While attending a bar mitzvah reception, Deborah Baer was approached by a fellow guest who thanked Baer for saving her life.
“I had taken care of her during [labor and] delivery, and then following her delivery she had some complications,” said Baer, who retired from her position at Sinai Hospital in August after working there for more than 50 years, primarily as a labor and delivery nurse. “Even though my shift was over, I stayed with her. She said she knows I helped keep the doctors and nurses attentive to what was going on with her, and just my presence with her reassured her she was going to be OK.”
It was one of many lives impacted by Baer — who lives in Pikesville with her husband, Louis, and is known by many local families as “the Car Seat Lady” — over the course of her career.
A Baltimore native and mother of two adult daughters, Baer said she wanted to become a nurse at an early age. “It was just the idea of being able to take care of people,” she said.
Baer received a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Skidmore College and completed her graduate work in maternal child nursing at the University of Maryland.
After taking her nursing board exams, Baer traveled to Israel where she worked in pediatrics and the newborn and intensive care nurseries at different hospitals.
After returning to the United States, she began her career at Sinai in late 1970, in the hospital’s newborn nursery and its intensive care nursery.
Baer recalled one case of an infant born at 36 weeks whose lungs were not yet well developed. Lacking the kind of modern machinery to help the infant breathe, Baer said she placed a mask over his face and pumped air into his lungs.
“It’s an incredible feeling,” Baer said. “You’re working very, very hard. You don’t have a lot of time to think when you’re doing this. … I hate to say it’s rote, but in some ways it was. We just went, and every hour we stood there with that baby and breathed for that baby.”
In the end, that infant boy survived and eventually grew up and moved to Israel, Baer said.
“You know, there are obviously some prayers [recited] that the baby will be OK,” she said. “And then when the baby is OK, you breathe this huge sigh of relief of, ‘Well, it worked.’”
By the end of Baer’s first year at Sinai, the hospital offered her a cross-training program in the field of maternal nursing. She immersed herself into the program since she “always loved mothers, babies, children,” and found her true calling.
As a labor and delivery nurse, Baer said one of her primary duties included stress-testing to ensure a mother’s uterus remained a viable environment for the fetus. This allowed the medical staff an opportunity to “optimize the time of delivery for these mothers and babies.”
In her work as a nurse, Baer, who belongs to Beth Tfiloh Congregation, said she always viewed the Jewish principle of pikuach nefesh, preservation of human life, as a driving force.
“[The idea] of saving a life, the idea of the sanctity of life, the idea of the sanctity of the family — all of this certainly had a huge influence on my attitude toward my patients,” she said. “I looked at every patient that I took care of as a very, very important person … to give them that sense of self-worth and help them understand what they were doing was very important and wonderful and miraculous.”
Baer’s work as a labor and delivery nurse technically ended last year after she was injured in a fall. Afterward, she taught classes at Sinai on such subjects as neonatal resuscitation. She continues to teach these classes, although no longer as a full-time employee.
Outside of her work at Sinai, Baer has been heavily involved in the field of child passenger safety for more than three decades. She noted that Maryland did not pass its first law regarding car seats until 1984, with only a small minority of families using them at the time.
As a nurse, Baer said she came to the realization that sending home infants from the hospital “in their mothers’ arms in the cars [did not] make any sense.”
Baer’s work in the field included going to local schools and other programs to teach students about car safety. She has taught car seat safety to countless groups in the area, and as far away as a limb hospital in Israel.
Although retired from nursing, Baer said she is not leaving her car seat work anytime soon.
“I always said the day I would go into work and not be awed by the miracle I was able to be part of was the day I had to walk out,” said Baer. “I never lost the sense of wonder. That moment of birth, there is a new family being born. Not just a baby, but a whole new family. And doing the best I could to help that baby get through the birth process safely, to help the mother get through it, and of course the father, it’s a miracle.”
Jesse Berman is a freelance writer.
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