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Sebastian de la Cruz with his mom Paola Vargas. Her sister Pamela Rauseo
rescued the infant by performing CPR when he stopped breathing while
traveling on the 836 expressway in February. AL DIAZ/MIAMI HERALD STAFF
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aburch@MiamiHerald.com
For his first birthday, Sebastian de la
Cruz is having a pool party Saturday with a bounce house and a donated Little
Dumbo cake topped with a single candle.
It will be the birthday celebration that
almost wasn’t.
But for the random nature of Miami’s
clogged highways — which happened to be filled with just the right strangers on
a February afternoon — and an alert aunt who remembered CPR just in time,
Sebastian might not have made it past five months.
Born prematurely, with some respiratory issues, the infant
had stopped breathing and was turning blue when his aunt, Pamela Rauseo,
revived him on the shoulder of State Road 836 in a dramatic roadside rescue
that was captured by a Miami Herald photographer in an image beamed around the
nation.
With the baby in her arms, Rauseo had jumped out
and run into the traffic jam begging for help. Miami Herald photographer Al
Diaz captured one of the most powerful moments: Rauseo crouched over the baby,
blowing into his mouth. The photo and rescue became a national story, rooted in
an aunt’s bravery and the importance of CPR.
“So many things had to come together in such a way
for there to be a positive outcome,’’ says Anthony Trim, a Miami-Dade Fire
Rescue captain who happened to be near the scene as it unfolded in traffic and
pitched in to help.
Had anything changed in the sequence of events that
afternoon, Sebastian might not have lived to see this first birthday. Had he
not stopped breathing, doctors might not have discovered he had life-threatening
cysts on his trachea. But he is here now, all gums and giggles and bursting
with energy. Even as the family prepares for his party, his mother, Paola
Vargas — Rauseo’s younger sister — worries about her firstborn, and still tears
up wondering about the what-ifs.
“I think a lot about all he’s been through and I
wonder why all this had to happen to him,’’ Vargas says. “But I know he is my
biggest gift. He is my little survivor.”
‘NOT MOVING AT ALL’
For months, Vargas, 28, had woken up before sunrise
to Sebastian’s gentle kicking — thump thump, thump, thump — in her belly. But
on the Wednesday morning of his birth, Sebastian was silent. Vargas began to
walk and drink orange juice to rustle her unborn into kicking.
As a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, she knew
the risks of a
premature birth. Sebastian wasn’t due until
December.
“It was a normal pregnancy. There were no warning
signs of anything,’’ she says. “I knew his routine of movement and that day he
was not moving at all.’’
By the time Vargas arrived at Jackson, Sebastian
still had not moved. She met with an obstetrician who ordered a sonogram. It
showed the unborn child had ascites, a fluid buildup in his stomach and Vargas
had no amniotic fluid, the nutritional lifeline to babies in the womb. This
meant Sebastian had to be delivered immediately by c-section.
Less than a half hour later on Sept. 18, 2013,
Sebastian de la Cruz was born prematurely at 28 weeks, five days.
He arrived with complications: Hydrops Fetalis, a
serious condition in which newborns retain abnormal amounts of fluid. At the
time, the doctors also worried that his kidneys might not be functioning
properly.
“The doctors said if there was something wrong with
his kidneys, that he had very little chance of making it,’’ Vargas says, tears
welling in her eyes.
Complications mounted. The next day, doctors
discovered Sebastian had a skull fracture that caused a brain bleed.
Fortunately, it would not require surgery. Two days later, he was diagnosed
with necrotizing enterocolitis, a condition among premature newborns in which
the intestines cannot hold waste.
“One minute, you think everything is going to be
OK, the next you don’t know because something else has come up,’’ Vargas says.
As the uncertainty continued, Rauseo attempted to
baptize the newborn. With rosary beads and holy water gathered from her church,
the aunt stood over the nephew as he lay in an incubator in the neonatal
intensive care unit.
“I knew that when someone is at risk, if they haven’t
been baptized, you can make the sign of the cross and say certain words and
that will suffice. I tried. We were very scared,’’ said Rauseo, who is
Catholic. “I remember telling my sister that you need to prepare yourself for
whatever fight is in front of us.’’
Sebastian was in the hospital the first two months
of his life. The day before Thanksgiving, he went home for the very first time
to an elephant-themed nursery. And things were good for a while, as Vargas and
her husband, Robinson de la Cruz, settled into their roles as new parents.
Then about a week after New Year’s Day, Sebastian
started coughing. His voice became hoarse, his breathing labored.
“We had traveled to North Carolina for the
holidays. I thought it was the change in temperature,” Vargas said. “It was
like he had a cold that would not go away.”
Doctors determined he had croup, inflammation of
the throat. He was treated but after a few days, he started coughing again.
Still, Sebastian was a happy, playful baby with
chubby cheeks and hazel-colored eyes; he loved to touch sparkly things, play
bouncy and to eat Cream of Wheat. But always the coughing would return,
sometimes accompanied with difficulty swallowing.
Sebastian was scheduled for another appointment
with a pulmonary specialist the day he stopped breathing.
A SECOND MOM
With a 10-year age gap, Rauseo has been like a “second
mom” to Vargas as long as she could remember. The oldest of four siblings,
Rauseo moved from New York to South Florida in 1997, followed by Vargas seven
years later. Rauseo, a preschool owner, took care of Sebastian, or Seba as she
called him, when her sister was working. So when Sebastian’s dad had to take a
business trip to Atlanta and Vargas had to work, it was Rauseo who took him to
see a doctor working on Jackson’s campus.
As Rauseo and the baby waited for for the
pulmonologist, Vargas and her mother, also a nurse at Jackson, found a couple
of minutes to visit the infant.
“Sebastian was fine. He was watching the movie Frozen
in the waiting room,’’ Vargas says. “He was so happy.’’
Afterward, Rauseo and Sebastian headed home on the
836, known locally as the Dolphin Expressway. It was about 2 p.m. and Sebastian
was in the back, in a car seat facing the rear. Rauseo was listening to a
Spanish language radio program discussing the social unrest in Venezuela.
Sebastian had fallen asleep. As traffic slowed, he woke up and started crying.
Somewhere between the Northwest 45th Avenue and Northwest 57th Avenue exits, he
became quiet. Too quiet.
“We are at a dead standstill, not a single car is
moving. The moment he stopped crying, I said to myself, this is not right, but
I couldn’t see him because he was directly behind me,’’ she says.
Rauseo pulled the car partially onto the shoulder
from the left lane. She checked on Sebastian. He was pale. His eyes were
closed. His limbs were limp. She tried calling 9-1-1 but her fingers wouldn’t —
couldn’t — move. So she did the only thing she could think of: grab the baby,
get out of the truck and run like hell, looking for help.
“I started screaming but I made sure to point to
the baby so people wouldn’t think I was some crazy woman,’’ she recalled.
“I need help!”
“Please someone help me!”
“Someone help me!”
She remembers a woman and a man rushing toward her —
Lucila Godoy and Diaz, the photographer. She remembers dropping to her knees
and trying to save her nephew’s life.
In the blur, Rauseo at first did not
remember she knew CPR. Then it kicked in, the lessons learned seven years
before in a class. She placed Sebastian on his back, then placed two fingers on
his chest and counted out compressions while breathing into his mouth. Godoy
helped and comforted the distraught Rauseo.
At first, Sebastian did not respond.
“I was getting tired and he had not yet started to
breathe. I remember at one point, pounding on the pavement and saying ‘please
God don’t let this happen,’ ” she says. “My sister had trusted me with her
baby. I could not let him die.”
The mother of three knew something about this kind
of panic. Her own son had stopped breathing eight years earlier as an infant.
She and her husband were racing to the hospital when he began to breathe again
on his own.
As Sebastian struggled to breathe, Amauris Bastidas,
a Sweetwater police officer at the time, rushed over. He had been sitting in
his squad car a few lanes over.
“I lifted him up in the air and moved him up and
down,” Bastidas said in an earlier Miami Herald interview. “He started
breathing and crying.”
Then he stopped again.
They frantically started CPR again, reviving
Sebastian for a second time. By that time, more help — officers from the City
of Miami and two from Miami-Dade, also stuck in traffic — had arrived.
Sebastian finally began breathing again. Rauseo
crumbled.
“Fear. Terror. Panic,” she says. “I really thought
we were losing him.’’
A MUFFLED SCREAM
Diaz had been returning from a photo assignment
when he ran into the crush of traffic on the 836. He happened to be right
behind Rauseo.
“I had just hung up the phone when I hear a muffled
scream. I am not really sure where it’s coming from. I am thinking it’s the
phone. I think it’s the radio. I look in the rear-view mirror and there’s
nobody around me,’’ Diaz says. “I look up and she pops out of the car with a
limp baby. With a blue baby. And she comes running toward me.’’
Diaz jumped out of his car. So did Godoy who left
her own 3-year-old son in the car.
“She runs over and asks if the baby was eating
anything or if he is choking. Pamela says no, he just stopped breathing,’’ Diaz
explained.
One of the women turned the baby over, patting him
to clear his airway. He went for additional help.
Diaz dashed through the stalled traffic, head on,
flagging down Bastidas who was in a marked police car. It is that second round
of CPR that is captured in Diaz’s picture.
‘SOMETHING ATYPICAL’
Capt. Anthony Trim and Lt. Alvaro Tonanez of
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s hazardous materials bureau — also stuck in stop-and-go
westbound traffic in separate vehicles — were returning from a training session
in Miami Beach when they heard the emergency call come over the radio. They
were both in the center lane, about a half-mile away from the scene.
The dispatcher was sending units to respond to “kid
in respiratory distress or cardiac arrest.” Both hit their light switches and
started trying to navigate the traffic jam.
“Something atypical happened. The cars actually
moved out of the way for us, which is sometimes hit or miss,” Trim recalls. “Typically
in congested situation, we encounter a handful of motorists who are hesitant or
downright obnoxious.’’
They found Sebastian barely breathing.
“I saw Pamela on her knees and the baby on a mat on
the shoulder of the road,’’ says Tonanez. “As I came up, she grabs Sebastian
and passes him to me.’’
Tonanez, a paramedic and firefighter, quickly
assessed the infant’s condition the way he was trained: He is breathing. He is
blue-ish or purple-ish. His eyes are open. He is making noise trying to
breathe. This is good. His arms are limp.
“I start by blowing air around his nose and mouth.
The aunt did pretty much all we needed to do to get Sebastian back. Did I help
by blowing a little bit? Hopefully I did help clear the passageway,” Tonanez
says. “His appearance was improved considerably by the time we passed him onto
the rescue truck.”
Trim said their job was to keep the infant alive
until help arrived. About seven minutes after the first call, a City of Miami
paramedic unit — which was closer than the county unit — arrived and rushed
Sebastian to Holtz Children’s Hospital at the University of Miami/Jackson
Memorial Medical Center.
“He was breathing, but he wasn’t in good shape,’’
Trim says. “We were hopeful.”
Trim and Tonanez have nearly 40 years of experience
between them, including many life and death situations. But cases involving
babies are always different.
When Tonanez got back to his office he picked up
the phone.
“I called my kids to make sure they were OK,”
Tonanez said. “It kind of hits home when you are dealing with kids.”
When Trim got back to the office he received a
call. His 77-year-old mother had been in a car accident. He rushed to her side.
She is still recovering from a leg injury.
TWIST OF FATE
Vargas was in the seventh hour of her nursing shift
when she called Rauseo to find out about Sebastian’s doctor’s appointment. What
she didn’t know: her sister and son were in an ambulance rushing to the
hospital. “I didn’t tell her at first.”
Vargas was pregnant at the time. Her sister was
worried about her reaction. “I am thinking, how do I tell my sister what we
just experienced?’’
At the hospital, Rauseo called Vargas and told her
to go to the emergency room.
“By the time I got to him, he was already crying so
I knew if he was crying, he was breathing,” Vargas said.
Doctors discovered and removed three cysts from the
baby’s trachea that were blocking his airway. Vargas said they may have never
known the procedure was necessary had Sebastian not stopped breathing that day.
Sebastian was in the hospital for a week. Since
then, he has had a few respiratory issues, but nothing severe and he is
developmentally up-to-date. The hope is that as his trachea grows and lungs
mature, the last of the breathing issues will subside. For now, Vargas suctions
his nose regularly to clear any congestion and keep the passageway clear.
In the months that followed that day in February,
Vargas would give birth to a little girl named Chloe. Sebastian was officially
baptized. Diaz won awards for the stunning photo that captured the rescue. And
Rauseo walked away from the experience convinced that more people need to know
CPR. She hopes to launch an initiative requiring infant CPR education for
parents before they are allowed to take their newborns home from a hospital.
The focus now is on Sebastian’s first birthday
party Saturday, a celebration of the promise of life.
“I believe he is meant for a big purpose,’’ says
Vargas. “He was given back to us twice.’’
Miami Herald photographer Al Diaz, a 30-year
veteran, shot photos of Pamela Rauseo’s dramatic CPR rescue of her nephew,
Sebastian de la Cruz, after he first flagged down help in traffic. In July,
that image was named the Associated Press Media Editors’ Member Showcase Photo
of the Year. He also received the 2014 National Press Photographers Association’s
Humanitarian Award.
RELATED LINKS
RELATED LINKS
Drama on the expressway: Drivers scramble to save unconscious baby on 836
Photojournalist Confronts Ethical Dilemma
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| Sebastian with his newborn baby sister Chloe. |
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| Sebastian gets a little help blowing out the candle from his father Robinson de la Cruz |