Sarah Lavonne: Hi. I'm Sarah Lavonne, and I'm so glad you're here. Here at Bundle Birth, we believe that your life has the potential to make a deep, meaningful impact on the world around you. You, as a nurse, have the ability to add value to every person and patient you touch. We want to inspire you with the resources, education, and stories to support you to live your absolute best life, both in and outside of work, but don't expect perfection over here. We're just here to have some conversations about anything birth, work, and life, trying to add some happy to your hour as we all grow together. By nurses, for nurses. This is Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses.
The moment that I heard this story, I died inside a little bit, and I had so many questions. I immediately was like, "Wait. Who's the doctor on this case because I have got to interview them for the pod?" I am so honored, so excited for us to learn from Dr. Ozimek. He is here today to tell us a medical wonder of a story. This, to me, as far as my brain knows, and he's going to fill us in, this, to me, is something that literally never happens. If it happens, the mom and baby almost always die. You can correct me if I'm wrong on that in just a second, [chuckles] but this story is wild and crazy, and it applies to us as labor and delivery nurses. Welcome to the pod, Dr. Ozimek.
Dr. John Ozimek: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for that great introduction. That was very, very nice.
Sarah: Tell us who you are, what's your background, what's your history, et cetera, and then we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of this story.
Dr. Ozimek: Sure. I am a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, so a specialist in high-risk pregnancies here at Cedars-Sinai. I am the medical director of labor and delivery in the maternal fetal care unit. I spend a lot of time both on labor and delivery and our high-risk unit, which is the Maternal Fetal Care Unit. I've been here at Cedars. I did my fellowship here for maternal-fetal medicine, and I've been here ever since. I've been here for almost about 12 years now, a little more than 12 years. I've been here for a while.
Sarah: Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Dr. Ozimek: No. Nothing like this. We had a cornual ectopic that progressed to the third trimester, which was wild, but it was nothing like this. This was just something you never think you're going to see. I mean, never say never, but we'll probably never see again. [chuckles]
Sarah: Totally. Totally. All right. Let's go to the beginning and tell us the story of how this patient arrived to your unit.
Dr. Ozimek: Sure. I was on call for our high-risk service. Meaning, it was a weekend. I wasn't in the hospital. I round in the morning. I do consults as they come up throughout the day. I had already been in the hospital that day. Then I got a call from the residence. It was like-- I work so closely with the residence, and they are the best, and I love them.
They know when something crazy rolls in the door. They called me, and they said-- it was one of the chief residents, and she said, "Dr. Ozimek, we have this patient." I'm just going to start out with "She's kind of a mess." [chuckles] I was like, "Okay. I'm listening. I'm listening."
Sarah: You're like, "I'm in it now. That's my specialty."
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. She said, "To start out with, she's 41 years old. She has this giant ovarian mass that she's known about. She just found out she was pregnant. We can't really see anything on the ultrasound. We can't. What we can see doesn't look normal, and we just need you to come in." I was like, "All right. I'll be there in 10 minutes." That's how it started. We didn't know anything about her. We had just met her. She rolled in off the street.
I got there to the hospital, and the residence told me a little bit more about her. I looked at her chart. Also, her blood pressure was 190 over 110. It was like, "Okay. We have to figure this out quickly." The residence showed me their pictures that they got. They said, "Look, we can't really see much, but we do see skeletal parts of a fetus, but we also see what looks like a uterus, and there's nothing in it." I was like, "Nah, I think that that's-- maybe she has a didelphys uterus. I don't know. Let's go look and see what we see." I walk in the room and--
Sarah: You're like, "We need to retrain these residents." [laughs]
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. [chuckles] Sort of. Not really. I knew that they were just-
Sarah: [laughs] I'm just kidding.
Dr. Ozimek: -very, very good residents, so I knew that there was something substantial here. I walk in the room, and I meet Suze for the first time, the patient. She's got this mass. I looked at her. I remember when I looked at her, the first thing I said to her was, "Girl, you have a mass." [chuckles] She said, "I know. I know." She told me the story of she had bilateral-- I think they were dermoids in her ovaries. They were diagnosed when she was young, maybe 17 or 18 years old.
At that point, she had to have one of them removed because it was big enough. They told her, "Look, the other side is smaller, and we can take it now, but if we take it, you're going to lose your ovary, and you're going to go through menopause and be infertile at 18 years old." You know what I mean? 20 years old or however young she was. As a team, they decided the right decision was to leave that mass there and just watch it over the years because they were sure it was benign.
Over the years, it grew slowly. When something grows slowly, even though to you and me, when we see it the first time, it looks really jarring, to her and to her family, this is something that's been there and just progressively grown over time. She said, "The reason I'm here is because this mass has started to grow rapidly over the last few weeks. My doctor in Bakersfield--" she lives in Bakersfield, wanted to get a CT scan to look at it because it might be time to take the mass out. She went to get her CT scan, and her pre-procedure pregnancy test was positive. This was three days before. This was a Wednesday, and she came [crosstalk]-
Sarah: Whoa.
Dr. Ozimek: -the Sunday. All she knew is that she was pregnant. She said, "Okay." She didn't have her CT scan. Then that weekend, they had plans. They came down to LA. They went to a Dodger game. That's where she revealed to her husband that she was pregnant. They'd wanted a baby forever.
Sarah: Aww.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Then she started having pain. She thought, "All right. We're in LA." Apparently, they had done a lot of research, and they knew they wanted to come to Cedars-Sinai, so they thought this was the time, and they did. She said that's all that she knew. That's all that she knew at that point, that she was pregnant, and she has this mass. I started to look with the ultrasound. This mass, by the way, is 22 centimeters or 30 centimeters. I'm sorry. 22 pounds, 30 centimeters.
I put the ultrasound probe on her belly. The first thing, all I could see is black. When you see fluid, it's black. That's all I could see because that giant mass was in the way. I started moving the probe around, and I could start to see parts of a fetus, but it looked very-- I couldn't tell anything because it was just so hidden by the mass. I rolled her on her side and put the probe way up by her ribs, up by her liver. Finally, I saw what looked like a femur. I was able to measure it. It measured full term. It measured 37 weeks. I thought, "There is no way. There's no way." I looked at the residents, and I nodded at them and it's--
Sarah: Yes. The look.
Dr. Ozimek: It's emotional, like, "Look at the screen." Then I kept looking, kept looking, and I found the baby's head up under her spleen or the liver. I can't remember. It was way up where it wasn't supposed to be. It was also measuring full term. I looked at her, and I was like, "You're full term. I don't know where this baby is because I should not be seeing what I'm seeing right now."
Sarah: Did you know that the baby was alive?
Dr. Ozimek: Well, I could see a heartbeat. I could see a heartbeat. They did with the baby-- they were able to get the baby on the monitor for a little bit before I got there, so they could see that there was a heartbeat there.
Sarah: It looked normal? The heartbeat also was a normal--?
Dr. Ozimek: It was there. We'll put it that way. [chuckles] We'll put it that way. Yes. All of a sudden, we were resetting. I had to reset my whole thought process. I just assumed this was going to be a really early pregnancy that this was-- Then I was like, "Okay." This isn't chronic hypertension where we can manage it and get it under control and keep the pregnancy going or anything. This is severe preeclampsia. This is a full-term pregnancy, so we have to deliver. Right?
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ozimek: Obviously, I said, "Okay, but this is super complicated with this mass." At this point, I'm still thinking, "There's some sort of uterine abnormality here." I wasn't really [crosstalk]--
Sarah: You still think it's in the uterus?
Dr. Ozimek: Well, I didn't know for sure, but I wasn't really looking to mentally admit that it was an abdominal ectopic pregnancy at this point because it was full-term, you know? [chuckles]
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Ozimek: It had a heartbeat. I said, "Look, we have to figure this out. We have to get you delivered, but we need more information first.
Sarah: Definitely.
Dr. Ozimek: We got her blood pressure under control. We put her on magnesium. Then I ordered an MRI. In the meantime, I was starting to plan her delivery because I knew it had to happen. I called our gyne-onc team, Dr. Mike Manuel, who is amazing and truly is the one that saved her. I told him the circumstance. I said, "I'm calling you because, number one, there's this huge mass. Number two, this is going to be a really complicated delivery, so I need you guys there [chuckles] to help me with the surgery."
Sarah: Totally.
Dr. Ozimek: He was like, "Absolutely." He actually came and saw her. In the meantime, the MRI came back. He called me because he saw it first, alerted, and it's abdominal. It's an abdominal pregnancy. I was like, "Oh, my God. I--" [chuckles]
Sarah: Like, "This is already complicated."
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. It's already complicated. We talked more, and we were both like, "Okay. Well, we can't--" At this point, it's 7 PM on a Sunday. We're like, "We can't do this in the middle of the night. Unless there's some sort of life-threatening immediate emergency, we need to assemble all the right people and get this ready to go and do it in the morning." In the meantime, we both [crosstalk]--
Sarah: What would be some life-threatening emergencies in this case?
Dr. Ozimek: If she suddenly became unstable, if her blood pressure dropped, or it was super hot, super, we couldn't get it under control, or she was having severe, severe pain, something that told us there's a real problem here at [unintelligible 00:10:51]. Luckily, we were able to get her under control, and her pain was reasonable at that point.
Sarah: Thank God she had some pain in the first place. That brought her in.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. When I came in, that's what brought her in. Then she was very comfortable. She wasn't-- I think she has a high tolerance. [chuckles] When a patient tells you-
Sarah: Clearly.
Dr. Ozimek: -they have a high tolerance for pain, the first thing that goes through your mind is they have no tolerance for pain. That's usually-- She really did. Dr. Manuel and I talked, and we were very worried about, "Okay. This is abdominal. The baby's alive. That means there's a placenta that's not in the uterus. Where is this implanted?" There are cases where there are abdominal-like topics that progress, never really to full term, but the placenta is implanted in a really dangerous places like the liver or the spleen or even the aorta.
I was gaming, "Okay. If it's in the liver, we're going to have to have liver transplant present at the surgery to help us control the bleeding. If it's in the aorta, I need trauma surgery and vascular surgery." I'm trying to figure out who I need there. Then we got a CT angio to help us map out where the placenta was. It showed us that it was in the right pelvic sidewall primarily, and maybe a little bit of involvement with the colon, like the rectum, really, and the exterior uterus. Dr. Manuel said, "I am comfortable. We don't need these other teams because I can deal with this. I can deal with the bleeding that's going to happen here." Now we knew it wasn't going to involve the liver or the aorta. We were-
Sarah: Right. Praise.
Dr. Ozimek: -happier. We were happier. Nonetheless, I still called trauma surgery. I wanted them aware of her because who knows what you're really going to find when you get in there? I had to have a difficult talk with her and her husband that night. I said, "Look, you are in an unprecedented circumstance here, really. Abdominal ectopic pregnancies--" To back it up, ectopic pregnancies account for about 1% of all pregnancies. Abdominal ectopic pregnancies account for about 1% of ectopic pregnancies, so already exceedingly rare.
Then those that progress to full term are unprecedented. They are unprecedented. It does not happen. If you look in the literature, there's case reports from Africa, and that's it because here, if they're in a developed country, most of them spontaneously abort. If they don't, they have to be managed medically or surgically very early to prevent life-threatening complications. Right?
Sarah: Totally.
Dr. Ozimek: Now we're like, "All right. Well, we don't have any real guidance here." The talk that I had with her was, number one, "We're putting a team together. We have to deliver you in the morning." We have no idea the condition of this baby. I quoted her a 50-50 chance that this baby was even going to survive at delivery because, presumably, in the abdomen, there was not really adequate amniotic fluid. I don't know what the sac looked like. Then if there's not, lungs can't develop. As soon as the baby is disconnected from the placenta, it has no means of oxygenating and would not survive. Who knows? Maybe there was amniotic fluid. I told her it's 50-50. We really don't know.
Sarah: Could you see any?
Dr. Ozimek: No. No.
Sarah: You couldn't see anything?
Dr. Ozimek: I couldn't see any. The image quality was extremely poor. You couldn't really see anything just because of the location.
Sarah: My God. You're going blind.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes.
Sarah: Crazy.
Dr. Ozimek: All the case reports that showed, even those that progressed to second trimester or the rare ones in the third trimester, almost all of those babies had some form of malformation or pulmonary hypoplasia. They either didn't survive or had significant challenges. That's what I set her up for. The other thing I had to set her up for was, like, "Look, when we have patients admitted with severe preeclampsia like you have or any other complication, we monitor the baby until we deliver, so that if we see signs of fetal distress, we can run to the operating room and do an emergency delivery to save the baby. If we do that with you and we run you and do an emergency surgery, it will likely kill you. We can't do that. We're not going to monitor the baby." [chuckles]
I told her, "Look, there's a chance that overnight, while you have preeclampsia, we could actually lose the baby between now and the time that we deliver. Every single option that we choose here has major risk. There are no risk-free options. We have to choose the one that's safest for you and for the baby, but prioritizing you in best circumstance." Luckily--
You know how it is. Patients often have a really hard time comprehending these things. They've never had to think like this. Now these are super complex ethical and safety medical scenarios to process on the fly. Luckily, both her and her partner were extremely medically savvy. They understood. They were on board essentially for whatever we recommended. It really felt great to have their trust and able to do that. It was so funny because on labor and delivery the next day, I had patients all day in my outpatient office. It's like, "I can't see these patients. I had to find somebody to cover."
Sarah: None.
Dr. Ozimek: I came back to the hospital for her surgery. I had a debrief before we started with gyn-onc, OB and anesthesiology, and all of the nurse team, and the NICU team. For a while, there was debate as to where we were going to do the surgery. Was it going to be in the LDRs or was it going to be in the main ORs? Eventually, after a lot of debate and challenges, it ended up in the LDRs, which honestly, was the best place for it, in my opinion.
It was so funny at the debrief. There were so many-- I was telling everybody, "I diagnosed it. I made the plan. I had all the data as they came in." People were arguing with me like, "No. It's implanted in the liver." "No. It's implanted in the--" These are all the rumors that have been circulating that people have been taking as reality. I said, "No. These are the facts, this is where we are, and this is why we have this plan. It was really important to put that into place ahead of time because we all forget how there are so many side conversations going on all the time. These things snowball out of reality. We have to bring everybody back.
Sarah: Yes. Hundred percent.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. We got to the OR and--
Sarah: Can I pause you there?
Dr. Ozimek: Yes.
Sarah: How in the world are you feeling at this point? I can imagine for your career-- first of all, you maybe read about the cases in Africa, but never in a million years I could imagine that you're like, "I'm going to face a case like this."
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. No. Just like anything else that's major, it takes some time to process something like this. At first, I was just like, "All right. Well, here's what we're going to do. This is just like whatever wild emergency came in the day before or the week before." Then you start thinking like, "Oh, my God. This is really sort of in uncharted territory." We just have to do, based on all of our medical training and all the experiences that we've had in the past, what are the biggest problems that are going to happen here?
Well, she's definitely going to hemorrhage. Under the best of circumstances, she's going to hemorrhage. We need to be prepared for that. Her blood pressure's out of control. We can't forget that. Despite all of these wild things, the very basics have to be controlled to keep her safe. My head was just like, "Okay. Do I have everything covered? Do I have everything covered?" I was actually supposed to go to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl that night. I was like-
Sarah: Aw, shucks.
Dr. Ozimek: -I have everything taken care of. I think I'm good. I started to go, and I was like, "No way. [chuckles] No way. There is no way."
Sarah: The case of your career.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. I didn't really sleep that night. I was really just trying to think if there was anything else that we weren't covering to be ready. We were. I was okay. At some point, you just have to say, "Okay. We are prepared for everything. Everybody that needs to know knows."
Sarah: Your biggest concern, so I'm thinking nurse brain here, if I'm prepping to be the primary here, you mentioned hemorrhage, for sure, so the double IV, the massive transfusion ready, everyone anticipating a hemorrhage, the preeclampsia stuff. She's already on mag. She's being monitored for her blood pressures and obviously treating if they're elevated. What else do you want the team to be aware of?
Dr. Ozimek: Well, yes. Massive hemorrhage also getting ready for what we encounter with this mass. You know what I mean?
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ozimek: Based on what we saw, we weren't too worried about that. It looked benign. It looked well-circumscribed. It looked like with the ONC team there, it would be easily managed and removed. The other things I wanted the team to be aware of is we didn't know what we were going to encounter with the baby. The NICU team was really important in terms of having an entire team for this full-term baby with every resource available for that baby as well. Really, other than that, it's just spectacle, honestly, because that team, that nursing team, that doctor team, they've seen it all. You know what I mean?
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ozimek: When it comes down to it, all of the things that we were going to be managing at this point, we have managed in different scenarios regularly. We've managed hemorrhage all the time. We've managed weird masses in pregnancy from time to time. We've managed severe preeclampsia. All of these are things that we manage, and we're good at, and the team is good at, and the nurses are used to, and neonatal complications. Everything was there. It's just not in this scenario.
Sarah: How this is packaged up for you.
Dr. Ozimek: Exactly right. That gave me confidence as well. Then the operating room was a bit overwhelming. There were so many people in there. All I could do is just sort of-- and this is not unique to me for this case. When there's a big case, and I'm worried, my mind is on Mars. It doesn't matter how many people are in that room. I am just trying to think about "Step. Step. Step. This is what we're going to do. Here's what we do." My mind just keeps going and going and going.
Then at some point, once we start the case, that tends, for me at least, to peak in this weird sort of anxiety. I give myself a second. I stop. I take deep breaths. Then there's nothing else. We just go. That's what we do. Dr. Manuel and his gyn-onc fellow opened and moved that tumor out of the way. We got into her abdomen pretty quickly. There was this baby just laying in her abdomen in a sac with a robust umbilical cord that you could see.
Sarah: Wow.
Dr. Ozimek: I remember seeing this umbilical cord. We opened the sac, and I've seen the umbilical cord and being like, "My God, there's a normal umbilical cord in there," which was just weird. Her omentum and her bowel was meconium-stained. I thought, "All right. All right. There's been amniotic fluid. At some point, this bag of water broke."
Sarah: Stop it.
Dr. Ozimek: It broke in her abdomen. Yes. Right next to her the baby was this tiny little empty uterus just sitting there in the bottom of her pelvis, just like any non-pregnant uterus. The head was up under the spleen. We opened the sac. When we opened the sac, this baby has a full head of hair, [chuckles] which was like, "Wow." I remember lifting the baby up and being like, "This is a heavy baby." This is like a heavy-- [chuckles] I delivered-- I don't know how many babies. It's "Oh, no. It's a heavy baby." The other part is she's obviously under general anesthesia. The baby is also under gen.
Sarah: It's been a while.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. The baby's asleep. We lift the baby up, clamp, cut, and hand off. No idea the status of the baby just because asleep. Then we just take a breath. You know? [chuckles]
Sarah: Totally. You're like one step closer. Now, mind you, where was the mass at this point?
Dr. Ozimek: Luckily, Dr. Manuel and his team were able to-- it was tethered in there. As these giant dermoid cysts are, they tend not to be adherent to a lot of things, luckily-
Sarah: Oh, thank goodness.
Dr. Ozimek: -because it's big. He was able to free up the connective tissue really quickly. It was still attached, but just move it right over to the side. Then--
Sarah: Like fluffed over?
Dr. Ozimek: Yes.
Sarah: This is for reference size because 22 pounds in my head is like, "Okay. Are we talking like basketball?"
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. It's like a basketball. Exactly.
Sarah: Okay. She looked like real pregnant. Throw a big baby in there.
Dr. Ozimek: Exactly. Exactly right. We looked and found the placenta. It was this huge, full-term, beautiful-looking placenta that was just adherent to her right pelvic sidewall. It grew these giant, giant vessels. Down there in that right pelvic sidewall are the iliac vessels, supplying the structures of the pelvis and the legs. It grew vessels the same caliber as those iliac vessels from those vessels to supply the placenta. We were like, "Okay. This is going to be tricky."
Sarah: It was connected to the iliac vessels?
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. It had [unintelligible 00:24:59] vessels [crosstalk]--
Sarah: Oh, shoot.
Dr. Ozimek: That general area. Yes.
Sarah: Oh, my God.
Dr. Ozimek: Parts of it were connected to, superficially at least, to the descending colon, luckily, not invading, which was good.
Sarah: Okay. So they don't need [crosstalk]
Dr. Ozimek: They were able to separate that pretty easily. Also, fairly substantially to the right cornua of the external uterus. That meant she had to have a hysterectomy, too, to control the bleeding.
Sarah: It was into the uterus, not just adhered like a normal placenta?
Dr. Ozimek: A little bit into the uterus, and not that it was to control the bleeding. It had to go, which she was prepared for. Dr. Manuel got to work right away trying to separate that placenta. Just as you would expect, we had massive hemorrhage at that point. We've seen far worse with accretas, but it was still a massive hemorrhage. I think she got a total of 11 units or-- 11 or 13, I can't remember, of red cells and then FFP and platelets as well.
Sarah: It's a hemorrhage, right?
Dr. Ozimek: It's a hemorrhage.
Sarah: That's like a--
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Her total QBL was 4,700, so 4.7. When you think about it-
Sarah: That's a lot.
Dr. Ozimek: -an average human has 5 liters of blood. She's not huge, [chuckles] so she lost her entire blood volume. Again, our pro team, our OB anesthesia team, they kept her very, very safe. They kept her vital stable. They transfused her continuously. Dr. Manuel got the placenta, went and did the hysterectomy. We closed, and she did great. [chuckles]
Sarah: Stop it. At some point, the tumor was removed?
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. The tumor. That was actually the simplest part of the procedure. It was just disconnecting the adhesions and ligating the pedicle that was connected to its blood supply, and that was that.
Sarah: She lost her uterus. They controlled the bleeding. Tumor's out. She, I'm sure, feels like a million bucks after all of that.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. What a shock to her, too, because she's been living with this mass forever. She's just learned that she was pregnant. Not only just learned she was pregnant, but also with a full-term baby. The baby, by the way, was over 8 pounds. It was 8 pounds, 3 ounces, or something like that. I can't remember the exact, but it was over 8 pounds. She lost more than 30 pounds just from the mass and the baby instantly. That's sort of a physical change combined with a new baby.
Sarah: Totally. Totally.
Dr. Ozimek: It's overwhelming. It's extremely overwhelming.
Sarah: You've been told that you could die, and your new baby, Lord knows how big or whatnot, could also die, and talk about the best-case scenario.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Unexpected. The baby, it turns out, they intubated the baby, obviously, because anesthetized. Then I was extubated. I don't remember the exact timeline, but I feel like it was within 24 hours. No problems. Completely normal. Just the cutest little, completely normal, beautiful little boy you've ever seen. I'd go up and just hang out with him in the NICU every day for a while because I just couldn't believe it.
Sarah: You're like, "I have to see it for my own eyes one more time."
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Exactly. Getting great up there. Suze went to the ICU, intubated after the surgery. She was extubated in less than 24 hours as well and came back down at MFCU, back to our high-risk postpartum unit, just within 24 hours. She did great. She did great.
Sarah: Like, "No big deal."
Dr. Ozimek: No big deal. Yes. Blood pressure under control. In medicine or life in general, you hear the word "miracle" a lot. I know. It's even hard for me to-- not to say I don't believe in miracles, but I don't really use the word, but this? It's hard for me to even say it. It is as close to a miracle between all of the circumstances and the outcome as it gets.
Sarah: Totally. Totally. How do you feel now looking back on it? What's it done for your career?
Dr. Ozimek: [chuckles] Well, it's gotten a lot of attention. The baby was born. She came in, and the baby was born August 18th. They were super excited to share their story. They wanted their story to be shared with the world. They're excited because they-- I think they're even-- not I think. They are submitting it to the Guinness book as the--
Sarah: Cute.
Dr. Ozimek: [chuckles] Yes.
Sarah: That's so fun.
Dr. Ozimek: They really were excited to share their story, and they should be. It's a remarkable story. They have a 17-year-old daughter together, who is also super excited.
Sarah: I'm sure.
Dr. Ozimek: We were excited to share their story, but we wanted to wait. We wanted to wait until they had some time and until we were sure that everybody was okay. The Cedars put it together and released it around Christmas time. I knew it was going to get attention, but I didn't know. It was just something like Cedars put out their own press release, and then they were contacted. We have a pro press office, which they are the best. They're essentially protecting us. [chuckles]
Sarah: Right. Totally.
Dr. Ozimek: In this case, it was more promotional, obviously. They did a press release of this great outcome and this really unique story. That night, I was getting calls from Good Morning America and Inside Edition and the Associated Press, and all of these outlets, which I did not expect. Then our media office told us. Then Suze and Andrew, her husband, they were getting blown up, blown up. I can't even remember the number of interviews they did in 24 hours after that. It was insane. It was insane.
I don't even think I had recorded anything yet, and somebody called me. It was a Cedars doctor whose wife is pregnant. He was in the waiting room in my office waiting for his wife to be seen. They had the TV on in the waiting room. He's like, "You're on NBC right now." [chuckles] I was like, "What?"
Sarah: You're like, "No. What? No. I'm not."
Dr. Ozimek: They had old footage of something that they used.
Sarah: Wow.
Dr. Ozimek: I think the most fun, though, was there was this talk show, the Tamron Hall Talk Show. They asked Suze-
Sarah: I saw it.
Dr. Ozimek: -and Andrew and the baby to be on the show. Then they asked if I would be on the show, too. We had to go to New York. It was the first time that I had seen them in person since then. We texted. Suze is maybe one of four patients in the last 12 years that has my cell phone number, my personal cell phone number. We've been keeping from time to time in communication and such. She sends me pictures of the baby. It's so cute.
That was the first time we got to see each other and tell the story together. It was really, really great. Then we went to dinner afterwards with the baby. I felt really bad because they treated me to dinner. I wasn't expecting that, but it was so, so nice of them. It's just a great story.
Sarah: What do you think this is going to do in the medical world? I know you don't have a crystal ball, but it's a big deal. Everybody in OB, we've all heard about it. I knew the moment I saw and heard, I was like, "Oh, this is going to blow up." What do you think it'll do on the medical side of things?
Dr. Ozimek: Interestingly, not much. Not much.
Sarah: Really?
Dr. Ozimek: Yes, because it is so exceedingly rare. Right?
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ozimek: Really, when you think about the management of it, and actually, we've encountered this now. We've written it up. We wrote a beautiful case report for it, which I was like, "It's going to go up to the--" Nobody wants it because it's so rare. It'll get published, but we're just finding the right spot for it. The responses that we've gotten, I didn't quite anticipate where they're saying, "Look, yes, this is an amazing story. In terms of application to a broad medical audience, it's fascination. Nobody's going to encounter this."
Sarah: Fair.
Dr. Ozimek: My response to that is, well, I never thought I was going to encounter it. When I did, I had really nothing to go to. We're sort of [chuckles] running into-- it's so unique and rare that they're like, "No, this doesn't really have application for our audience." Nonetheless, it will be published, and it will be in a great journal, and it will have its place where it belongs so that when somebody like me at 2 in the morning has a patient that comes in and finds a baby that's full term outside of the uterus, they can say, "Okay. Well, this is what they did, so let's do that, too." You know?
Sarah: Yes. I think my biggest takeaway already is when you come across a case that's so unique and overwhelming, I can imagine. I know if I was the nurse, I'd be like, "Oh, my God. Okay. Do I know what to do? We've never seen this before." The way you grounded it in a way of like, "Okay, but let's break up the systems here. Let's break it down that there's a lot of these components that we've done before, and we just have to keep doing what we know how to do."
Dr. Ozimek: Exactly.
Sarah: It worked.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Exactly right. Yes. It was a unique situation, but all of the complications that we were going to encounter were not unique. This job, by virtue of high-risk pregnancies, I have to give bad news all the time, heartbreaking news, awful outcomes. Sometimes, they're great, but nothing is like-- this is something I'll never forget. I've said that before about other cases, and sometimes I'm reminded like, "Oh, yes. This one, this one-"
Sarah: No chance.
Dr. Ozimek: "-I will never, ever forget." Yes.
Sarah: Totally. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing the story, and thank you also. It's so fun to connect with other medical professionals and just be reminded of the impact that we have. While a lot of the normal pregnancies maybe don't get talked about on a podcast [chuckles] like this, it still is, and it takes all of us and all of the brilliant minds out there applying their skills, caring for these patients, and then giving yourself in a way that you offer your expertise, your brilliance, your background, your medical training to continue to, not only perform miracles.
I'm going to call it a miracle because I definitely think it's a miracle, and I'm going to be the more dramatic one of this, but also to be able to give back to the medical community. That's why I asked that question about how it will change medicine. I think you're totally right that while, sure, are we ever going to see this in your career? Are these nurses ever going to probably see this in their career? Probably not, but also, we want to be a resource and continue to learn and grow from one another. Again, I just thank you so much for being here and for sharing your story. My mouth was gaping the entire time. I'm like, "What? What?" It's so cool.
Dr. Ozimek: Yes. Absolutely. It's my pleasure. I never get tired of talking about it. It's such a crazy-- it has a great outcome, so it's a great story to share.
Sarah: Thanks for spending your time with us during this crazy episode of Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses. If you like what you heard, it helps us both if you subscribe, rate, leave a rating review, and share this episode with a friend. If you want more from us, head to bundlebirthnurses.com, subscribe to our email list, or follow us on Instagram.
Now it's your turn to take what you learned today, apply it to your life, and just appreciate the honor it is to get to be a part of such an incredible time in our lives and get to see these stories and be a part of stories like these, maybe not quite as wild as this one, but stories just like this where we're able to lead to better outcomes to save lives and ultimately influence our world and profession. We'll see you next time.