By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times
TAMPA — As John Reisinger waited with family at Tampa General Hospital, grief settled in like a fog. So some of the details are hazy.
But he remembers the moment when three women in white lab coats approached him.
The day before, his niece, Jessica Raubenolt, had been struck and killed by a speeding car as she legally crossed Bayshore Boulevard with her 21-month-old daughter, Lillia.
A bystander had kept the girl’s heart beating. But now, in the neonatal intensive care unit, she was fading.
The women had some paperwork. They asked for permission to record Lillia’s heartbeat.
“Of course with the emotional state of the immediate family, I told them to go ahead and record it, that we’d have the paperwork signed in time,” Reisinger said.
That night, a team of nurses and staff from Tampa General captured audio from the dying child’s heart. They later added music and offered it to the family as a keepsake — part of the hospital’s Beats of Love program, which began last year, with a focus on critical patients.
Anthony Goodwin, a musician by trade who plays guitar for Tampa General patients, uses his audio engineering experience to save the heartbeats for families to listen to on their own.
“We wanted to help families cope with the unfathomable loss of a child,” said Dr. Maya Balakrishnan, a neonatologist at the hospital and an associate professor of pediatrics at the USF Morsani College of Medicine.
She described Goodwin’s role as “creating magic.”
Reisinger remembers Goodwin asking if the family would like the sound of Lillia’s last heartbeats set to music. They said yes, and requested Over the Rainbow.
“It was one of the first songs David and Jessica sang to Lillia when she was born,” he said of Lillia’s parents. “And it was one of the last things David was able to do before she died, is sing it to her again, and then she was taken away for organ donor surgery.”