Smith and I decided to share a taxi to downtown Indianapolis, and that gave me a chance to try to process this pregnancy with him. And I said, “I don’t understand. She can’t be pregnant because she wasn’t ovulating at the time.”
Rick shook his head and spelled it out to me. “Let me give you a biology lesson. A woman is most likely to get pregnant right before she’s ovulating.”
I said, “Really? I didn’t know that.” And I didn’t. Which amazed and frightened me. Here I was, a grown man, involved in many relationships before, and I never knew that. They never taught me that in school.
Rick smiled and said, “That’s it. Done. Pregnant.” What every reporter always seeks: confirmation. And there was more coming.
After I dropped my bags at the downtown Indianapolis Marriott, I called Sharri again. She had taken another test. Another positive.
I asked Rick to meet me for lunch, because by this time, he was married and a father, and I figured he now could give me more than a biology lesson. He could give me a hint of what to expect in the months and years to come. He was in the process of trading quarterback Sage Rosenfels to the Vikings, and I was in the process of a much larger personnel move.
The Combine is a blur, with virtually everybody in the league talking, gossiping, eating, drinking, negotiating, scouting, and socializing, but it was tough for me to concentrate that night, or the entire week. I went to bed that night after midnight with my head spinning. Pregnant? Our team was about to expand its roster.
* * *
When Sharri became pregnant in 1999, she had wanted to find out the sex of the child, and Joe did not. Sharri, of course, won. They found out it was a boy and decided to name him Devon, after her grandfather Daniel and her uncle Donald, two men she loved.
She wanted to find out this time, too, and so we did.
We went for the sonogram, and the doctor looked at the monitor and broke the news.
We were having a girl.
A baby girl! This was going to be different for me in every way.
* * *
That June, with Sharri around halfway through her pregnancy, I drove to George Maio’s golf club, Rockland Country Club, in Sparkill, New York. He was sponsoring a charity golf tournament for the Rockland Country Club Foundation to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it would be a strange, memorable day that combined relaxation, intense emotions, and work.
I did not expect the work. It was June, a rare quiet time in the NFL year, but as I drove over the George Washington Bridge, the news broke that New York Giants star Michael Strahan was retiring. I thought I might have to turn around, go to a local TV studio, and start doing live shots, but I also felt a strong obligation to George. Then I realized that I might be able to honor my obligation to George while making my employer happy. A number of Giants would be attending this golf outing, and I figured I could interview them. So that was how we decided to do it.
When I arrived, I scanned the list of names scheduled to be at the outing: Eli Manning, Tom Coughlin, Tiki Barber, and Jerome Bettis. Those were three prominent Giants and a future Hall of Famer. The NFL Network sent a satellite truck to the club so I could conduct some interviews, which probably sounds a little more intrusive than it actually was. There were celebrities there, and it was a golf outing. It wasn’t a solemn affair. It was done for people to be happy and raise money.
I managed to work, play nine holes of golf, and still have lunch with George and meet some of his friends at the club. It was obvious to me that George was beloved there; he knew everyone, and they knew him. He might have been the most popular guy in the room. I wasn’t surprised.
But what I remember most about the day was not meeting of any George’s friends or interviewing any Giants or NFL people. What I most remember was seeing an engraved stone beneath a flagpole, in memory of Joseph D. Maio:
Our friend and fellow member who perished tragically in the assault on American Liberty of September 11, 2001. We will never forget!
For a good five minutes, I stood there staring at it. I got choked up.
* * *
Sharri had warmed to the idea of having another child, but she was still scared. Her diabetes meant it would likely be a difficult pregnancy.
Sharri thought her second pregnancy might be as bad as her first. She was wrong.
It was worse.
We found out Sharri was pregnant in February. She was due in October. The months in between were brutal. In early July, she started to have severe stomach pain. Medication didn’t help. At 3:30 one morning, she woke up moaning in pain before she fell back asleep.
As I went to the gym that morning, I thought she would be OK. I did not bring my phone into my spinning class, which was a mistake. I should have kept it on me in case Sharri called, but at that point in my life, I never worked out with my phone on me. It was one of those moments when you need to realize you can’t do things the way you did as a single guy all those years.
I got out of class and saw I had missed two calls from home. And I knew that meant one thing: trouble. I’d blown it. I called Sharri, and she was as furious at me as she had ever been. When I got home, it wasn’t any better.
She ripped into me right there, with Devon watching; I tried to persuade her to wait until he was gone, but she didn’t care. I was embarrassed.
“Where the hell were you?” she said.
“I jumped in the shower…”
“Are you crazy?! I have to go to the hospital!”
I didn’t mean to be insensitive; I just had stuck to my routine. I had sweat dripping off me, so I jumped in the shower, then rushed right home, but she was so angry. We put Devon on the school bus and drove in silence to her doctor’s office. I could feel the fury and fear from her, all the way until we got to the hospital.
By the time we got to her doctor, she was in agony. Something was clearly wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. One doctor suspected it was her appendix, and he sent us to the emergency room at North Shore University Hospital.
On our way there, I got a call from a producer at the NFL Network: Brett Favre was asking for his unconditional release from the Green Bay Packers. I said I couldn’t help. That was the first time in my two-decade career that I could ever remember saying I was too busy to help and backing away from work, but there was no other option. Nothing mattered more than making sure Sharri was OK.
Sharri needed an MRI, but she was beyond anxious and nervous about taking it. I was worried and felt helpless—I thought the MRI should have been done earlier, and I wasn’t convinced that doctors had been giving Sharri the attention she deserved.
Finally, that night, she had an emergency appendectomy. Before she went under, I was told that one in five pregnant women who have their appendixes removed go into premature labor. That was frightening, but we had no options. This was emergency surgery. I tried to digest the possibility. Sharri could be giving birth this evening. Our daughter could be coming along at any time now.
The surgery, fortunately, was a success. Sharri did not go into labor. I kept popping into her room in intensive care to check on her, then returning to the waiting room, where a TV was tuned to ESPN and its Brett Favre reporting. Sharri finally left the ICU and got her own room at 2:00 A.M. I saw a chair in there and decided I would sleep in it that night. We’d had a rough morning and a scary evening. I wanted to finish the day by doing the right thing. I wasn’t going to leave that hospital until Sharri did.
* * *
Our argument about my phone was not an isolated incident. Sharri and I were struggling. I had underestimated the difficulty of walking into her and Devon’s life—or perhaps just overestimated my ability to do it. She also had to adjust to having someone else in her life, after years of having to think about only Devon and herself.
Every time I thought I was getting the hang of it, we’d experience some sort of setback. I had connected with Devon when I was dating Sharri, but it
was not always so simple once I married her. The issues did not sit well with Sharri, who got mad at me. And she and I were having problems. It was not a good cycle.
A few days after Sharri’s appendectomy, I went to the eye doctor. As I sat in the waiting room, I read a stat that 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce. I wrote in my journal:
Can’t say I knew that, but we could be a statistic at this rate, that’s what concerns me.
That afternoon, I offered to take Devon to GameStop to buy video games. It should have been a simple, fun activity for a kid and his stepdad, but at GameStop, he asked me to buy three games. I told him I thought two was enough, and it was. I came from a background in which I did not get whatever I wanted; limits almost always were imposed. But Sharri liked to indulge Devon. She always wanted him to have the best, because he had experienced the worst.
When I told Devon I would not allow him to get more than two games, he walked out of the store crying. I thought he was acting spoiled, and I didn’t care for it. I yelled at him as loudly as I had ever yelled at him. Stepdad or not, it never feels good to yell at a child you love.
We went home. Devon went crying to Sharri, telling her that he wasn’t allowed to get what he wanted. I told Sharri my side of the story and marched into my home office, seeking time to calm down, process the situation, and wonder if I could have or should have done anything differently. As I sat alone in my office, Sharri came in to tell me that I had to make Devon dinner, but at that moment, I didn’t feel like doing anything for him. That night, Devon went to bed in tears. I was angry and frustrated.
In other words, life happened. I assume that these kinds of days happen in every single family, even the happiest ones, but I felt like they were piling up for us.
I’d talk to friends and compare notes on marital problems. It seemed like everybody had different variations of the same stories, so we were not unusual, but it was still hard.
I had a long history of ending relationships too quickly. I was not about to end this one, but with a baby on the way, I was wondering if I had what it took to make it through and to make the relationship last.
* * *
Less than a week after Sharri’s appendectomy, I was in for a massage appointment when somebody knocked on the door.
“Adam,” I was told, “your wife is on the phone. It’s an emergency.”
Another one. Sharri said she had been struggling to breathe. Well, I wasn’t going to screw up this time. I got right up and went home immediately. Sharri’s mom met us there. We raced to the hospital and got her into the emergency room.
We were told Sharri might have a pulmonary embolism. Then we were told she had a blood clot in her lung. It sounded disturbing, all of it, whatever it actually was. It turned out to be more disturbing than I even realized. She had a pulmonary embolism and a blood clot in her lung. Sharri, who was already dealing with diabetes, would have to be on blood thinners for a while and deal with twice-a-day injections … and of course, she had to be extremely careful in the final months of the pregnancy.
She was discouraged, and understandably so. I sent a group text to some friends, just to vent. Some people in the summer go to the Hamptons, others go to bed-and-breakfasts, we go to the North Shore Hospital emergency room.
We kept getting conflicting signals about when Sharri could go home. One doctor said she would soon be released. Then a nurse came in and said she was shocked—shocked!—that Sharri was being released. She went on and on about how she never had seen a pregnant woman with a pulmonary embolism be discharged. She talked about the possibility of the blood clot traveling to Sharri’s brain.
“You could die,” the nurse said.
She went on for fifteen minutes about the dangers of this, especially for pregnant women, and the damage she had seen it wreak in others. By the end of her medical talk and lesson, Sharri was crying.
I was stuck. Sharri really wanted to get out of there, and I wanted to stick up for her, but what if there was a real danger in having her discharged?
Things that mattered to me before that moment suddenly mattered less, like work. I got emails that Chris Long, the second pick in the NFL Draft, had reached a contract agreement with the St. Louis Rams. This was the kind of story I normally would get to work on right away, but I wrote in my journal:
I couldn’t care less, to be honest.
I found myself driving around Long Island, trying to find the right medication for Sharri, physically and mentally exhausted. We had two straight weekends in the hospital, with one incident more unsettling and unnerving than the previous.
Eventually, we got the medication that Sharri needed. Eventually, she got out of the hospital again. And we had to hope that in every way, things would get better.
* * *
I suppose most women are ready to be done with their pregnancies by the time they reach full term. Sharri was really ready to be done. When we went to see doctors in late September 2008 and they did a sonogram, they found that our soon-to-be-born daughter was weighing in at close to twelve pounds—and Sharri wasn’t much over one hundred pounds herself. The sound and reality of it practically made Sharri sick; doctors knew they needed to do the C-section sooner rather than later, lest this baby come out practically a full-grown person. It was a fitting way to end the pregnancy.
Sharri had gone through the pregnancy from hell. And yet, when it came time for the scheduled C-section, she was nervous. So much had already gone wrong, it was fair to wonder what else could. It was hard to feel totally confident about anything anymore. I tossed and turned the night before, so you can imagine what it was like for her.
We left our house at 5:30 A.M. Sharri was quiet, the roads were empty, and it all felt strangely surreal. My mom was very upset that I did not have a Cord Blood Registry kit to save Sharri’s blood for the baby in the event of some sort of emergency. We called around to see if we could find one, and we did, at her doctor’s office. I was so desperate to get it that I bolted past my father in the lobby without even saying hello to him. He thought it was odd that I was running away from the delivery room and hospital, instead of toward it. But time was of the essence, and I was rushing for everything. I even got pulled over for speeding on the way to the doctor’s office. I showed the cop that my wife was about to give birth, and this truly was a life-and-death situation. He responded by staying in his car for ten minutes before finally letting me leave.
I got back to the hospital and immediately changed into scrubs. Then, while I waited to go into Sharri’s operating room, I sat in a chair right outside it, contemplating how my life was about to change. This was another one of those moments that always stays with you, forever. I knew my life would change dramatically from the moment I walked in that room to the moment I walked out of it. This was one of those moments we await all our adult years.
I had been parenting Devon for almost two years and really loved doing it, but this time I would get to be there from the beginning, not miss out on those early years as I had with Devon.
I walked into the room. There was a blue curtain between Sharri and the doctors, and I was on Sharri’s side. I tried to get a sense of what was happening that I couldn’t see. I thought I heard a cry but didn’t. Then I heard them talk about how much hair the baby had. I could see fluid and blood dripping, and the intensity of the moment really hit me.
Then I heard crying, and there she was: our girl.
Dylan Madeline Schefter, named after my beloved grandfather Poppy Dave, whom we had lost to lung cancer in 2002. Dylan weighed eleven pounds, ten ounces—bigger, even, than Devon had been. She was covered in a white film. Sharri joked that she looked like a sausage casing. I was so relieved that the surgery had gone well—the previous few months had been a nightmare, and I had been worried about Sharri. My eyes were watering, the emotions were strong, and then I had this weird thought I had not anticipated. I had spent so much time thinking about Sharri’s health.
Now I wondered: Was I suppos
ed to look after Sharri—or Dylan?
* * *
The doctors asked me to go back outside for a few minutes while they got Sharri ready for the recovery room. I sat in the same chair I had sat in minutes earlier, but this felt completely different. We had a daughter now. I thought about how many fathers had sat in that same chair and experienced the same powerful emotions I had. That feeling stuck with me for many years.
They wheeled Sharri out, and we saw our families, and I sent an email blast to as many people as I could to share the good news. Of course, everybody was laughing because I was on my BlackBerry. After people started to leave, I gave Sharri a Cartier bracelet that I had bought her. She wasn’t expecting it, and she loved it.
All I could really think, though, was that I wanted to see my daughter again. I took my sister, Marni, to the maternity ward to see her, but she wasn’t there. It was very odd; this girl had been born minutes earlier, and she wasn’t in the maternity ward? I was told she had been moved to intensive care because her sugars were low. Intensive care? Sugars low? We found her, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was lying under a heat lamp, what looked like a french fry warmer, to take away some of her jaundice and to try to help restore her blood sugars. Her arms flailed out to the sides and were in the shape of goalposts, a position that she would wind up sleeping in for years throughout her childhood—and sometimes even to this day. My happiness was mitigated with concern for her being in intensive care, and our family came by to see our newest addition as well.
Eventually, George Maio was the one who brought Devon to the hospital. Devon came upstairs to the ICU, stared through the glass, and, for the first time, eyed his new baby sister.
* * *
After Dylan spent about one week in the hospital in intensive care, we finally were able to bring her home. I quickly realized how much I didn’t know. I had never given any thought to baby seats, but we had to have one set up in the back seat of our car. Fortunately, Sharri had parenting experience and knowledge and knew things I didn’t. She was the head coach, and I was happy to execute her game plan.
The Man I Never Met Page 10