MEETING HIS HEROES

him the medicine to make him stop breathing on his own, and they went to go intubate him and didn’t have children’s tubes,” said Jenn. “He went to zero and they just ripped me off of him.”

“The doctor was out on a little wooden deck, and he said, ‘Please God, don’t let this little baby die,’” said the boy’s grandmother, Toni Sawyer. “I had just pulled up, and I’m like, ‘Please don’t tell me you’re talking about Miles.’”

With the first helicopter en route to airlift Miles to Miami diverted due to an accident on U.S. 1, and a second bird still a ways out, the minutes remaining to ventilate both of Miles' lungs were absolutely critical. Enter Forcine.

With a pediatric background, doctors called Forcine’s number for help with the intubation. He immediately went to work.

“There were a bunch of nurses around, and when I walked in, I was like, ‘You guys need to move,’” he recalled.

With the baby’s airway extremely swollen due to what was eventually diagnosed as metapneumonia, X-rays sent to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital revealed that Miles’ breathing tube was only providing air to one lung. Pediatric intubations are widely regarded as a challenging procedure even in a fully-equipped hospital, let alone an emergency field station, and in Miles’ case, diagnostic images showed that his tube needed to move a mere 2 millimeters – and stay exactly there.

“He was completely gray,” Jenn recalled.

“God was with me, and he put this idea in my head,” said Forcine. “I took a video laryngoscope for an adult and just put it in the corner of his mouth just so I could see. I took an extra long guide wire, and once I could see his opening, I placed that in, and then I was able to slide a tube in and go directly into the glottic opening to ventilate him.”

Miles’ color returned almost instantly, and his heart rate began declining. But one reading was still troubling. His EtCO2 values, a measure of the carbon dioxide exhaled by the baby, still weren’t right, igniting a debate about whether to move the tube again. But Forcine was confident in his placement.

“I was like, ‘That reading is wrong. His color is too good,’” remembered Forcine. “He was so little, the adult one they had on was giving a false reading. I said, ‘He’s too saturated (with oxygen). Leave it alone. … Sometimes you’ve got to look at the baby and not the instrument.”

Sure enough, once the instrument was swapped for its pediatric counterpart, the reading was normal.

Miles was airlifted to Nicklaus and faced an extensive road to recovery. But today, he’s a happy and healthy little boy with a family – including a younger brother and little sister on the way – who will be forever grateful to Forcine and the Marathon Fire Rescue staff who saved their little one’s life.

The station rolled out the red carpet for the youngster on Tuesday, presenting him with fire rescue memorabilia and opening up their ambulances and fire trucks for the family to sit in the front seats – even letting the boys take a swing at blasting a fire hose. Leaving Forcine with a collection of then-and-now photos of Miles, the Fortunatos announced their desire to make a $1,000 donation to the department.

“Everyone we’ve ever talked to has such high esteem for you,” Sawyer told Forcine. “They say, ‘He’s so precise, there’s not a thing he does that isn’t perfect,’ and I have to agree.’”

In the half hour spent at the station, Forcine never stopped smiling.

“When I got this information, it just made my heart smile,” he said. “We don’t always get to hear the rest of the story. … It was truly an honor and a blessing to have helped.”