Gershanik's Helicopter Evacuation with a Premature Infant

Juan Jorge Gershanik’s helicopter evacuation with a premature infant turned a transfer that seemed impossible into a precarious act of improvisation. When the incubator would not fit aboard the small helicopter, he carried a six-week-old baby himself, trying to replace essential machine support by hand. A delayed refueling stop brought the infant’s limited oxygen supply into immediate focus; the babies nevertheless reached Baton Rouge alive, and the infant’s oxygen level matched the level previously maintained by high-tech equipment.

The problem of transport

On the helipad at Memorial Medical Center, Gershanik faced a choice involving two seriously ill newborns and a helicopter too small to accommodate their incubator. He relied heavily on technology to keep his critically ill patients alive, and transporting babies in this condition without an incubator had seemed unthinkable. The constraint was not simply a matter of fitting patients into a vehicle: the equipment on which the babies depended could not travel with them in the available aircraft.

Gershanik decided to proceed despite that limitation. He took a seat beside the pilot and held Baby Boy S, a six-week-old premature infant born at twenty-four weeks who weighed less than a kilogram and had severely underdeveloped lungs. The second baby was carried by a nurse, who folded into the helicopter’s back seat and placed the infant beneath her scrub shirt. The evacuation therefore depended on caregivers accompanying the babies and sustaining them during transport, rather than on moving the incubator with them.

Replacing machine support by hand

For Baby Boy S, Gershanik used a reinflating bag to give rapid puffs of oxygen. The task was an improvised substitute for a sophisticated machine that delivered oscillating waves of oxygen into the infant’s lungs. His hands were part of the life-support effort: one operated the bag while he held the baby, trying to maintain support in conditions for which the usual equipment was unavailable.

The flight also removed familiar ways of checking the infant’s condition. The helicopter’s noise made Gershanik’s stethoscope useless, so he could not listen for breath sounds. He had brought no machine to measure the baby’s blood oxygen level, and he worried that he might dislodge the small tube in the baby’s windpipe without realizing it. One of the few checks he could make was to pinch the baby’s foot with his free hand and feel for a withdrawal response. The scene makes the gap between medical skill and available instrumentation concrete: Gershanik was still providing care, but he had to work without several of the tools that ordinarily made assessment possible.

The refueling delay

The helicopter had to stop for fuel at a site used by petroleum-industry helicopters. What was expected to be a five-minute stop lasted ten minutes, then fifteen, and eventually twenty-five. Gershanik used a penlight to check the baby and found that he was still alive, but the oxygen tank was nearly empty. Two U.S. Army helicopters had landed after the medical flight and were being served first.

Gershanik protested to the pilot that the babies might not survive the delay. The pilot explained that the Army helicopters were rescuing people from rooftops, who would otherwise die as well. The explanation forced the evacuation into a wider frame: the immediate needs of two fragile infants were competing with rescue demands across a flooded city. Gershanik recognized that his instinct to advocate for his own patients existed within a larger emergency, rather than outside it. He used the wait to switch oxygen tanks, accomplishing the change with difficulty, and apologized for his impatience.

Destination and outcome

The babies’ destination was also a point of concern for the neonatal staff. They did not know whether another hospital could support the infants, and Richard Deichmann said they could be taken wherever the pilot was going. The nursing director responsible for the neonates objected and insisted that the pilot fly to Baton Rouge before she would permit the babies to leave. Within minutes, the flight plan was approved. The episode shows that the transfer depended not only on Gershanik’s bedside improvisation, but also on the staff’s insistence that the destination be suitable for the babies’ continuing care.

A text message from Baton Rouge arrived a few hours later with the outcome: all the babies had made it, including Gershanik’s patient. Baby Boy S’s oxygen level on arrival matched the level maintained by the high-tech machines before the evacuation. The result confirmed that the hand-delivered oxygen had sustained the infant through the flight, despite the missing incubator, limited monitoring, and prolonged stop. Gershanik had feared that his decision to attempt the transport might be wrong; the message supplied a clear answer about this immediate outcome.

Significance of the flight

The evacuation is defined by the contrast between sophisticated neonatal care and the improvised means available in an emergency. Gershanik did not abandon the technology-dependent standard of care as irrelevant; he tried to reproduce a crucial part of it with a hand-operated bag while carrying the baby. At the same time, the refueling delay exposed the limits of focusing on one patient when rescue resources served a city in crisis. His protest and subsequent apology record both obligations: urgent advocacy for the infant and recognition that other lives depended on the same constrained response.

The successful arrival does not erase the uncertainty of the flight. It establishes its outcome without making the missing equipment, reduced monitoring, or near-empty oxygen tank seem inconsequential. The episode presents evacuation as care conducted under altered conditions: the infant survived because a physician and nurse accompanied the babies, improvised support, and pressed for an appropriate destination, while the wider emergency continued to shape what help could reach them.