Dr. Donald Craig greeted by surprise guest during award presentation in Saint John
Dr. Donald Craig was an intern at the old General Hospital in Saint John on a snowy night in January 1968 when a doctor asked him for help.
The doctor had to deliver a baby at nearby St. Joseph's Hospital, but a woman at the General was also about to give birth. That child was three months premature and expected to be stillborn.
"Can you handle this?" the doctor asked.
Craig had delivered babies before, but only under the supervision of a doctor or a resident. So he grabbed a book on human labour and began to review it.
Then a nurse came and told him the baby was breech — something the doctor hadn't mentioned. So he went back to his book to look that one up. A few hours later, a nurse came to take him to the delivery room.
"She screams at me, 'Craig, she's ready, she's pushing and she's crying. Let's go.'"
Craig had to break the baby's clavicle on its way out, but he manged to deliver the baby, still expecting it to be stillborn.
And then the baby started to cry.
"My heart took off faster than the baby's heart, and the mother started crying, 'Is that my baby crying?'"
The baby was alive and Craig's thoughts quickly turned to her survival. She weighed two pounds and was three months premature. Her odds of survival weren't great.
He knew the General had just hired a pediatrician who specialized in newborn child care and premature births — and she happened to be in the hospital overnight in case she was needed during the storm.
Craig said that doctor soon appeared, wearing a bathrobe over her pyjamas. She looked at him and asked, "Did you deliver that by yourself? Give me the baby."
He said the doctor "let the mom kiss her baby and said, 'We're just taking the baby down the hall. We're going to be fine.' Then she disappeared."
To this day, Craig says the doctor's skilled care was critical to the survival of the baby, who was in the hospital for a month before being released. Craig checked on her every day and gave updates to her mother, who wasn't allowed to stay in the hospital with her.
"I delivered that baby, but [the doctor] had the skill, and was trained to handle it from there," Craig said.
More than 55 years later, Craig is retired after a decades-long career in family and emergency medicine. He has served as president of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New Brunswick and the Saint John Medical Society.
He also founded the New Brunswick Medical Education Foundation, which provides scholarships to the province's medical students who agree to set up practice here — a critical part of the efforts to increase the number of doctors in New Brunswick.
In April, the foundation gave Craig the Champions of Care Founder's Award at a gala at the Saint John Trade and Convention Centre. The person who presented him with that award was Krista Barczyk, the premature baby he delivered as an intern decades ago during that January snowstorm.
It was a planned reunion the foundation kept secret from Craig until the moment Barczyk was called to the stage.
"I didn't hear half of her speech because I was so shocked," Craig said. "Then I got a copy of her speech and I printed it off to put up on my wall."
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