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?'”
Dr. Donald Craig delivered Krista Barczyk in 1968. Decades later, Krista, her mother and the doctor who changed their lives recall that moment.
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.
A carefully managed secret
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.”
Barczyk and her daughter visited Craig’s table afterward to give him a hug and have a chat. Craig said he could see the multi-generational impact on her family.
“We not only saved her life, we saved her children’s lives and their children and on and on,” he said.
For decades, Barczyk has told her birth story, but she really felt the impact standing next to him on stage.
“If it hadn’t been for him, none of what I went through in my life would have happened. I never would have fallen in love. I never would have played sports, I never would have gotten married, had my three children and been able to have grandkids,” she said.
“You can tell your birth story 100 times, but when you’re standing with the man who basically saved your life … it really hits you pretty hard.”
Her mother knew it might be a stillbirth
She’s also thankful to the woman who gave her life — her mother Dorothy Fillmore.
Fillmore went into the hospital that day in 1968 because she was in a lot of pain. She was only six months pregnant and very concerned about having a miscarriage.
Fillmore said she was also aware that it would be a breech birth, and that Craig went to the hospital library to study up on the procedure. So when she heard the baby’s cry in the delivery room, her joy was tempered by concern that her daughter might not survive.
“I didn’t know if she was going to live or die,” Fillmore said, “so I just stayed in that mindset until she started to gain weight.”
For the next month, it was that kind of waiting game — gaining a little bit of weight each day until she was ready to leave the hospital at five pounds and 12 ounces.
‘I can’t get this story out of my head’
The story of Barczyk’s birth resurfaced because of the keen interest of Alyssa Long, the executive director of the medical education foundation, and fellow staff members David Ryan and Natalie Boyce.
As part of the preparations for the awards gala, Craig took part in a video interview for communications materials for the event. They asked what patient stories stood out the most over his 43-year career and he began telling them about Barczyk.
“It struck a chord with me. I was about four or five months pregnant at the time and just thought, ‘I can’t get this out of my head,'” Long said.
“It stuck with me and it stuck with my team to the point where I said, ‘What if we could find this baby?'”
It took eight weeks of sleuthing, but they found Barczyk and invited her to the event. She was living in Memramcook and working in Moncton for a tech company. She has three kids, three grandchildren, and is getting married again in the fall.
Several family members, including her mother and older brother, came to the event in Saint John.
Barczyk and Craig’s story, and their reunion on stage, had a profound effect on many of those in attendance.
“There were a lot of tears,” Barczyk said. “I went into the bathroom and there were two ladies there. They were both crying when I walked in, and they both screamed, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ They came over to me, and they were like, ‘Tell us the story again.’ They gave me hugs and one of them said, ‘You know, I will carry the story with me for the rest of my life.'”
Craig and Barczyk met again several weeks later on Craig’s back deck overlooking the Kennebecasis River in Rothesay. They took a few minutes to look at her baby pictures taken in the hospital.
She asked him questions about the birth and he told her once again of the challenges he faced, including breaking her clavicle as he steered her through the birth canal.
She stretched her shoulder area and laughed, saying “That’s why it hurts when it rains, it’s your fault.”
