NEW ORLEANS — As an ambulance pulled into Children’s Hospital New Orleans overnight Thursday, three newborn babies made their second arrivals.
The infants, needing critical, special care, were evacuated from a hospital in Lake Charles that was devastated by Hurricane Laura.
Nurse Sandy Amato was part of the team that drove into Lake Charles Thursday evening.
“The ambulance kept having to detour,” she said. “I’d look out and I’d see the debris in the street. So, he’d [the driver] actually have to go in yards to go around the debris to get to the hospital.”
The area around the hospital was particularly bad, she said. When they arrived to help evacuate the hospital, nurses were exhausted, hungry, and hot.
“When we went into the facility, of course, the air conditioner was off,” said Amato. “They lost water pressure, and they lost their air conditioning system. So, everything — the walls were wet, the floors were wet from the humidity, and it was just stifling. “
Amato and the rest of the team from New Orleans swaddled, secured, and loaded the babies into their ambulance. On a cell phone, she and another nurse documented their journey to New Orleans.
“As of right now, we were able to bring home two sweet little twins. We have them on the bench, safely secured in our evacuation basket,” said Amato in the video. "Then, we have one baby that’s in the isolette that requires oxygen.”
The staff at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, which is run by LCMC, has a dedicated transfer team. That means what happened Thursday night was not out of the ordinary. But for Sandy, it brought back memories.
“It’s been an eventful trip. Kind of surreal since we both were in New Orleans for Katrina,” she said in the video on the ambulance.
Amato was part of another team of nurses who evacuated babies from Children’s Hospital New Orleans to Lake Charles almost exactly 15 years ago, after Hurricane Katrina.
“It was awesome. I’m not going to lie. I felt very rewarded that I was able to pay it back. Because they helped us, and we were to happy to help them. And I felt so good about it,” she said.
Amato gets emotional talking about the critical need for newborn care.
And for her, helping out fellow nurses in Lake Charles is simply doing her job.
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