Every Wednesday and Friday mornings, Amanda Colón wakes up at the crack of dawn to make her trek to Brigham and Women’s Hospital where she interns. Twice a week, you’ll find this pre-med, Rochester native working in what she calls the NICU (the neonatal intensive care unit), the hospital unit devoted to working with highly premature babies and high-risk pregnancy deliveries. Amanda directly helps deliver babies that are going to be born before 35 weeks of gestation (what Amanda jokingly calls “in-belly time”) or babies that will be born with known defects.
Amanda will attend multiple C-sections each day she’s in the hospital. Most of the births are C-sections because they’ve been planned in advance due to high-risk pregnancies.
“The doctor [the neonatologist] and I will be in the room during the C-section and when the baby is born, it is immediately transferred to our care. Then, we must stabilize the baby—that is, make sure it is breathing or help it to breathe via technological assistance and make sure it has a stable heart rate. We do our ABCD’s—check the baby’s airways, breathing and circulation and see if there are any obvious deformities. If the baby is stable enough, we let the baby spend some time with mom before taking the baby up to the NICU where a team of five to 10 doctors put the baby through every kind of medical test to verify its health and figure out what the major problems are.”
When a baby is born prematurely at 35 weeks or earlier (40 weeks is a full term), it is likely it won’t have a fully functioning heart, lungs and/or brain, Amanda says. Fortunately though, modern medicine allows doctors to see if the baby isn’t developing correctly. Some babies Amanda has helped deliver have had congenital heart defects, one kidney, one lung or extra fingers. One baby was born to an HIV positive mother and Amanda and her team of doctors had to work hard to make sure the baby wasn’t overly exposed to its mother’s blood. Amanda smiles as she tells this story; they succeeded and the baby went home healthy.
“When we get a baby and it might die but then it lives—it’s exciting,” she says.
These medical miracles are especially significant for progress at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and beyond, Amanda explains. Brigham and Women’s uses new technology, and when a test is successful, more hospitals can have the opportunity to access this life-saving technology. Ultimately, more babies can be saved.
“It’s validating when we save a baby,” said Colón. “Some babies never make it out of the NICU—not all get the chance to live, even when we try our hardest. So when one lives, it reminds us that even though they all won’t live, we’re doing something helpful.”
“I’m placed in high-intensity life or death situations all the time,” she says, “but when we’re able to stabilize the baby, we’re creating families. People come in to the hospital as a couple and they leave as a family of 3—or 4 if there are twins. I get so happy when thinking about it.”
And she really does. She claps and laughs seeing the beauty of her work— she cannot stop smiling.
This is the kind of medicine Amanda wants to practice, and she’s known this her entire life. She recalls her birthday pool party one summer when her neonatologist neighbor told her that he helped save one of her friends at the party when the friend was a baby.
“I thought that was so cool,” Amanda said. “Here he was swimming in my pool, all normal and everything, and I never realized he was sick and my neighbor helped him.”
This experience inspired Amanda— in second grade she wrote a paper about how she wanted to be a neonatologist when she grew up. She recalls everyone thinking she was crazy. Then, each year in sixth, seventh and eighth grade she attended her school’s mock career fair as a neonatologist. One of her teachers thought she chose to do her project on neonatology year after year so she never had to redo the project.
“Little did he realize…,” Amanda smiled and said.
Amanda found her dream and has been pursuing it since—even when people didn’t take her seriously. And now, she’s working to enter this field that has been traditionally male dominated. “I’M COMINGGGGGG,” Amanda yells with a grin.
Between her rigorous classes and internship, you’ll find Amanda either in the Mugar basement or Sargent second floor study space— probably working on her organic chemistry problems. But she does find time to pursue her other loves like dance and Greek life. She’s minoring in dance and holds a leadership position in her sorority, Kappa Delta. In addition to this, Amanda works with Out of the Darkness as a suicide first responder. She’s trained to work as a peer counselor for people with suicidal thoughts and to get them the treatment they need. She mostly reassures the individuals who reach out to her that they can get help and that they’re not alone in their struggle.
You can follow Amanda on Twitter (@amandaecolon) and Instagram (@amandacolon_), but she doesn’t know why you would because, as she says with a wink and a smile, “I’m just an average gal.”