Every day is labor day for the most celebrated expectant mother at Glenwood Springs’ Valley View Hospital delivery ward.
Noelle — like Madonna, Prince and Raffi, she uses only one name — has given birth more often than Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas 41-year-old whose 18th baby is due on New Year’s Day 2009. Noelle’s current record is seven births in one afternoon.
That’s a lot to ask, but Noelle is at the cutting edge of robotic birth simulator technology. She is the latest model, a Gaumard Scientific S575 Noelle.
Valley View Hospital paid about $38,000 for her and her baby, named Hal in a wink to Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Noelle is unnervingly realistic. She complains. She groans. She yells. Her standard features include a programmable hemorrhage — simulated blood — and a bladder that produces simulated urine.
“She’s fantastic,” says Jane Vincent, clinical supervisor of Valley View’s Family Birthplace.
“You can see the veins in her arms. She’s proportionately fairly correct. Her wig isn’t the most beautiful, but we’re planning to do moulage — that’s making her up for different scenarios.”
From the perspective of living pregnant women, and the hospital staff who work with them, Noelle’s perpetual bad hair day is far less important than the opportunity she offers in duplicating worst-case scenarios.
No nurses or physicians want to practice their emergency techniques on a live, laboring woman who actually is suffering a heart attack or seizure. When an emerging baby’s shoulder catches behind its mother’s pubic bone, they want to react instinctively, freeing the infant before the mother starts hemorrhaging.
“You can start IVs on her, you can do urinary catheterization, you can listen to her lung sounds — and the baby’s — and her heartbeat, actually take a blood pressure on her,” Vincent says, ticking off Noelle’s attributes.
“She can be intubated and put on a respirator. You can do CPR on her, including defibrillation. You can practice postpartum hemorrhage.”
Noelle’s physical reactions are exquisitely detailed. So are baby Hal’s. It’s possible to watch his thorax rise and fall, to hear the air exchange in his tiny robotic lungs, to monitor his changing heart rate. Hal can be programmed to turn a little blue around the mouth, a sign that his oxygen level is dangerously low.
And after the mandatory debriefing session, Hal pops back into Noelle, and she’s ready to start birthing babies again.
“In real-life emergencies, it’s difficult to learn to sequence procedures,” Vincent says.
“With Noelle, you can learn to sequence different scenarios. You can program her to answer questions, and you can program her to go into labor at warp speed. We only have 50 nurses here, and a real-time simulation would take up too much time.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
