Dr. Darlene Vasbinder-Calhoun
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series on the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023.
When Darlene Vasbinder-Calhoun and her twin sister, Debbie Vasbinder Dillon, were born in 1956, they weren’t supposed to make it.
They were born six weeks early at a time when there were no specialists in premature infants, let alone neonatal intensive care units with specialized equipment.
“If you were born (prematurely) when I and my twin were born, your chance of dying was more than 95 percent,” Vasbinder-Calhoun said. “If you were the 5 percent that survived, your chance of being not normal – maybe have cerebral palsy, not able to walk, talk, do any of the things that parents want their babies to do – was very high.”
Aside from those grim facts, the Vasbinder girls were born at Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, where they were just one of five sets of twins born that week. Presumably, medical resources were stretched very thin.
The prognosis for the Vasbinder girls: there was nothing they could do for them.
“Even though there was nothing they could do, somebody cared enough to make sure that somehow we got nutrition, somehow our temperature was kept up so that we could reach that monumental weight of five pounds to get discharged from the hospital,” Vasbinder-Calhoun said.
Vasbinder-Calhoun is left without a clue as to how they got nutrition in an era without feeding tubes, nor isolettes with variable temperature controls.
As she got older and could understand the story of her birth, she came to appreciate the efforts made by the doctors and nurses at Trumbull Memorial.
“I valued the care that somebody had provided for us, and I thought that was an amazing job,” Vasbinder-Calhoun said.
Vasbinder-Calhoun and her sister thrived. Vasbinder-Calhoun went on to earn a National Science Foundation grant between her junior and senior years, graduate as valedictorian in 1974, and receive a bachelor’s degree in medical technology from the State University of New York and a master’s degree in chemistry from Youngstown State University.
While working as a medical technologist, she frequently was tasked with drawing blood from babies, and started to appreciate their resilience and also the improved care that was offered to them – a far cry from when she was born.
“I wanted to be the person that wasn’t there for my twin sister and I,” she said.
Vasbinder-Calhoun went to the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine to become a neonatologist – a doctor who treats premature and sick babies. It’s a difficult job because these babies not only have to develop normal functions, they might be dealing with an infection or some other condition.
Settling in Florida, Vasbinder-Calhoun went on to do research in blood problems of the newborn, train burgeoning pediatricians and become division chief of neonatology at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando.
While the loss of a patient can be excruciating, the career is rewarding because the success rate keeps climbing and there is always something new to learn that might help the next child.
“So many benefit from what we can do,” she said.
