The Color of Joy (2 page)

The med student—I later learned her name was Elaine—led me to a spot by Lois’s head where I could stand out of the way but still see what was happening.

“There’s a lot of blood,” Dr. Orlean said. “More suction please. I can barely see what I’m doing here.” She set the scalpel down on a tray and reached in with her hands. “I’ve got her. It’s a girl. Get ready to clamp the cord.”

Dr. Orlean drew the blood-covered baby out. All I could do was stand and stare with wide eyes, feeling stunned and woozy.
Was she all right? Was she alive?

A nurse carried her to a separate examination table, laid her down and quickly wiped her clean. “She’s blue and flaccid.”

Everyone moved about in a panic. I felt like I was in some kind of waking nightmare.

“Baby’s heart rate’s sixty,” the nurse said, “but she’s unresponsive.”

“
Bag and mask her!
” Dr. Orlean shouted from where she stood over Lois, still working frantically to stop the bleeding.

“Still unresponsive,” a nurse said. “Heart rate’s going down.”

“
Start chest compressions!
” Dr. Orlean ordered.

Blind, stark terror rose up in my throat. I was utterly paralyzed as I watched them push with their fingers on top of my daughter’s tiny, delicate chest.

Help her! God, please help her!

No one spoke. The air was tense with urgency.

All the sounds in the room—the squeezing of the oxygen bag, the beeping monitors and suction machine—faded to a grim silence in my mind until all I could hear was the thunderous beating of my own heart.

I stared intently at our baby.
Please, little girl, wake up
.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh
went the oxygen bag.

Then slowly, gradually, her bluish color began to turn pink. Her tiny hand opened and closed.

There was a new sound…a squeak. Then her sweet, beautiful newborn cry filled me with a wave of joy greater than any I’d known in my life.

Thank you, God. Thank you
!

Then, like a jolt, I was wrenched out of my joy and thrown back into a dark pool of terror. My gaze swung back to Lois on the table.

Dr. Orlean had sheared the placenta away and was now pulling blood clots the size of fists out of my wife’s abdomen.

“We need ten units of PRBCs and FFP,” she told a nurse.

I felt woozy again. The room began to spin. The med student must have been keeping an eye on me because she helped me move to a chair in the corner and sat me down. It was all so overwhelming.

Another doctor hurried into the room just then with hands scrubbed and elevated. “What’s happening?” he asked as he approached the table to assist.

“I just clamped off the uterine arteries,” Dr. Orlean explained. She continued to work but began to shake her head. “This isn’t working. It all has to come out.”

I glanced up at the student. “What’s she talking about?”

“A hysterectomy, I think.”

Somehow I was able to rise to my feet. “Wait,” I said. “Lois won’t be able to have any more children?”

I knew Lois wouldn’t want that. We’d often talked about having as many as five.

Dr. Orlean’s eyes lifted briefly, but only for a fraction of a second.

“There’s no option here, Mr. James. If you want your wife to live, this has to happen.”

I realized in that horrendous, shuddering moment that Dr. Orlean wasn’t even sure if she could save her.

My eyes shot to Lois’s face. She was pasty gray. She looked like death. I could barely comprehend what I was seeing. The mood in the room grew dismal. The gruesome sound of the suction machine made me want to vomit.

This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening
…

“Blood pressure’s dropping fast,” a nurse said.

“Get the husband out of here,” Dr. Orlean firmly replied.

“No!” I resisted when Elaine tried to take hold of my arm. “I need to stay.”

“
Get him out!
” Dr. Orlean shouted as she began to work faster to slice and cut.

“BP’s still dropping.”

“Please, come with me.” Elaine grabbed my elbow and pulled me out forcefully. “We can’t be in here.”

I practically stumbled out of the OR, watching in horror as I passed the operating table and saw more blood spill onto the floor.

Elaine dragged me through the doors. As soon as they swung shut behind me, I pulled the mask off my face and dropped to my knees in the corridor. Burying my face in my hands, I prayed harder than I’d ever prayed in my life.

Please, God. Don’t take her from me. Please let her live
.

November 13

Eight hours later, in my sleep, I heard the frightening sound of someone knocking urgently on a window. I woke with a start.

I was slouched sideways in a hard chair in the ICU. It was 6:00 a.m. and I’d been dreaming.

About my oldest sister, Leah.

Leah, a medical resident, had passed away two years ago from complications due to a neurodegenerative disease called ALS.

I was still wracked with guilt over that loss because I hadn’t seen my sister in nearly a decade. I hadn’t even known she was sick. No one had told me because I’d become estranged from my family years earlier when I was sent to prison for the stupid things I’d done.

In my dream, Leah was in the ICU, looking in at me through the observation window. She knocked hard to wake me, then entered and shook me violently by the shoulder. “
Wake up, Riley! You have to wake up
!
”

My eyes flew open and I cried out in fear.
Lois!

I leaped from my chair and rushed to her side where I found her resting peacefully on the bed. Though she hadn’t regained consciousness since the surgery, she was still breathing. The heart monitor was beeping steadily. It was a comforting sound.

I took her hand in mine and marveled at the warmth of her skin which proved there was life—
glorious and beautiful life
—still flowing through her veins. She was strong. She would make it.

Yes…there was hope and joy to be felt here. I knew it in my bones, even though, for a brief moment outside the operating room, I was certain I would lose her. I’d believed she would be taken from me. I’d felt that horrible premonition in my gut.

Then the doctor appeared and told me that Lois had pulled through. Against all odds. She wouldn’t be able to have any more children, but she had survived and was in stable condition, and for that I was grateful.

I bent forward and kissed the back of her hand. “Keep resting,” I whispered. “I promise I won’t leave your side, not even for a second. When you wake up, we’ll see our baby girl together and we’ll give her a name.”

It was a promise I would later regret.

“Thank God she’s all right,” my mother-in-law said when she walked into the ICU a short while later.

I had called her during the night, not long after I was escorted out of the OR. She’d wanted to come to the hospital immediately but I begged her to remain at home with our children. She broke down into a fit of relief and tears a few hours later when I called to report that Lois had survived the surgery.

I rose from my chair to greet Carol, but as soon as our eyes met, I couldn’t form words. Neither could she. We stepped into each other’s arms and held tightly for a long time.

“The doctor was just here,” I said as we moved apart and collected ourselves. “She said Lois is doing fine.”

“But she hasn’t regained consciousness at all?” Carol asked with concern as she removed her coat and draped it over the chair.

I shook my head. “She lost a lot of blood. Besides that, she was in labor for almost twenty-four hours. Neither of us slept a wink, so she has to be exhausted.”

“You must be exhausted too,” Carol said, running a hand over my shoulder.

“I’ve been out cold in that chair for hours,” I told her. “How are the kids?”

“Fine. I dropped Danny off at school just now and your neighbor, Joan, is babysitting Trudy. I didn’t tell the children anything about what happened. I didn’t want to scare them. I promised they could come and visit later.”

“It’s just as well,” I replied. “I don’t think they need to know how close they came to losing their mother.”

“How’s the baby?” Carol asked.

“Fine. Eight pounds, seven ounces.” I held up my wrist to show Carol the bracelet that identified me as a new father. “One of the nurses came in during the night and gave me a full report. They asked if it was okay to feed her from a bottle because she was hungry. I said yes. I hope that’s okay. Lois won’t be happy about that. She wanted to breast feed.”

“It’ll be fine,” Carol said. “She still can, when she’s able. She wouldn’t want us to let the poor darling starve. Have you gone to see her yet?”

“No, I’m waiting for Lois to wake up. I want us to see her together, and we still have to decide on a name.”

Carol leaned over the bed and kissed Lois on the forehead. “Thank goodness everything’s all right. I don’t know what I would have done…”

My heart rose up in my throat. “Me neither. She’s my whole world, Carol. My life was a disaster until the day I met her.”

I had been living in L.A. and had just been released from my second stay in prison—a one-year sentence for a DUI that had been reduced to six months for good behavior. Determined not to end up back in jail a third time, I’d finally separated myself from the stoners I’d considered friends and joined a support group for addicts in the basement of my neighborhood church.

Lois worked in the coffee shop across the street and for some reason I’ll never quite be able to comprehend, she saw something in me. “Something magical,” she always said.

Lois was different from any of the friends I’d had in the past. She was a college girl—smart, kind-hearted, close to her parents. Most importantly, she believed in forgiveness and second chances.

“She changed my life,” I said to Carol.

Just then, a young nurse walked into the room and looked around with concern.

“Is something wrong?” Carol asked.

The nurse’s cheeks flushed red. “Did someone bring your baby down to you?”

“No,” I replied. “I told them to wait until my wife was awake.”

She immediately turned and ran out. I felt a rush of alarm and ran after her. “Wait! What’s going on?”

The nurse didn’t stop. She sprinted down the length of the corridor.

I followed and thrust my arm between the elevator doors just as they were closing, shoved them open and stepped on. “Why are you running?”

She pressed the “close door” button about five times in rapid succession.

“We can’t find your baby.”

“What do you mean you can’t
find
her?”

Her brow furrowed with tension. “She was there in the nursery earlier when we gave her a bottle. Then we laid her down to sleep, but now she’s gone.”

“
Gone
. I don’t understand.”

“I’m sure we’ll find her,” the nurse said, though she was tapping her foot anxiously, her eyes focused intently on the floor numbers as they changed. “Somebody probably took her to the wrong room. Maybe she’s back now.”

“What the hell?”

The doors opened and the nurse dashed off toward the nursery. I followed closely behind.

“How could this happen?” I asked as I moved from crib to crib and checked the incubators as well. “You can’t just lose a baby. Someone must have taken her to another floor. Was she all right? Did something happen?”

“She was fine. She’d been sleeping since she had the bottle.” The nurse picked up the phone at the desk and called someone.

“What time was that?”

“Around five,” she replied. “She was due for another feeding and that’s when we noticed she was gone.” The nurse spoke into the phone. “No, the father doesn’t have her. He’s here with me now.”

“Who are you talking to?” I asked, holding out my hand to take the phone from her. “I want to talk to them.”

She handed me the receiver. “It’s the head nurse. She’s down in security looking at the surveillance recordings.”

“
Jesus
!” I grabbed the phone. “This is Riley James. Where’s my daughter?”

“We’re trying to locate her, sir.”

“I certainly hope so!”

The nurse spoke in a patronizingly calm voice. “We’ve notified security and put out an alert. They’re searching every floor in the hospital as we speak.”

“Have the police been notified?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m calling them right now.” I slammed the receiver down, pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and quickly dialed 9-1-1.

I don’t believe actual words exist to adequately describe the agony a parent endures when a child goes missing. It’s an unimaginable nightmare, a bottomless pit of heartrending, uninterrupted black misery as you torture yourself with images of what could be happening to your child.