I look after a baby with stiff lungs (pulmonary hypertension), as the heart has been pumping too hard, and for too long, with a valve that doesn’t work and a hole in the center. She will not self-oxygenate and needs to go onto nitric oxide in order to live. Nitric oxide is not to be confused with the nitrous oxide that my midwife friends and I were inhaling. Nitric oxide, which is used regularly in neonatal, child and adult Intensive-Care Units in the high-oxygen-rich environment of the ventilation circuit, has the dangerous potential to convert to cytotoxic nitrogen oxide—the same gas that
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