Quake bonds ECRMC nurse and ‘her’ preemie

It’s been five years, so Nelva Marcus doesn’t quite remember the baby’s name. But for one afternoon, they were attached at the hip, with Marcus as protective and attentive as if the girl was her own.

Marcus, a registered nurse, was assigned to the neonatal intensive-care unit at El Centro Regional Medical Center, where she was attending to the needs of a 7-day-old baby born prematurely at 33 weeks. The little girl was on oxygen and had been having apneic episodes — periods where the baby stopped breathing — throughout the night.

When the Easter Sunday earthquake of 2010 ripped through the Imperial Valley at 3:40 p.m. April 4, El Centro got some of the worst of the shaking, and its hospital took on some of the worst damage. El Centro Regional lost its fairly new outpatient building off of Ross Avenue, and with the Maternal-Child Department net yet seismically updated, mothers and their children were evacuated to an outside area near the emergency room.

Marcus, in the midst of the shaking, power outage and what was believed to be a gas leak at the time, would be the shield between the quake and her preemie. Since the baby had been in the hospital for several days and the mom was from Mexicali, there was no family present that day.

“We tend to have our babies with their mommies,” said Marcus, who now works for ECRMC’s clinical documentation integrity department.

The Imperial resident believes she might have even been changing the baby’s diaper when the shaking began. Yet when it did, she remembers without question scooping the preemie into her arms and ducking beneath what is called a giraffe bed, an incubator and warming unit.

“I just did my duty to protect her, so it was a natural reaction of mine,” Marcus said. “I would have done that anytime.”

Still, it was scary. “I thought I was gonna die,” she said.

Nurse Kim Petersell, who was charge nurse in the maternal-child department that afternoon, was in the NICU with Marcus when the quake hit. Two babies were in the NICU nursery, and Petersell grabbed the other child, standing under the doorway.

Petersell, who had the less-critical child in her arms, was impressed with the actions of Marcus.

“At the time, it was so hard to think of anything else,” Petersell said, referring to violent shaking all around them. “But (Marcus’) training and professionalism just kicked in. I stayed with her until the shaking stopped.”

The pediatrician on duty, Dr. Luz Tristan, checked on the babies in the NICU as the preemie was moved to a mobile oxygen unit and evacuated outside.

Before that, it was a hectic minute and half of shaking, Petersell and Marcus said. After the power shut down it seemed like forever until the backup generators kicked on — the longest seven seconds Marcus can remember — and Petersell said a strange odor was detected near the department’s nurses’ station. Meanwhile, Marcus could hear piercing ringing overhead signifying a possible yet later unfounded gas leak.

But it was also a well-coordinated moment of hospital staff and even families stepping up to calmly assist one another. The NICU babies, as well as the newborn and their mothers down the hall, were led outside.

“It felt so smooth; we had help from family members,” Marcus said, adding she felt so safe at that point she considered having her own family come join her at the hospital. Although all communication was down, she was confident her then-13- and 17-year-olds were safe with their father.

Petersell said the hospital’s disaster plan was executed perfectly, and while she said she could see the fear in the family members’ eyes, the nurses kept everyone relatively calm.

It was tough, Petersell said, as the moms, babies and families were stuck outdoors on that warm afternoon, amid the aftershocks, for two to three hours before being cleared to return inside.

“It was something you never want to experience. It was a scary thing, but staff did a really fantastic job,” she said.

For Marcus, who lived through the magnitude-6.4 earthquake of 1979, that was a “piece of cake” in comparison to the April 4 roller. At one point, she even considered moving out of the Valley.

“The first days after, I wanted to move,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘It’s not that bad. If something bad is going to happen, it’s going to happen anywhere.’”

This story originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, April 5, 2015.