Chapter 3

APRIL 7, 1995

Our home telephone rang and I ran from the bathroom to answer it in the bedroom. Kara was at track practice, Guerin was in Florida swimming at a national YMCA swim meet and Tom was out shopping for a white shirt to wear to a wedding the next day.

The words were calmly delivered: “Kara passed out on the track.” I said back, just as calmly, “I’ll be right there.” A similar event had occurred to Kara in February and I thought that I knew the drill. I drove hastily to the track which is about three miles from our home expecting to see Kara sitting on the track, surrounded by her ever-attentive friends, waiting for me to take her home. What I saw was completely different--the ambulance already racing through the track gates and a policeman named Joel telling me not to speed to the hospital. “Don’t worry, I won’t,” I assured him. I was thinking that when I arrived at the emergency room, Kara would be resting on a stretcher sipping a Coke, eating a popsicle, surrounded now by a bevy of nurses attending to her every whim.

But when I arrived at the emergency room door, I could sense that the ambulance had been parked quickly and that Kara had been just as quickly rushed into the emergency room. I haphazardly parked my car off to the side of the hospital entrance as fear and worry were replacing my vision of Kara sipping a Coke. I ran into the emergency room and pulled back the dividing curtain to see Kara lying on a stretcher in what I knew in my heart was critical condition.

She was, indeed, surrounded by a bevy of nurses and technicians but she was intubated and a respiratory therapist was breathing for her. She was attached to a cardiac monitor, an automatic blood pressure cuff, an oximeter, had two IVs running, one in each arm, and a catheter in her bladder. Being a nurse, I knew the questions to ask. “Did you defibrillate her?” “Yes, two times,” came the answer. “She was in v-fib when we arrived,” said the EMTs, “and then she went into an agonal rhythm. We didn’t think that we would get her back.”

Now my observations were a mixture of mother and nurse as she lay so dependent upon the skill of others in the emergency room. She had on her red and white Umbro shorts. I remembered the day I bought them. Someone’s brown plaid flannel shirt lay beneath her. I wondered whose shirt it was. Her rings were still on her fingers. I thought I had better take them off in case her fingers got swollen. Her chest had slight red marks on it from the defibrillator. “How can this be happening?” I asked myself...

There I sat on a stool as I watched these people try to save my daughter’s life. I saw the dopamine drip, heard the blood gas results, saw the chest X-ray and pieced together what was happening before my eyes. I knew exactly what Kara was facing and that her future lay somewhere between death and a complete recovery and that there was a long continuum between those two points where she might come to rest...