Special Heart: A Journey of Faith, Hope, Courage and Love

by Bret Baier

  Paul—Paulie—was doing great, and so was Amy, who was seriously talking like she was ready to get out of there and reestablish this party back at the Georgetown condo. We had a spectacular room all spiffed up for Paulie, and since the nine-month lease on his old place had run out we couldn’t wait to show him his new digs.

  With mother and son doing so well, and being the attentive son-in-law I am, I offered to take Amy’s folks to lunch and bring her something back from her favorite salad haunt, Sweet Green. While we were out I also wanted to show Amy’s folks a house in the area we were looking at. So we left for a few hours, hoping Amy might be able to catch a nap while we were gone.

  While we were away, things back at Sibley were fine, with one exception. The nurse assigned to Amy and Paulie had a seizure while on duty in the hospital. Everything turned out fine with her, but assignments had to be shifted around, and Paulie and Amy now had a new nurse looking after them. Entering the room to check on mother and baby for the first time, nurse Beth Kennedy took one look at Paul and said she thought his color seemed off.

  Amy and I were brand-new parents who had just met Paulie for the first time less than twenty-four hours before. We had no idea what his normal color was supposed to be. We did notice Paulie didn’t seem too interested in Amy’s milk that morning, but we were told that was fairly normal after a circumcision.

  Beth suggested to Amy that Paulie’s pale color might be the result of some kind of bacterial infection. She thought he should have a few tests just to be safe. So she took him to the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) so he could be checked out. Amy called to fill me in on the possible bacterial infection. After dropping her folks off at their hotel, I returned to Sibley.

  I was back in the room with Amy for a short while when Beth came in to let us know the bacterial infection tests had all come back negative. This was a huge relief. Amy had been told that newborns with any kind of bacterial infection often stay in the hospital for as many as ten additional days. After all the excitement of Paulie’s birth and the wonderful overnight we had with him there in the room, Amy couldn’t fathom the idea of leaving the hospital without her son, let alone not taking him home for another ten days.

  While Amy and I were thrilled with the news that Paulie didn’t have an infection, Nurse Kennedy wasn’t. Still concerned about his color, Beth told us she wanted to run some more tests and page a doctor to come in and take a look just to be safe.

  * * *

  Dr. Gerard Martin is the father of five children, all of whom played competitive soccer on one level or another. Trying to figure out which field he needed to be at on any given Saturday could sometimes be a challenge, and even more difficult on weekends when he was on call. This happened to be one of those weekends.

  Even though Dr. Martin was a department head at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, he still had to do regular doctoring from time to time. On Saturday, June 30, 2007, he was doing just that. Dressed casually for some morning soccer games, Dr. Martin was already on his way to Georgetown Hospital in response to a page he received about a baby there who seemed to be having some issues.

  As he drove from Chevy Chase toward Georgetown, Dr. Martin received a completely separate page from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Sibley Hospital about a one-day-old they also had some concerns about—our Paulie. Sitting at a traffic light, Dr. Martin called the Sibley NICU back and was told they thought they heard a heart murmur and that Paulie was breathing faster than normal. They also expressed concern because they couldn’t get a good pulse reading in his legs, possibly indicating some sort of blockage.

  Based on what he was hearing, Dr. Martin made an instant decision, banked a right turn, and headed directly to Sibley. His gut already told him the Georgetown case was not as serious, but he had zero doubts about the situation at Sibley.

  Dr. Martin was driving right past Sibley at the time he received the page, so he arrived there just a minute or two later. Once at the NICU, he went right to work trying to find out what might be going on with his newest patient. Feeling Paulie’s chest wall with his fingers, Dr. Martin noticed the heartbeat was much stronger than it should be—working way too hard for pumping blood through his little body. He continued listening and touching the baby’s chest. Even as he prepared his young patient for an echocardiogram to get a more detailed look, Dr. Martin’s instincts and thirty-plus years in cardiology already told him what was going on—and it wasn’t good.

  * * *

  After hearing Paulie didn’t have a bacterial infection, Amy and I were eager to get him back in the room with us so we could continue with that warm and wonderful Three Baiers bonding process. Amy was enjoying the salad I brought her from Sweet Green, and the mood in the room was upbeat as I filled her in on what her folks had to say about the house I took them to see.

  Amy was a little miffed at me for being gone so long and not around to help her deal with the nurse reassignment issue and the bacterial infection scare. I reminded my dear wife I was out with her parents and not exactly quaffing beer with the boys at the nineteenth hole after playing a round of golf.

  Amy, of course, knew that. But I realized then how worried she had been about the possibility of not being able to take Paulie home for ten more days. She was so looking forward to that day—tomorrow—when we would finally be able to put Paulie into the empty car seat that we had been goofily grinning at for the past two months.

  Amy is an incredibly strong person, both in mind and spirit. I could see in her eyes there was nothing that was going to keep her from taking her son home tomorrow. Upon hearing an infection might keep Paulie in the hospital one extra minute, I would not have been surprised if she didn’t simply will—or pray—that bad boy of a possibility completely off Paulie’s medical chart.

  Now that she’d been told there was no infection, we sat there confident that whatever these extra precautionary tests were, Beth Kennedy would soon be coming in to tell us what we already knew: Paulie was perfectly healthy.

  Over the years, I had done several stories about the mountain of medical litigation cases hospitals face every year. If they needed to run a few extra tests on Paulie so they could dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s to keep their lawyers happy, that was perfectly fine with me. There was nothing to worry about. We spent the entire night with Paulie right there in the room with us and there were no problems of any kind. Still, we were a little anxious about the situation. We chalked it up to having a new nurse who was probably just being abundantly cautious.

  With the lights in the room down low so Amy could nap, I slipped out to the nurses’ station to ask why it was taking so long for Paulie to get back. The nurses assured me it wouldn’t be much longer, so I returned to the room to be with Amy.

  Before long we heard a knock on the door and a doctor came in. He was someone we’d never laid eyes on before. Wearing civilian clothes, he apologized for not looking the part, explaining his children were soccer players and he had been to a couple of games earlier in the day. With that, Dr. Gerard Martin introduced himself as the cardiologist who received the call from Sibley to come take a look at Paulie. Amy was lying down and I was sitting on the edge of the bed as Dr. Martin entered the room and flipped on the overhead lights.

  “I need to talk to you about your son,” he said.

  The instant those harsh, clinical overhead lights came on I immediately got a sickening feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, like playtime was over and I was now in the principal’s office. Only this time it wasn’t about me. This wasn’t even about my wife, who was still recovering from giving birth one day before. This was about our one-day-old son.

  My mind was racing two hundred miles per hour and in fifty different directions at once. Now operating on a seven-second delay, I realized Dr. Martin had introduced himself to us as a cardiologist. Why would a cardiologist be talking to us about a bacterial infection or the results of some precautionary tests?

 
My heart dropped as I started to put two and two together. I knew instantly and instinctively this was going to be exponentially worse than simply having to keep Paulie in the hospital for an extra ten days because of an infection. I quickly rewound the tape in my mind, now hoping that Paulie actually did have an infection.

  Ten extra days? No problem! Keep him for twenty if you need to. We can deal with that. Piece of cake. Keep him as long as you need him. Let’s just get our boy home healthy. An infection is nothing. Happens all the time. Please God,let Paul have this bacterial infection.

  It’s amazing the number of thoughts your mind can process and the speed at which it can process them in that frozen split second of a moment when you realize the comfortable reality you have known your entire life is over and you are now entering a place of uncertainty and fear from which you may never return.

  I looked at Amy and she had sheer terror in her eyes. I moved closer and held her hand as Dr. Martin continued to speak. In a very calm but serious voice he said, “Your baby has heart disease. Heart disease can be simple or it can be complex. Your son has a complex heart disease. He has a very complicated heart.”

  That sentence hung there in the room as Amy and I sat silently on the bed in complete shock. Dr. Martin pulled out a piece of paper and started to draw a picture and talk at the same time. “Paulie’s heart is built wrong,” he said.

  “The normal heart pumps this way, but Paulie’s heart is pumping this way,” indicating the exact opposite direction than the correct heart in his diagram.

  “This is going to be a significant issue to deal with for a very long time,” Dr. Martin said. “We do have ways to deal with it, but it is going to take some time to explain it all to you.”

  And then Dr. Martin uttered the words that have played in my mind on a continual loop every day since: “If your son doesn’t have surgery within the next two weeks, he’s not going to make it.”

  Immediately my mouth went completely dry. I didn’t know where my next breath would come from. Time stopped. Unlike any moment I have experienced in my life, it resembled one of those slow-motion scenes in a movie when you know the bomb is about to explode. Thoughts of complete doom filled my mind.

  I remember squeezing Amy’s hand, but my whole body was weightless. For a minute everything got completely fuzzy. I simply could not believe what I was hearing. Both of us were in a state of shock and disbelief. Neither Amy nor I said a word. My mind immediately started to flood with a torrent of discordant thoughts and questions for this doctor we had met for the first time all of two minutes ago.

  “Who do you think you are coming in here on your high horse and telling us such horrible news? How could you possibly know this about our son? Maybe you have Paulie mixed up with someone else. Our son is completely healthy. Everybody knows that. They told us that all through Amy’s pregnancy. Our pediatrician told us Paulie was perfect there in the delivery room. That was just yesterday, for God’s sake—don’t you know anything? You are clueless. You don’t know what you’re talking about. My God, Paul stayed right here in this room with us last night, didn’t they tell you that? We need another doctor here. My son will be coming through that door any second now. How dare you come in here and bring us this horrible news? You should be ashamed of yourself for scaring us like that. And turn those lights back off!”

  I, of course, did not say any of those things out loud, but Dr. Martin could see our confusion and dismay. Holding each other on that hospital bed, Amy and I both started to cry at the same time. These were not the Mount Everest tears of joy we’d shared the day before in the delivery room. These were the tears of totally distraught, scared-to-death parents who at that moment were convinced their baby boy was going to die. We felt totally hopeless and lost.

  Just a few hours before, right here in this room, we had taken several joyous pictures of the family with everyone holding Paulie, sharing the euphoric excitement, joy, and promise that goes with any new birth. Everyone was joking around about how Paulie was going to be a great golfer like his dad. It was a wonderful time. The kind of moment that, as you are experiencing it, you just know you are going to remember forever.

  And now this.

  A nuclear bomb of emotion had just detonated in that very same room, and everything that took place prior to that moment was instantly vaporized: the memories, the laughs, the picture taking, everything. All those things were now obliterated in a mushroom cloud of despair. Now, none of that stuff meant anything. Paul had been with us less than thirty hours, and now his life was hanging in the balance. How could this possibly be happening?

  In the midst of all the sadness, grief, and torment of that moment—the worst moment of my life—it was almost like I started to have some kind of out-of-body experience. Through the tears and the numbness, I began to hear words coming out of my mouth. Probably out of sheer desperation and helpless panic knowing I had no control over anything at that moment, my journalism training started to kick in, and I began with what must have been a million questions for Dr. Martin: “How can you have all this information after being with Paulie less than thirty minutes? Does Paulie need to have surgery today? Can he get this fixed right here at Sibley? What happens if they operate and can’t fix the problem? Where should we go for the surgery? Who’s the best in the country, the world, for doing the kind of surgery he needs? When can we fix this?”

  Finally, just as I would do if I heard a newsmaker make an outlandish claim that demanded to be followed up, I reframed Dr. Martin’s bombshell sentence to make sure I heard him correctly: “So you’re saying if Paulie doesn’t have surgery, he is going to die?”

  I scared myself even more when I heard those stark words come out of my mouth. Dr. Martin replied, “Yes. Paulie has at least four, maybe five, separate congenital heart defects. He has a very, very complex heart.” He went on to tell us Paulie would need at least one open-heart surgery—possibly more.

  While I was reloading with a second barrage of technical and medical questions, Amy’s motherly instincts kicked in and all she wanted to know was where Paulie was and if he was okay. Could she see him? Could she hold him?

  Dr. Martin told us Paulie was in the NICU and was fine for the time being. He said he had given Paulie medication to stabilize him and keep his blood vessels open and flowing. Dr. Martin also explained that when a baby has heart disease like Paulie’s, there is also an increased likelihood other abnormalities could exist in other internal organs. He told us the medication he gave Paulie would buy them some time so they could get a better, fuller read on the totality of what he might be facing.

  I asked Dr. Martin what the next step was, and he told us he had already notified the cardiology department at Children’s National Medical Center in D.C. He wanted Paulie transferred to Children’s immediately so a team of specialists could assess the situation and start coming up with options for going forward. In fact, Paulie’s case was so serious that even before Dr. Martin came into the room to talk to us he’d already called for a special cardiac transport team to come to Sibley to take him to Children’s Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU).

  Dr. Martin explained that while Amy stayed at Sibley to continue recovering, I would need to follow the ambulance to Children’s and take care of all the admissions paperwork there. Because of Paulie’s complex and multiple issues, Dr. Martin told us they would need overnight to sort things out, and we would meet again in the morning over at Children’s after he had more information.

  Before he left the room, Dr. Martin told me that when the cardiac team arrived I would need to sign some papers so they could legally transport Paulie to Children’s. In the meantime, we called Amy’s folks at their hotel. Along with Amy’s brother, they immediately hopped in a cab so they could return to Sibley to be with us. I also called my mother in Florida, who told me she was on her way.

  After Dr. Martin left and we had made our phone calls, Amy and I were alone in the room. We looked at each other with tear-filled eyes and then
held on to each other for dear life. Our world was spinning out of control, and neither one of us knew how to make it stop. We were both in a state of shock, disbelief, confusion, and fear over the possibility of losing our dear and precious son.

  Raised as Catholics, Amy and I were both people of faith. But to be honest, at that very moment I had serious doubts God was on the job. As with my unspoken rant against Dr. Martin when he first told us of Paulie’s condition, I did not have the guts to say out loud what my heart was now screaming: “Why us, Lord? Why did this have to happen to us? Things were going so great for us. Why did you do this to us?”

  From the moment I laid eyes on Amy five years before, all the way through Paulie’s birth, everything had been absolutely perfect for us. We fell in love. We got married. We bought a great condo on the water’s edge in Georgetown. I had gone from being an unknown reporter, to Pentagon correspondent, to chief White House correspondent for Fox News.

  I was traveling all over the world on Air Force One with the president of the United States. I loved working at Fox and the network was doing great. Amy and I were a very happy couple. We had everything going for us—had all we needed. Our hopes, dreams, and future prospects were unlimited. Everyone said so.

  But now, none of that meant a thing.

  There was only one reality now; our son was extremely sick, and there was a good chance he was going to die. Starting tomorrow morning we were going to have to begin making critical life-and-death decisions for our son. That was the only thing that mattered in our lives right now. In that moment, and in that hospital room, it became clear that this wasn’t about me anymore. Not about career, money, or our cool place on the river.

  My one-day-old son was getting ready to be strapped into the back of an ambulance without his mother or father to hold his hand for a trip across town to a strange place. That singular image of Paulie alone in the back of an ambulance racing through the streets of D.C. to a hospital I never heard of immediately crashed the pity party I had been holding for myself. Paulie needed a clear-thinking father right now, and if I was going to be of any help at all to him I better man up—and quick.