Apgar score

He-- It's an instrument that he recommends really every class session happens where you ask the students to think about at what moment in this class did you feel most engaged with what was happening? At what moment in class were you most distanced from what was happening? What action that anyone, teacher or student, took this weekend did you find most affirming or helpful? What action that anyone took did you find most puzzling or confusing? What about the class surprised you the most? This could be about your own reactions to what went on, something that someone did, or anything else that occurs.

When Gardner Campbell was on the show, he talked about this with a slight twist of the Apgar, and the Apgar is a test that's given to newborn babies by medical professionals to rate their health.

And so he looks at that as, you know, how the health of that learning context is.

They're both, you know, using different instruments or different ways of gauging that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So she was born with like an Apgar of nine.

Like she was in great shape.

She was six pounds.

So she would have been big too.

13 pounds.

wow like huge wow in the 80s in the 80s in the 80s and his mom is like a Polly Pocket where was she hiding probably up in her rib cage you know what I mean anyway so so she was Apgar

score all good

So keeping them warm, helping them breathe, and so on and so forth.

Really quick, because we've mentioned this at some point, I believe, but can we give a brief lowdown on APGAR, APGAR scoring, what that is? Sure.

So the Abgar score is a score that was created a long time ago to basically determine what that baby looks like on the outside.

Are they pink? Are they breathing? Do they have good muscle tone? And while although it can be a good predictor for babies that are full term who are lacking oxygen at birth, the one minute and the five minute really have no predictive value.

So, yeah, he was completely blue, not breathing.

So his Apgar was, I think, one because he got one point for his heart beating.

And that was it.

So they had started resuscitation protocols, and I think they kind of had assumed what happened at that point, that he had swallowed a lot of meconium, some meconium aspiration.

Yeah.

And that affects his Apgar score.

Really?

Me getting a fever.

That's weird.

Yeah.

I don't even know what the Apgar score really is, but-

I don't know either.

And then he was sort of whisked off me quite quickly and taken to the resuscitator and was looked over by the baby doctor, which again, in hindsight, I'm like, I don't know why they did that.

His APGARs were 10, 10, 10.

There was no reason for them to take him off me.

And that's the point where I realized that they'd cut his cord.

The baby was born vigorous, uh, but had a history of thin meconium-stained fluid.

And the Apgar scores were eight at one minute, and then again at five minutes was eight again.

The baby was put on mom's chest, uh, and about s- at seven minutes of life, the baby was noted to be dusky.

So the team brought the patient to the warmer, uh, and put the sat probe, and the baby was satting thirty percent on room air.

Cardiomegaly on chest X-ray.

So those are all kind of things that think, make you think more about congenital heart disease.

Uh, and things that may make you point more towards pulmonary hypertension in the transitional period specifically will be a history of fetal distress, um, low Apgar scores, uh, poor pH, a baby that is very labile when you're handling, a baby that when you do try to wean the oxygen, the, the sats get even worse, and the very commonly abnormal lung parenchyma, because obviously pulmonary hypertension is a vascular disease, but the majority of the neonatal cases of pulmonary hypertension do have associated lung disease.

So basically, using these parameters, they were actually pretty accurate in about 88% of the cases, uh, which I thought was pretty interesting that we can guess pretty well even in the absence of a lot of information at that point.

Um, unfortunately with a condition like this one, it can lead to some compromise of the baby.

So because I had been in respiratory distress for about, uh, 15 minutes at that point, um, My son was born, uh, with an Apgar score of zero.

So that means basically, um, he was blue, not breathing, no heart rate, kind of no responsiveness.

So for all intents and purposes, you know, dead, but thankfully babies are very resilient.