"Doctor, we have a problem."
Those were words from my nurse while I was fully gowned, masked, gloved and ready to start the procedure on the sedated infant. The premature baby was unable to feed by mouth due to multiple medical concerns, and needed to have a feeding tube placed through the abdominal wall into the stomach. Unfortunately, the most important piece of equipment for the procedure, a neonatal gastroscope, somehow became malfunctioned at the last moment, and a replacement scope was not available. The only gastroscopes that we had were too large to go through the baby's throat without potentially causing damage and/or interfering with the baby's breathing. It seemed for the moment that I had no choice but to postpone the procedure. Better to play it safe than risk a serious complication, I thought. However, my nurse wasn't quite ready to quit, and she asked whether I might consider using a bronchoscope instead. A bronchoscope is designed to go down into the lungs, and is much smaller than the neonatal gastroscope that is used to go down the baby's stomach. However, because of its small size, it does not have some of the features of gastroscopes, and would require some creative manipulation to be used properly in the stomach. The idea seemed a bit unorthodox, but workable, so I agreed to give it a try. The procedure was successfully completed after several minutes as the bronchoscope was put to good use. The baby did well.
I received an urgent message from the father of another baby who also required tube feedings. It was about 4:30 p.m. on Friday. He frantically explained that the tube somehow got plugged up, and that the baby could not be fed. The father was ready to bring the child to the emergency room, as the clinic was already closed for the week. After considering various options, I asked him to find a single tipped cotton swab (or to cut a double-tipped swab in half), and to insert about an inch of the stick into the tube to try and unplug the tube. The father managed to pull off the trick within a couple of minutes, and thanked me for sparing him the trip to the emergency room.
Sometimes the technical difficulty in placing a stomach feeding tube is not because a child is too small, but too big. I once tried to place such a tube in a morbidly obese teenage boy who had a brain tumor, and discovered that the special needle for the procedure was too short to puncture the stomach through all of his belly fat. Hearing my dilemma, the nurse anesthetist offered me the "Shamu" (i.e., referring to the killer whale at San Diego's Sea World) needle, and handed me an extra long spinal needle that she uses to perform epidural anesthesia for obese women. The needle reached the stomach easily, and the tube was successfully placed without further difficulty.
A bronchoscope, a cotton swab, and an extra-long spinal needle each serves very specific and essential functions, just as in the body of Christ, each believer has unique sets of gifts and abilities that God has given us to serve and build up each other. Knowing our gifts and abilities will certainly help us to serve more effectively; however, we also must not refuse to let God use us in more "creative" ways within the body, and we need to be available to be used by Him when called upon to do so. God can and will use us in any way that He pleases.
But now, O LORD, you are our Father;
we are the clay, you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand. (Isaiah 64:8)
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace:
(1 Peter 4:10)
