Mother touches her babies

Press, 29 May 1985, Page 10

Mother touches her babies

NZPA-AP Orange Patricia Frustaci was much happier after touching her five surviving septuplets for the first time yesterday, and hospital officials cancelled a news briefing because the premature infants were making such good progress. The children, known from Baby A to Baby E, remained in critical but stable conditions at the neonatal intensive care unit at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, said a nursing supervisor, Sharon Braun.

Mrs Frustaci, aged 30, was in a good condition, but still had a condition called ileus, or underactive intestines, from the caesarean section delivery at nearby St Joseph Hospital, said nursing supervisor Donna Berman.

She gave birth last Wednesday, 12 weeks prematurely, to the five in-

fants, a stillborn girl and a boy who died three days later.

Mrs Frustaci has named the infants, but she and her husband, Sam, have chosen not to release the names.

The Frustacis, who have openly sought financial help since the birth of the children, also have sold story and photograph rights to “People” magazine. When Mrs Frustaci visited her babies, on Sunday, she was accompanied by a “People” photographer. A St Joseph spokeswoman, Debra Conkey, said Mrs Frustaci and her husband, an industrial equipment salesman, aged 32, planned to hold a news conference at the Children’s Hospital today. Her obstetrician, Dr Martin Feldman, said on Monday that she was much happier after touching the tiny infants and talking to them for about an hour.

Some opened their eyes in apparent response, he said. Mrs Frustaci had only seen pictures of the babies before the visit, but had held the bodies of her stillborn girl and her smallest baby — a boy weighing 454 grams dubbed “Peanut” who died early on Saturday. A senior security guard at St Joseph, Steve Alimeri, said it took hospital staff 30 minutes to prepare Mrs Frustaci for the wheelchair trip through a basement tunnel linking the hospitals. A nurse, Sam Frustaci and two guards accompanied Mrs Frustaci, who was attached to a portable heart monitor and intravenous tubes, he said.

A neonatologist, Dr David Hicks, said that the babies’ greatest problem was their inability to produce a substance necessary to keep their lungs from collapsing. The condition is called hyaline membrane disease and is common in prema-

ture infants — lungs are among the last organs to mature before birth.

Treatments using a bank of fluorescent lights have all but cleared up the jaundice in two of them while the rest continued to have the ailment, Hicks said. Jaundice develops when the liver is unable to process old blood cells. Doctors said drugs had cleared up a heart duct problem suffered by all the babies.

Dr Hicks described all the children as quite active and said early neurological tests have not detected any internal bleeding or other brain maladies. All the babies were receiving additional oxygen, he said. A boy known as Baby B remained the sickest, while Babies D and E — a girl and a boy — had improved, he said. The five babies receive blood transfusions every other day and breathe with respirators.