BY Connie Mitchell

“It was a lonely experience.” That’s how Dave Barylski remembers the long hours at his babies’ bedsides. Twins, the girls were born in April 2019 weighing just more than 1 pound each after birth at 22 weeks of gestation. Barylski and his partner, Bethany Watkins, practically lived in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital for seven months—and he was often the only father in the unit. “I was lucky that my job offered paternity leave and extended family leave so I could be there, but being a dad in that situation, I had to piggyback off the services that are usually focused on moms,” he says. “I was the only father there during lunches and in the support groups that were clearly aimed at moms’ needs.

In an ice rink measuring 200 feet by 85, 10 of the 12 players on a professional hockey team skate at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, vying for a frozen, vulcanized rubber puck that, when forcefully shot, can reach 100 miles per hour. Players collide with each other, get rammed into the rink’s wood or fiberglass walls and steel goal posts, skate on razor-sharp blades and swiftly maneuver hockey sticks measuring up to 63 inches in length. What could possibly go wrong?

Just a few decades ago, cardiac surgeons, engineers and scientists were working on new technology that would revolutionize open-heart surgery. Specifically, they were developing a device that would act as a patient’s heart and lungs, keeping the body’s blood supply circulating while the heart underwent complex repairs. At Barnes Hospital, now Barnes-Jewish, a solution to the problem arrived in 1956: the Gibbon-Mayo heart-lung pump.

A little boy is cured of cancer. A woman finds relief after months of pain. A man gets the new lung he needs to breathe easy and keep living. A baby goes home from the hospital—healthy after a frightening early birth and a stay in the newborn intensive care unit. With its cutting-edge technologies and lifesaving advances, the field of medicine is full of stories like these. This is apparent every day in health-care systems across the country and around the world.