by Bret Baier
Despite our nervousness about the upcoming operation, Amy and I were trying to enjoy every precious moment we had with Paulie at home. Heart issues aside, we were really getting a kick out of watching our little man as he discovered the big wide world around him. Even with all the challenges in his young life, Paulie was turning out to be quite a boy’s boy, exploring every nook and cranny around the condo and showing extreme curiosity about each new discovery, especially dogs, birds, and the boats on the Potomac River.
Paulie was crawling everywhere and conquering every obstacle that had the audacity to block him from wherever his expeditionary spirit told him he needed to go. One of his favorite activities lately was walking behind his Winnie the Pooh train as he pushed it around the condo. Paulie was also developing a distinct personality. With Amy and me both card-carrying members of the type A personality club, it didn’t shock either of us that our son hit the genetic jackpot in the strong will department. Paulie was very adorable, very sweet—but very strong willed. Amy and I spent a fair amount of time discussing just whose particular gene pool might have fueled the latest record-setting decibels coming out of that little body.
Because I was a good match for him, just a day or two before the surgery I went into the hospital and gave blood that could be used during the upcoming operation. Somewhere in the middle of squeezing that ball they give you to make the blood flow faster and then seeing it rush into the bag, it hit me that this second open-heart surgery was really upon us. We, of course, knew Dr. Jonas was the best in his field and the quality of the care at Children’s National Medical Center was second to none. But still, twenty-three pounds or not, I was constantly worrying about just how much trauma Paulie’s body could take before he even reached his first birthday.
Even though we knew a new homograph connector would buy Paulie several more years before he would need another operation, as the actual day approached, Amy and I grew more and more anxious about going through all this one more time. We were both extremely agitated and having a tough time in our own ways. Amy was experiencing really bad migraine headaches, and I was having a lot of difficulty sleeping.
Just a few days before the surgery I was walking on Pennsylvania Avenue right in front of the White House when I saw a woman coming toward me toting a big cardboard display of one kind or another. About a half block away, I couldn’t make out what it was she was carrying. But as she got closer I could see she was holding an oversize cardboard replica of the front cover of the popular Top Doctors Issue of Washingtonian Magazine.
On the magazine cover seen on the poster was Paulie’s surgeon, Dr. Richard Jonas. The woman told me her mother was also listed in the issue, and she had asked the bookstore near the White House if she could have the display when they were done with it.
When I got home later that night, I told Amy about the woman with the poster of Dr. Jonas. Like me, she got very excited about another one of those chance encounters that seemed to be there for us whenever our troubled spirits needed it most. And we definitely needed it that week. Whether pure coincidence or a reinforcing bit of encouragement from above to remind us we were on the right path, it didn’t really matter to me one way or the other. Amy and I both slept just a little bit better that night.
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April 29, 2008, 6:32 PM, Tuesday
Subject: Thank you—so far so good
Thank you all for your prayers, your thoughts, and your good wishes. Paul is now in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Children’s recovering from what his surgeon is calling a very successful open-heart surgery. While Paul is just starting to wake up (opening his eyes for a few minutes at a time), his vital signs all look very good so far.
Late this afternoon, the doctors took out his breathing tube, which is a huge development this early, and his parents are cautiously breathing a big sigh of relief. While there will be some long days ahead in the hospital, his doctors say the prognosis looks very good, and (knock on wood) we could be home in five to six days, which would be ahead of the predicted schedule.
An early morning started at 5:00 a.m., and because Paul couldn’t eat or drink anything from midnight until the surgery at 7:30 a.m., we expected him to be cranky. But he wasn’t. He was actually in a very good mood and was literally crawling all over the bed in the pre-op area and even chomping on his hospital gown ties (he WAS hungry, after all).
As Mom and Dad were increasingly anxious, Paul didn’t have a care in the world besides trying to play the bed like a drum every few minutes. Even when the anesthesiologist came to take him to surgery already wearing her mask, Paulie pointed to her mask with his finger as he went to her. We reluctantly handed him over, squeezing and kissing him a few more times. As they carried him down the hall away from us to go to the operating room, that’s when we could hear him start to cry, leaving his two parents in a pre-op room to shed a tear or two as well.
During surgery parents are given pagers to be updated throughout. The wait is the excruciating thing, so any blip of information is like gold.
8:55 a.m. the pager buzzed: “First chest incision just took place.”
9:41 a.m.: “Paul is now on bypass” (the heart-lung machine that essentially takes over for his heart as the surgery takes place).
And then for an hour, complete pager silence.
Trying to read the newspaper is not possible without constantly glancing down to make sure the pager on your belt is working. We knew the surgery was supposed to last four to five hours—this was going to be the longest and toughest part. But then, suddenly, a buzz from the belt, and I almost spit out my Diet Coke.
10:45 a.m.: “Paul is off bypass and Dr. Jonas will see you soon in the waiting room.”
The surgery was over much sooner than we expected. After 20 more minutes that felt like 55, Dr. Jonas came into the waiting room and smiled, saying in his Australian accent, “All went very well.” The homograph (the conduit that Paulie had replaced that connects his right ventricle to his pulmonary artery) fit well, and Dr. Jonas repaired the area (aneurysm) that needed to be fixed.
Imagine sewing a donated baby aorta (a very small piece of a donor baby’s organ) onto a walnut-size heart that is still beating as you are sewing, using minuscule stitches to patch an area where my son’s blood flows to keep him alive. It boggles the mind. Dr. Jonas truly is a gifted man, and we are extremely fortunate to have him as Paulie’s surgeon. We have some hurdles to cross in recovery, but we believe Paul is a true fighter and he’ll be back crawling and walking behind his Winnie the Pooh train in no time!
We just found out that we can actually thank the family who donated the baby aorta through the Washington Regional Transplant Consortium (WRTC). However, the consortium only allows you to do it anonymously. There are now two families that have helped Paulie live. WRTC has a printed note that recipients can then attach to a personalized message. The WRTC then sends the note to the donor families.
Here’s how it reads:
“The spirit of gratitude knows no season, it only knows of kindness and of love. Every day throughout the year, you have my sincere gratitude for giving me the opportunity of renewed life, a priceless gift of hope through organ donation. May you always find comfort and peace with the gift you have given. I am forever grateful!”
We will now write two notes on Paulie’s behalf and have them sent to the donor families—to whom we are eternally grateful. As we walk through Children’s we realize how many grateful families come out of here each week. The doctors and nurses do amazing work to try to get and keep kids healthy.
Thank you all again. We are now on the right track to getting home. The power of the prayers and the good thoughts really helped us through again, and they’re really helping Paulie bounce back fast. We come away again only appreciating life more and acknowledging how important every minute with family can be.
Sincerely,
Bret and Amy
A few days after his second open-heart surgery in ten months, I decided to update eve
ryone on the progress Paulie was making as he recuperated at home. I was hoping this would be my last communication about Paulie’s health for a good long while. I prayed we were about to enter an uneventful period of calm and normalcy with no medical news to report for at least four or five years.
May 4, 2008, 8:08 PM, Sunday
Subject: Back on the train!
Thank you all for your prayers and good wishes—we believe they paid off. Paul is home, he’s on the mend in his own environment, and he is thriving. It has been quite a week of worrying during some long, sleepless nights at Children’s, but he did it again. He came through his second open-heart surgery like a champ.
All of the wires and tubes attached to him were making Paulie pretty upset. I would be, too! To go from crawling with toys in your home to being connected to tubes and wires and an oxygen tank—no, thank you! At times Amy was allowed to crawl into the bed with Paul to try to calm him down.
Staying with Paul in a room on the heart and kidney floor at Children’s there were some scary times (hence the e-mail silence). Paulie had a fever that he eventually fought off. But the scare of infection was real (and that’s what docs are most concerned about postsurgery).
In addition, Paul was clearly in pain a few times and very uncomfortable. The grimace turned to a whimper turned to an all-out cry is a tough progression to watch for any parent. The whole thing was a much different experience this time. Paul’s now a big boy who is used to being mobile, yet he still can’t talk to tell us what hurts or what he needs. While he was really out of it and wiped out the first two days, he quickly came back to his old smiling self on day three.
We are always amazed at how resilient kids are. But once you go through two heart surgeries, “resilient” really doesn’t do it justice. We always remember that he couldn’t bounce back without the work of his amazing surgeon and the doctors and nurses who work with him. Dr. Jonas and his team are truly remarkable—we can’t say enough about them and what they do.
Paul was in a great mood when we found out we were going home. It’s like he knew what the doctors were saying and he couldn’t stop smiling. His Mom and Dad were a little wiped out from alternating overnight stays at Paulie’s cribside. But Paul’s grandparents are in town to help keep him in good spirits.
The bottom line is this—the surgery was a success. So far, the recovery is going amazingly well and remarkably fast (even faster than last time). And Paul’s first order of business when we got home—you guessed it—that Winnie the Pooh train. At first, we were very worried about his movement. But the doctors say he will self-regulate and he will determine what he can and can’t do. They told us to let him explore. He now walks behind that Winnie the Pooh train with a new chest scar barely peeking through his shirt—it’s the most beautiful chest scar we’ve ever seen.
I hope not to “reply to all” for quite some time. But thank you ALL for your prayers and good wishes. We believe the Big Guy upstairs must have some big things in store for Paulie. We are just along for his train ride.
Sincerely,
Bret and Amy
* * *
Sunday, June 29, 2008, brought joy and rejoicing throughout the Baier home in Georgetown. Paul Francis “Paulie” Baier had done it. One year old! Two open-heart operations, one stomach surgery, and two angioplasties: Paulie was a living, breathing one-year-old miracle and an honest-to-God example of resilience, grit, stamina, heart, and determination. And he was my son! I couldn’t have been more proud of him for the way he endured—even triumphed—over everything that came his way during his extremely challenging first year of life.
The doctors were fairly confident the new donated baby aorta now in Paulie’s chest would last him a good five or six years. And although he would definitely need several more procedures before he entered kindergarten, for the first time in a long time Amy and I felt hope for the future. We could begin to see a clear path for Paulie having as much of a normal little-boy life as possible: romping around the condo, hikes with Mom and Dad down by the river, holidays with our families, trips to the park, first day at school, playdates with the other kids—and especially walking on the golf course with his dad on a cool autumn day.
On the heels of Paulie’s first birthday, Saturday, July 12, 2008, promised to be another day of great celebration and joy around the Baier house. As it was one year to the day when Paulie underwent his first lifesaving open-heart operation, we considered this to be the anniversary of the day we were given a second chance with our precious son.
Sadly, July 12 was also the day we received news that my friend and colleague Tony Snow had died of cancer at the age of fifty-three. Less than a year ago Tony stood at the White House briefing room podium and welcomed me back after Paulie’s first surgery. Just a few months before that, he had returned to the briefing room after being away for five weeks of chemotherapy. Tony stood tall at the podium that day, telling us all “I am a very lucky guy” and “You’ve got to realize you’ve got the gift of life. So make the most of it.” What an amazing spirit Tony had. And now he was gone.
Unlike Jack McWethy’s unanticipated death just a few months before, most of us who knew Tony suspected his courageous battle was coming to an end. That didn’t make the news any easier. To be sure, it was a blessing that Tony was no longer suffering. But the reality that his bright light and overflowing spirit were now gone from this world was hard to grasp.
Tony had left his White House post late the previous year and had taken a new job as a commentator for CNN. So over the past few years I had known Tony as a colleague at Fox News, an adversary in the White House briefing room, and most recently as a competitor at CNN. But no matter where he happened to be working, Tony was always a joy and delight to know and truly a gentleman. Later that day, on Fox News Channel’s Weekend Live, I paid tribute to him by going on air and reading in his honor “The True Gentleman,” by John Walter Wayland:
The True Gentleman is a man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled when necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but with sincerity and sympathy always; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue is safe.
In his homily at Tony’s funeral at the Basilica at Catholic University, university president David M. O’Connell seemed to capture perfectly the essence of Tony’s life when he said, “The measure of this man’s life can be found in his character, in his optimism, in his joy and humor, in his courage, in his passion for what was good and right, and in his love for God and family and neighbor and country. Tony Snow did not need a long life for us to measure. It was, rather, we who needed his life to be longer.”
It was difficult to comprehend. During the 2008 presidential campaign and in the midst of this absolute monster of a news year in American politics, along with Jack McWethy and Tony Snow, longtime Meet the Press anchor Tim Russert died of a heart attack while at the NBC bureau in Washington, D.C.
Although I didn’t know Tim as well as I knew Tony or Jack, he was someone I always looked up to personally and professionally. Tim was probably the best American television news interviewer of his generation. No one could grill a public official trying to hold something back better than Tim Russert.
Once on a campaign trip I found myself talking to Tim about everything—sports, religion, politics, and, of course, the art of interviewing. I remember Tim telling me that the absolute best quality of a good interviewer was the ability to listen to your guest and not be so infatuated with all the brilliant questions you have jotted down on your three-by-five cards. Perhaps not the most keen theological obser
vation ever, but the only thing I could figure was that the Lord himself had taken some kind of personal interest in the American political scene in 2008 and decided to recruit Jack, Tony, and Tim for his own all-star panel.
The rest of 2008 was unbelievably busy for everyone working in the news business. And like every other journalist in town, I was up to my eyeballs in assignments. Along with covering the final year of the George W. Bush presidency, I was still anchoring Special Report on Friday nights; a two-hour show, Weekend Live; and a political analysis show called The Strategy Room on Sunday nights. I also served as a floor reporter for the political conventions in Denver and Minneapolis that summer. As news years go, 2008 was at the top of the heap, and I was privileged to be in the middle of all the action.
I always knew I wanted to be a journalist. The news business is intensely competitive, and to pursue it professionally you need to have your eyes wide open and develop a very thick skin early on. I had received great training at DePauw University, was always a pretty decent writer, was curious about everything and smart enough, I suppose. But, as in a lot of professions, there are always smarter, better-looking, or better-whatever folks around who think they can do the job as well as you can.
That said, although I never felt I was the best-looking, the smartest, or the best whatever in the room, I always felt as if I had a secret weapon, if you could call it that. On any job I was ever given, I simply refused to allow myself to be outworked by anyone. And that attitude and work ethic seemed to be appreciated by my bosses over the years.
Going back to my first days in the Atlanta bureau, to the Pentagon, the White House, and now the 2008 presidential election, Fox had given me more once-in-a-lifetime opportunities than I could ever count. Over the past ten years I had traveled to seventy-four countries, taking trips with defense secretaries, generals, the vice president, and the president of the United States on Air Force One. In addition to my personal home life with Paulie and Amy, I felt that I had found my professional home at Fox. The way I showed my gratitude for all the opportunities that came to me over the years was to never be a clock-watcher and always work until the job was done. If that approach to my work happened to be rewarded with a front-row seat to history, that was okay, too. And boy, 2008 was quite a year to have a front-row seat.