When Dr. Niveditha Balakumar arrived in San Antonio, she only planned to stay for a year.
It was July 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she arrived to start work at Christus Children’s Hospital.
“I told myself, I’m going to give myself one year here,” she said.
Five years later, she’s still caring for San Antonio’s sickest children, with no plans to leave.
“I don’t see myself moving anywhere anytime soon,” she said.
Balakumar came to Texas after stops on the East Coast: She completed medical school in India, then pediatrics residency in New York City and a fellowship in critical care in Miami.
She chose pediatrics because she likes seeing patients from newborns and toddlers to teenagers, “almost like you’re growing up with them.”
As the medical director of the hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit, Balakumar is seeing children —and their families — in their most challenging moments.
“They come in extremely sick and fragile and vulnerable,” she said. “You make decisions in a matter of moments and seconds that change the entire course of a child’s life.”
She’s also focused on constantly improving the care children receive by reviewing data and implementing changes with her team.
One of those projects is part of a nationwide critical care initiative, aimed at aiding patients’ recovery and transition out of intensive care.
“The patient comes to the ICU, and oftentimes we don’t know how much life alters after their stay in the ICU,” Balakumar said. To address that, the project includes assessing medication, rehabilitation efforts, early mobility exercises and other efforts during their stay that can help patients after they leave.
Balakumar is also the medical director of the hospital’s All Kidz Transport program, which works to safely move children to receive specialized care.
“In simple words, it’s like a mobile ICU,” she said.
An ongoing focus is working to transport patients that are using heart-lung machines for a treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or “ECMO.”
The machine pumps blood outside the body to do the work of the heart and lungs. Christus is working to provide mobile ECMO — transporting children while they’re undergoing the treatment.
“I’m really excited for that to roll out,” Balakumar said.
Seeing kids in bed connected to those kinds of machines and tubes is “one of the hardest things you can see,” she said — but in those moments, she’s often thinking about their lives outside the hospital room.
Parents often decorate their children’s rooms with pictures from when they were healthy, which serve as a visual reminder of what the ICU team is working toward.
“Let’s see how we can get that child better, to get that smile back again, so they can go home with their family,” Balakumar said. “That’s the one thing that keeps me and all of my team members going, is working toward getting that child home.”