Published: April 05, 2009 11:39 pm      

Looking Back 1932:

A 10-pound boy named ‘Oxygen’

Mrs. Hutson screamed with the final effort to push her son into the world on June 12, 1932. Exhausted, she collapsed back onto her bed that was now damp with the sweat from her labor. The doctor announced that the baby was a boy. He cut the umbilical cord and swatted the baby on the bottom to start him crying.

The cries started, but they were weak, not the full-throated wail a 10-pound baby should have been able to make.

Though undiagnosed at the time, the baby may have had transient tachypnea. While in the womb, babies get their oxygen from the blood vessels of the placenta. Their lungs are full of fluid. They begin to clear the fluid in response to hormonal changes shortly before they are born. More fluid is squeezed out of their lungs during the birthing process, and the remainder gets coughed out after birth. A baby with transient tachypnea clears his lungs too slowly, causing breathing difficulties. The baby breathes harder and faster trying to get enough oxygen.

This is what was happening with the newborn baby.

When Mrs. Hutson asked to hold her newborn son, the doctor said that she would have to wait.

Kitzmiller, where the Hutsons lived, was one of the larger coal-mining towns along the Upper Potomac in 1932. In its heyday, Kitzmiller had a bank, bakery, theater, hotel, post office and stores, but it never had a hospital.

However, a hospital is what the baby needed. While in most instances a home birth wouldn’t be a problem, it was now. The baby was struggling to breathe and without the right equipment, the type of equipment found at a hospital, the little guy might not survive.

The closest hospital was Miner’s Hospital in Frostburg, but the doctor worried the baby might not survive the journey.

L.C. Hutson, the baby’s father, was a vocational mining instructor and he had another idea. The baby needed oxygen and Hutson knew how to get it. He and the doctor placed a call to Mine Inspector Powers and Assistant Vocational Mining Instructor Ewing in Frostburg. They brought an inhalator from the Frostburg Mine Rescue Station to Kitzmiller.

“A surgeon and nurse were present and Messrs. Powers and Ewing, assisted by Mr. Hutson, gave oxygen to the babe and revived him,” reported the Cumberland Sunday Times. “The babe, a fine 10-pound boy, has been nicknamed ‘Oxygen,’ a memorial to the occasion.”

Garrett County would eventually get a hospital, but not until Oxygen was an adult in 1950. That is when George W. Loar bequeathed $175,000 to Garrett County to build a hospital. The Garrett County Memorial Hospital was a 30-bed facility with an emergency room, laboratory, X-ray department and operating room when it first opened.

Five years later, 20 more beds were added to accommodate the growing need for hospital services in the region.