“Shortly after that call, Steph’s sister, Michelle, called me to say that she was making arrangements to fly up to Chicago that night. It was less of a question and more of a statement. I gave her the same update that I’d given her parents.
“One piece of good news was that Steph was looking better. The hemorrhage seemed to be slowing down. She had already received a huge quantity of blood transfusions during birth. A port, protruding from her stomach, was draining all of the blood that was pouring into it. At around 4:30 P.M., the bag was nearly full and was swapped out for a new one. That new one was filling up very slowly. The doctors were happy about this. It meant that the internal bleeding was getting under control.
“Things in Steph’s ICU room had settled down to a steady level of frenzy. In fact, it felt like a low level of frenzy, but that was probably a consequence of the frenetic attention she received in her first two hours there.
“I had the fortune or the misfortune of WiFi in the room, so I hopped on the Internet to find out all the information I could on AFEs. With a few clicks, and after 15 minutes of research, I got myself pretty scared. AFEs are a leading cause of maternal death around the world. Most women do not survive a full-blown AFE. For those women who do survive, the health outcome is generally poor, permanent paralysis or permanent neurological deficit being the likely result.
“The AFE Foundation website, afesupport.org, hit my radar in short order. I was immediately drawn to one of its main tabs: ‘Grieving Fathers.’ There I read story after story about husbands losing their wives and even their newborns. There were many resources directing you to widower support and parental loss support. I felt the horror overcoming me.
“Was this going to be my future? My mind was racing but was quickly interrupted by the stepped-up activity in the room. Steph’s second bag of blood was running dry, and a third was being hooked up. Almost no blood had drained out of her abdominal line. Good, or so I thought.
“Her belly was getting harder and harder to the touch. Steph was still hemorrhaging. Her body was positioned in such a way that the blood in her stomach wasn’t draining the way it should, which was why we all thought things were getting better. But they weren’t. The amount of hemorrhaging was unacceptable. She needed a hysterectomy, and she needed it right then. They paged Dr. Schink.”
The pathology report on the uterus validated my earlier premonition—a placenta accreta had formed. My husband was in disbelief. This was way too much for him.
Dr. Schink performed the hysterectomy, and the surgical team packed me with gauze. The bleed was finally under control, but the ordeal was far from over.
Chapter 6
AS THE HOURS WENT BY, my body clung to life with the help of machines. Jonathan sat in the room wondering if I would ever wake up from the coma.
“Usually between 9:00 P.M. and 5:00 A.M. the ICU was extremely quiet,” he remembered. “It was at these times that I allowed my mind to drift from its work of assessment, analysis, evaluation, etc. My mind instead focused on all the unknowns: Would my wife survive? If she did, would she have permanent impairments? If so, what would they be? What would be required of me? How on earth could I raise our children without her? Those were the scariest times for me. And I came to dread them.”
The doctors would come in and tell Jonathan that they didn’t know how well I would recover. He feared I’d have brain damage. He saw how swollen I was becoming due to kidney failure and didn’t know whether I would stay that way. I had ballooned to three times my size. By then, he was well aware of the recovery statistics of an AFE. They were not good.
Jonathan tried to distract himself by doing calculations on the whiteboard inside my ICU room. He was calculating the “frequency distribution” of AFEs in any given year at this hospital, using formulas to figure out the probabilities of this rare occurrence. Not that it mattered, because we were smack in the middle of this rare occurrence, but it helped him stay busy. Doctors would come in and out, look at his math, and shake their heads, trying to figure out what he was doing. They would check my vitals and tell him once again that they didn’t know how I would fare. None of it was helping Jonathan, so he went into crisis management mode, determined to believe I would be fine. I had to be fine.
In the meantime the calls kept coming. Jonathan continued to say, “The baby is great, Steph is sleeping right now, she is unavailable to speak.” He didn’t know what else to say, but he knew he didn’t want to tell everyone how dire the situation was until he fully knew what was happening. Friends and family would persist and call back every couple of hours. My father called several times that day, and Jonathan would say, “She is in with the doctor right now, but we will speak to you later.” He never lied, really, but he didn’t exactly tell the whole story. He didn’t want to scare my father, and he didn’t want to field calls every hour. He needed to concentrate on me without any distractions.
My sister Michelle arrived at 2:00 A.M. on Friday, May 31, thank goodness. She and my brother-in-law Roy didn’t know what had happened, but she had a feeling that something wasn’t right and hopped on the earliest flight that would get her from Florida to Chicago. Jonathan knew he needed to tell them what was going on, so he met up with them for breakfast across from the hospital around 7:30 A.M.
My sister immediately noticed how terrible he looked, and Roy joked about him never getting another good night’s sleep now that we had given birth to a boy. Jonathan wasn’t in the mood to smile. He sat down and said, “Your sister’s condition is very serious. I was hoping to put this off another day or so until I knew more . . . but here you are. She is in the ICU and had an AFE.”
He explained to Michelle and Roy what that meant. He reassured them that Jacob was fine. After breakfast, as they walked over to the hospital to see me, he tried to prepare them. “It is a really horrific sight to see her in the ICU. And no matter how bad you think this is going to look, it is going to be worse—much worse—when you see it.”
Michelle said later that when she first saw me she was confused. She thought she had walked into the wrong room. “I was staring at a 300-pound person, and that wasn’t my sister.” I looked nothing like myself. As reality settled in, she too went into crisis mode. There were no tears, and as she will readily tell you, there were no fears. There would be only one outcome in her mind. I had to survive.
After getting briefed on my condition, Jonathan took Michelle to see Jacob and to hold him. She said that was the hardest part. “It was really sad to see Jonathan holding Jacob without Stephanie. It was an incredibly sad time when we were supposed to be happy. A complete dichotomy.”
Jonathan made Michelle swear to not tell our parents until they knew more. I get it now, and so does my sister. It was the right thing to do. But in the moment my sister felt strongly that if I was going to die, my parents should have the chance to see me one more time to say good-bye.
My sister is very good under extreme pressure. She shuttled back and forth between the maternity ward and the ICU. She asked Jonathan where the “stuff” was for Jacob and me. “What are you talking about?” he asked, perplexed. Michelle said, “His clothes, blanket, plush toys, a bathrobe and toiletries for Steph, their stuff.”
Jonathan hadn’t been thinking about any of that and told my sister he didn’t know. She knew how organized I was and couldn’t understand how I could have come to the hospital without at least some personal items for myself. Little did she know that I hadn’t felt as though I’d be needing them. I hadn’t thought I was ever going to leave the hospital. In her typical way, Michelle went out and bought some items for me and everything Jacob would need for the first six months of his life. Including shoes.
She held Jacob any chance she had. She made sure the nursing staff was well fed and attended to because they were the ones keeping Jacob alive and very happy. She changed him into street clothes and wrapped him in his own swaddle blankets so he didn’t look like an abandoned hospital baby. I think she just wanted him to feel love
d by his family and to know that he had a mother, if only through her sister for a while. It still makes me cry to this day when I think about those moments.
As hours went by, and soon days, I lay still in the ICU, surrounded by machines and attached to tubes, with my family sitting vigil. My parents would call every four to five hours, and my sister and Jonathan were running out of excuses. Michelle called our cousin Sari to talk it through. She explained that she felt caught in the middle between respect for Jonathan’s wishes and a need to tell her parents so they could fly to Chicago. Sari and Michelle devised a plan that would keep them busy until it was the right time to divulge the truth.
They knew that Mom would know what to do. She always knew what to do in a very heavy situation. And our mom would be able to be strong for everyone. Michelle needed for Mom to know. She never went against Jonathan’s wishes, though, and she didn’t even call our mom. After three days of not being able to speak to me, my mother’s intuition was running in high gear. She called my sister and said, “Michelle, what is going on? Do I need to come up there?” Michelle mustered up all the strength she could to avoid blurting out what had happened and just said, “Yes, Mom, I think you need to come up now. Yes, now.” And with that, my mom was en route.
My mother, Charlene, is a pretty strong woman. At 75, she exercises for six hours every day. She is the daughter of a Jewish gangster who used to work for Meyer Lansky, although she constantly corrects me and tells me her father was a “legitimate businessman.” She is tough as nails, and although at first sight you can’t help thinking she is a tiny woman who would blow over if a strong wind headed her way, she is the complete opposite. She has inner strength and gumption that is unparalleled in anyone I have ever known. Nothing stops her or intimidates her into not doing what she wants to do. Nothing.
Years ago, when I was 13 years old, I was in Vegas with her when she sat down at a private poker table to play with some very substantial “whales.” They were smoking their cigars and blowing the smoke out when she sat down at their all-men’s game. They started cursing and saying this was not a place for a little lady. I was intimidated, but my mother could have cared less. No one was going to tell her she was out of her league.
My mother had only a handful of chips, and these guys had huge stacks in front of them. She even had the courage to look at one of the guys and say, “Do you mind putting your cigar out or blowing it the other way?” I can tell you, he was not pleased to hear that. I said, “Mom, you okay?”
“Yes, honey,” she said. “Go see your grandfather and meet me back here in two hours.” I was nervous for her, but I left.
Wouldn’t you know, when I went back all of those whales had barely any chips in front of them, and guess who was loaded up? That’s right, my frail, tiny mommy. She said, “My daughter is back, I have to go. See ya, fellas, have a good night.” The guys looked at her and said, “C’mon, Charlene, we are just getting warmed up, stay and play,” but my mother was shrewd. She was an excellent poker player, not just because she knew instinctively when to bluff and when to fold, but because she knew exactly when to stop playing. Her “momma didn’t raise no fool.”
I guess I learned that tenacity and intuitiveness from her. Now, in the ICU, I wasn’t bluffing, and I wasn’t going to stop fighting. This wasn’t a game. This was real, and I was playing for the highest stakes of my life.
My mother had worked as a volunteer in hospitals, and she had seen some pretty sick people. Nevertheless, Michelle, Roy, and Jonathan had to prepare her for what she was about to see. Michelle met my mom in the hospital lobby and met everyone outside of my ICU room. They told my mom that her daughter was inside that body, but the body didn’t look like mine. They said that she would be seeing a lot of machines and hearing many sounds, but that I would be quiet. She would see blood everywhere, on my neck, on my arms, on my legs, through drainage tubes in my abdomen, but I would not be feeling any pain.
My mother, getting impatient, said, “I have seen worse things. Let me go in and see my daughter.” Before they went in, Jonathan asked her not to tell my dad until they knew my prognosis. She agreed and proceeded to walk into my room.
Jonathan and Roy walked in with her, one on either side. When she caught a glimpse of me in the bed, she almost passed out. They grabbed her under the arms and stood her up. In that moment, she told me later, she was brought back to the time I was five years old and had a terrible case of sinusitis. The doctors didn’t know what it was at the time, so I was hospitalized. Half of my face was swollen and abnormally drooping down. Uncle Marvin came to visit me and asked my mom, “Where is Stephanie?” She said, “Right there in the bed.” He said, “That’s not her, it looks nothing close to her.” And that is exactly how my mother felt now, standing in front of me 36 years later. The body in the bed looked nothing like me. She said the color of my hair was all she recognized. She was going to be sick.
She immediately phoned my father crying and couldn’t hold back. The first thing she said was, “We lost her.” As hard as everyone had been trying to keep the bad news away from my dad, with his heart condition, she couldn’t contain herself. Luckily, she followed that up with, “She’s in the ICU and in a coma,” or my dad would have lost it himself.
Jonathan and Roy told her to sit down and got her some water. After a few moments, she realized she had to be strong. She walked over to me, held my hand, kissed me on the forehead, and told me stories about everyone in the family.
All my life she had been wishing I would have a kid just like the tough, strong-willed, and stubborn kid I once was. But in that moment she would have given anything to hear me fight with her. She wanted the doctors and Jonathan, Michelle, and Roy to know that I could hear, that I could talk, and that I was feeling every touch.
Meanwhile, down in Florida, my cousin Sari was telling my dad that he needed “to drum up as much courage as you can find and go to Chicago.” My father hated hospitals, but more than that, he knew he would hate to see his baby at death’s door. He knew he needed to go, but was too scared to see me. After a few days, though, he agreed to fly up.
When he arrived, he walked into my room, bent down and kissed me, and said, “Papi’s here, everything is going to be okay. Stay positive and stay strong.” Then he swiftly left and went to the waiting room. The sight of me had been too much for him. He needed to pray. “I asked G-d,” he said later, “if there was a chance that he was going to take you, to please take me instead.” Then, out of breath, he started to shake and needed his heart medication. He went to get a cup of water, then sat back down to recover.
My brother Mark had come with him. Mark is an Orthodox Jew, and he made sure to bring a community of prayers with him to ensure my recovery.
My room in the ICU had become crowded with love. My sister put pictures of our entire family up on the walls so that, if I woke up and no one was there, I wouldn’t feel alone. My mother would sit beside me, holding my hand, then leave to go relieve her stress by doing yoga in the waiting room. Mark would pray, reading through the Bible front to back, and around my bed he would pin “evil eye” charms, which are supposed to protect you. My dad’s anguish was starting to affect his heart in more ways than one—he was having trouble breathing—so he would stay for only short stints. While he was in the room, though, he would pray for help from Uncle Marvin, Grandma Ida, and G-d.
And in the building across the pedestrian bridges, the love of my life held our precious baby boy and told him he couldn’t wait for him to meet his mom. It was a promise Jonathan wasn’t sure he could keep.
Chapter 7
MY ROOM HAD BECOME a makeshift shul. My family prayed. Jonathan prayed. Hospital staff and my doctors stopped by to pray. People of all different faiths prayed. They were all coming together, sitting vigil, hoping and praying for a miracle.
Jonathan got used to the rhythmic low hum of the machines breathing for me, peppered by the beeps from the blood pressure monitor as my numbers sometimes soared for a
moment, then dropped back to normal. He was constantly reminded that I was not able to do any “living” unassisted. He would think about all our plans that might never come to fruition.
This might sound morbid, or maybe just practical, but before all of this happened we had dreamed of being buried next to each other. We wanted to find the right cemetery for us and the perfect plots where we would be together for all eternity. Would he now have to make that decision on his own? He was also thinking about his children: How would he handle their daily routine without a mother of the house? Would he be asking for help from everyone he knew? He had to shake off these thoughts and decide that it was never going to happen. I would be fine. I had to be fine.
Jonathan had to face a lot of people and deal with reality sooner than later. He had to explain to the New York Attorney General’s Office that he wouldn’t be coming back to work as quickly as he’d thought and needed to take a medical leave of absence from his position. He had to prepare a mass e-mail to our friends and family because, by this time, the word was out that something must have happened since I hadn’t returned calls from anyone for days.
Jonathan knew he was going to have to deal with the world eventually, but for now, he would keep the world at bay. He had to worry not only about me in one hospital but about Jacob across the street in another hospital. And he had to think about the bris. Jacob would soon be eight days old, and according to the laws of Judaism, he had to have his bris, or ceremonial circumcision, on the eighth day. This pact between a male baby and G-d is prescribed in the Torah.
Our family rabbi told Jonathan that, as long as the baby was healthy, the ceremony needed to proceed, even without me. The search began for a mohel—someone who is trained to do Jewish ritual circumcisions—so Michelle and Roy called their rabbi in Bogota, Colombia, who called the Chabad community in Chicago and got the name of one.
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