized equipment. During the hospital’s evacuation, that dependence became a practical and ethical problem: two sick babies needed to leave, but their incubator could not fit in a small helicopter. Gershanik ultimately accepted the risk of transporting them without it, improvising support for one infant throughout the flight. Both babies survived, and their evacuation forced him to weigh the urgent needs of his own patients against a rescue effort extending across the flooded city.

A neonatologist in an unfolding emergency

Gershanik was responsible for two fragile newborns waiting to be evacuated from Memorial. Their incubators were kept in a covered tunnel and plugged into an outlet supplied by a hospital generator. The babies were hot, and one had complications that might require urgent surgery. As he watched the delay, Gershanik considered what would happen if the hospital lost power: the machines supporting the children could no longer be relied upon. The possibility made the wait for transport feel increasingly dangerous, not merely inconvenient.

The expected Coast Guard helicopters did not arrive when the babies reached the helipad. Pilots from outside the area were having difficulty locating Memorial, and the helipad had not been certified for use in years; its old Southern Baptist markings could also cause confusion. Small private helicopters came and went, including one carrying drug supplies. Some pilots were prepared to transport sick elderly patients but not neonates, whose care required more specialized support. For Gershanik, the general evacuation problem had a particular urgency: the babies could not be treated as ordinary passengers without accounting for the equipment and expertise their condition required.

From equipment dependence to improvisation

When the incubator proved too large for a three-seat helicopter, Gershanik asked Richard Deichmann, the chairman directing activity on the helipad, to see whether a pilot could take the babies. Deichmann said he was at the pilots’ mercy. After another helicopter landed, he gave Gershanik a pointed look; uncertain what it meant, the neonatologist hurried forward with the incubator. The pilot refused because it would not fit. The babies would have to wait again.

Gershanik had depended on technology to keep newborns this ill alive, and transporting them without an incubator had seemed unthinkable. He nevertheless decided to try. He took the seat beside the pilot with a six-week-old premature infant, Baby Boy S, wrapped in blankets in his arms. Born at twenty-four weeks and still weighing less than a kilogram, the baby had severely underdeveloped lungs. Gershanik used a reinflating bag to give him repeated puffs of oxygen, attempting to reproduce by hand the work of the sophisticated machine that sent oscillating oxygen into his lungs. A nurse carried the second baby in the back seat, tucked beneath her scrub shirt.

The improvised arrangement left Gershanik without the usual means of checking the infant’s condition. He had no machine to measure the baby’s blood oxygen level, and the helicopter blades made it impossible to use his stethoscope to listen to the baby’s breathing. He worried that he might dislodge the small tube in the baby’s windpipe without realizing it. To check for a response, he used his free hand to pinch the infant’s foot; meanwhile, his other hand continued squeezing the oxygen bag. The episode placed his clinical judgment under pressure without making the decision simple: taking the infant out of the incubator carried risks, but waiting also left the babies in a hospital whose power supply might fail.

A wider field of responsibility

The flight was interrupted by a stop for fuel at a petroleum-industry helicopter site. A planned five-minute stop stretched to twenty-five minutes. Gershanik saw that the oxygen tank was nearly empty and protested to the pilot that the babies might not survive. Two U.S. Army helicopters had landed after them but were being served first because they were rescuing people from rooftops. The pilot’s explanation confronted Gershanik with a competing emergency: those people, too, faced death if they were not rescued.

For a moment, Gershanik considered the scale of the disaster beyond the two newborns in his care. His instinct to advocate for them was part of being a doctor, but the immediate struggle to save lives extended beyond his patients, beyond the hospital, and across the city. He used the delay to change oxygen tanks, managing the task with difficulty, and apologized for his impatience. This was not a withdrawal of concern for the babies; it was a recognition that their urgent need was one claim among many in a rescue operation shaped by scarce time and transport.

Arrival and consequence

At Memorial, the remaining neonatal nurses waved down passing helicopters, while a crowd of hospital staff and other onlookers gathered to watch the activity. A newly arrived coordinator from Acadian, who was moving between hospitals with small medical helicopters, found Memorial less organized than other hospitals. The helipad’s crowded, unsettled operation forms the backdrop to Gershanik’s effort: securing transport depended not only on medical decisions but also on the movement and capacity of aircraft and on the coordination of people trying to get patients out.

The neonatal nurses resisted sending the babies wherever a pilot happened to be going because they did not know whether another hospital could support the infants. Deichmann said the babies could leave for the pilot’s destination, but the nursing director responsible for the neonates insisted that the flight be approved to Baton Rouge or she would not let the pilot take them. Approval came within minutes. A text message from Baton Rouge later reported that all the babies had arrived safely, including Gershanik’s. Baby Boy S’s oxygen level on arrival matched the level recorded on the high-tech machines. The successful outcome showed that Gershanik’s improvised support had sustained the infant through the journey, while also correcting his expectation of how little the babies could withstand.

Significance within the evacuation

Gershanik’s episode brings together two scales of disaster medicine: the intimate work of keeping a particular patient alive and the larger allocation of rescue capacity across a city. The oxygen bag, the unusable incubator, and the fuel stop make that tension concrete. His initial focus on the two babies was not presented as a failure of judgment; it was the ordinary obligation to advocate for those entrusted to his care. The encounter with the rooftop rescues widened that obligation by making other patients’ peril visible at the same moment.

The babies’ safe arrival does not erase the risks of the flight or turn the decision into a guarantee that the same choice would always work. Rather, the episode records a specific passage from reliance on advanced neonatal technology to hands-on improvisation under constrained conditions. Gershanik’s effort succeeded, and the arriving oxygen reading supplied a measurable confirmation of that success. His brief apology after recognizing the wider emergency marks the scene’s change in perspective: care for an individual patient continued, but it could no longer be understood as the whole field of responsibility.