Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Filming a TV series at a hospital is nothing like you’d see on TV. There’s no cantankerous but brilliant doctor with a cane who regularly solves complicated medical puzzles. There are no McSteamy-style love affairs to distract from the job’s serious side. There are no scripts, no formulas, and no guarantees.
So when St. Louis–based Coolfire Originals set out to film a documentary-style series about St. Louis Children’s Hospital, titled The Frontline for Hope, the company had to take an entirely different approach than with other reality-based shows it’s created.
“This is not like Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s or something, where you’re on a set or shooting a lot of people who expect you to be there or are used to cameras being around,” says Sue Stanley, a writer and story producer with Coolfire. “These were real families with real children that were going through real challenges—in some cases, life-threatening challenges.”
Last fall, Stanley and her team set out to capture life at Children’s Hospital in all its dimensions. Some patients they followed for minutes, others for months. They worked closely with the hospital’s staff, recording patients, families, and doctors for nearly six months, from early August 2012 to late January. Along the way, they filmed visitors from here and around the globe—Dublin, Ireland; Topeka, Kan.; New Jersey; Columbia, Mo.—and moved from the emergency room to the operating room, doctors’ homes to patients’ bedsides. They showed some of the state-of-the-art technology available at Children’s Hospital and examined the critical decision-making process that doctors face every day.
“This was one of the most challenging storytelling assignments I’ve ever had,” says Stanley. “When we were introduced to a family, we knew what the hopes of the family and the doctor were, but we didn’t know if any of those would come to pass—and we didn’t know when or to what extent.”
Among those interviewed was Jamie Truscott, a 28-year-old medical student and mother from Collinsville, Ill., who was referred to Children’s Hospital after discovering at a 20-week ultrasound that her baby had a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. The birth defect involves an abnormal opening in the diaphragm, which allows organs in the abdomen to push up into the chest cavity and prevents a baby’s lungs from properly developing.
Children’s Hospital treats the condition in a variety of ways: using mechanical ventilators in the neonatal intensive care unit to help with breathing, putting some children with more severe cases on a temporary heart/lung bypass machine called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and performing surgery to repair the hole in the diaphragm once the child’s condition improves. The hospital is also the world’s most active center for pediatric lung transplants.
Dr. F. Sessions Cole, director of newborn medicine and chief medical officer at Children’s Hospital, is among the nation’s leading experts in intensive care for newborns. The Wall Street Journal has lauded his approach to “family-centered care,” closely involving patients’ families in the medical process, as being at the forefront of NICU care and having influenced other hospitals nationwide.
After Truscott’s daughter, Madeline, was born last September, she remained in the NICU at Children’s Hospital. Stanley and her team captured the Truscotts’ story, meeting with Truscott before Madeline was born and following them until the baby was released from the hospital more than three months later.
“The crew sort of adopted Madeline from the very beginning,” says Truscott. “Her name was Blueberry because we hadn’t decided on a name yet, so the staff considered her their little Blueberry, too.” The film crew was there when Truscott gave birth: “One of the sound guys came in afterward and told me, ‘I’ve been doing sound for 12 years, and I’ve never recorded anything that was as cool as her first cry.’”
While at Children’s, the team filmed according to hospital rules: scrubbing their hands before and after recording medical procedures, working around doctors’ and patients’ schedules, asking hospital staff to accompany them while filming. “I tried to make the most of every second I had with a family,” says Stanley, adding that the limitations were sometimes challenging. “I wanted to talk to families at the time that’s most dramatic, but sometimes that was inappropriate. Being a mom whose child has been in the emergency room, I know there are moments that all you need and want to do is care about your child.”
Stanley was mindful of “bad days,” as Truscott called them, when the film crew would avoid contacting the family. But she was also there for the good ones, such as when Madeline was released last December, four days before Christmas. At press time, Madeline was at home and making steady progress. In fact, as Truscott explained how Madeline’s condition had initially prevented her lungs from developing, she joked, “If you’d have heard her screaming this morning, you wouldn’t believe that.”
During the course of filming, Stanley and her team came to form special bonds with patients. “As we followed some of these stories for long periods of time, we developed a relationship with the family that was different than any other relationship they had,” says Stanley. “For some, it was very comforting, because we weren’t medical staff or family friends, but we knew the intimacies of their child’s situation. We developed a sort of trust—but it was more than that.
“Sometimes, we would come out of the operating room and want to see the doctor coming in to tell the parents how the surgery went, and they would look at us, like, ‘Is my child OK?’ We weren’t able to tell them, but we were there when they got the word that the surgery went great or if there was a problem. We became confidants, a place that they could let some of their emotions out.” They’d receive texts from the families at times when they weren’t scheduled for interviews. One family sent a Christmas card.
While the Coolfire crew was already accustomed to filming emotional stories, there were still moments that caught them off guard. “Every single one of us came across at least one experience or family situation where we had to stop and walk down the hall and gather our emotions,” recalls Stanley. “There’s some tough stuff that’s happening in the hospital and incredible emotional journeys that families are on, and they’re grappling with it the best they can.”
Stanley hopes viewers will find a new appreciation for all aspects of Children’s Hospital—the emotional roller coasters that families face, the technology and procedures the hospital offers, the compassion and skill of the doctors—and ultimately realize “they have no idea what goes on within those walls.”
The Frontline for Hope airs on KSDK–TV at 6:30 p.m. on Saturdays beginning March 16. Sportscaster Joe Buck will narrate the six-part series.
