What's That Pig Outdoors? (21 page)

The news was so stunning that the editor in charge of the Blue Streak was momentarily dumbfounded, wondering out loud whether he should discard his plans for Page One, at that moment being assembled in the composing room one floor below. Bill had both the presence of mind and the temerity to spin around in his chair and bellow at his superior, “You're gonna rip that page apart. This is a big one!”

It was a baptism of fire, assembling “take” after “take” from the city desk, making sure that there were no contradictions, that all the important facts stood high in the story, and writing the headlines with only minutes to spare. The pressure was on, but we made our 7:10 a.m. press deadline with good, solid stories. Richard Speck may have been a heinous killer, but I owe him a debt of sorts: he helped me prove my competence. That may sound obscene, but it was a fact of the profession of journalism, at least before the explosion in specialization that began about 1980, that career advancement depended on timely and lively handling of crime and catastrophe. Only after paying our dues in the trenches of police news were we able to struggle out of them.

As time went on, I soon began working other jobs on the shift. When the night national and foreign editor was off duty, I'd fill in. This was fascinating, exacting work. Copy constantly flowed in from the clattering teletype machines in the wire room, bearing London, Paris, and Moscow datelines. Often I'd compile a single story with information from three
different sources—the Associated Press, United Press International, and the
Daily News
's own correspondents. Once in a long while there'd be a discrepancy I couldn't solve on my own, and I'd ask someone on the copy desk to call the bureau or news service to check. My deafness never seemed a hindrance in this sort of work.

There was a telephone at the copy desk, and it was fairly busy during the last hour before Page One, the last to be sent to press, was “locked up” on the composing-room floor. These were the last years of “hot type,” when pages were assembled in large steel forms from long “sticks” of soft metal type set and cast on Linotype machines. For the most part makeup editors could trim and adjust stories to fit their allotted holes, but as the deadline crept near, especially if there was breaking news, they'd phone the copy desk for aid. If I was in the slot, an editor on the rim would take the call and pass on the requests from below.

I never, however, worked the slot on really busy nights when Bill Rising was on duty—when there was a storm at sea, he commanded from the bridge—so I was never tripped up by the telephone under pressure. Had I remained on the night shift, I probably could have grown into a decent copy chief. But there was another problem, and it had nothing to do with my deafness. Despite working for two and a half years on the Blue Streak shift, I never was able to adjust my circadian rhythm so that I could consistently get eight hours of sleep each day. I was simply not a born night worker. During the day I'd toss and turn fitfully, getting less and less sleep as the week wore on, and make up for the deprivation by sleeping at night during weekends. Toward the end I became dependent on Placidyl, a sleeping drug that when abused causes the user to stumble around in a zombie-like fog, never quite fully alert.

I asked Dan Sullivan if he could assign me to the day shift. By then I had earned enough seniority to claim a daytime spot on the copy desk, and I slid into it gratefully. After ten days of cold-turkey withdrawal, I beat the Placidyl dependency and settled down to a more normal existence.

By this time, our son Colin was on the way. He was born September 18, 1969, at Evanston Hospital. In those days expectant fathers still waited
offstage instead of playing a supporting role at the delivery, and I smoked cigarette after cigarette in the waiting room while Debby went through the last stages of labor.

Then the door opened and the obstetrician strode in. I recall that he looked tired and drawn, but assumed that that was normal for doctors called out of bed in the small hours. He smiled and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “You have a son.” I was so flooded with relief that I began trembling. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said with a quaver in my voice. “Is everything all right?” Momentarily, he glanced away, then looked back at me. “Yes,” he said. “Both Debby and the baby are well. You can go see them now.”

Overwhelmed, I rushed into the recovery room. Debby was groggy, almost incoherent, unsmiling. The baby was not with her. “Let me sleep,” she said irritatedly. A nurse brought Colin over and I held him briefly, tears in my eyes. Then I dashed to my parents' house to spread the good news.

The next day, recovered, Debby told me what had happened, what the obstetrician had concealed. Right after the moment of birth, she had suffered a grand mal seizure. The doctor had decided not to tell me. He didn't know whether I was capable, at that moment, of dealing with the news, what consequence my deafness might have, whether he could get across to me what the seizure meant. There are a number of causes of seizures during delivery, and one of the most common is a brain tumor. He felt he didn't need a second crisis on his hands.

It turned out that Debby did not have a tumor. We never learned what caused the seizure, although a neurologist later speculated that the cause might have been a chemical imbalance during pregnancy. In any case, I was resentful. Here, I thought, was a doctor paternalistically withholding information from someone who had a right to it. Debby, however, took the obstetrician's side. She, not I, was his patient, and in the absence of knowledge about me, he had to call the shot as he saw it.

He would have to do it again four years later, when our second son, Conan, was born. By then fathers in the delivery room were commonplace. Debby asked me if I wanted to be present. She had discussed the matter with the obstetrician, and he agreed that I had a right to be consulted. I thought about it. Though there was every reason to expect the delivery to be normal, another seizure was possible. If something went
wrong, how would I know what was happening? Everyone wore a mask. In an emergency there might not be time for a nurse to pull down her mask and tell me what was going on. It was possible that I could unwittingly get in the way and jeopardize the lives of mother and child.

We decided to leave the decision to the doctor. He was the professional and could see the problem from more angles than I. Forthrightly he said he'd rather not have me present. He wanted to minimize the risks. That was all right with me. And in the end, the delivery went smoothly for mother and child—and daddy.

There was, however, one more reproductive medical experience to bear— the single most difficult sequence of events I have experienced in my life. Like most young men, I had considered myself inextinguishable, even charmed. Vaguely, I had thought that having contracted meningitis at age three—the odds against doing so were one in a hundred thousand— would somehow insure me for the rest of my life against further medical catastrophe. In 1980, however, the thunderbolt of chance struck for the second time.

The year before, when Colin was ten and Conan six, Debby and I had decided to limit our family to the two robust sons it had been our good fortune to produce. After thoroughly researching the question, we decided that the best solution was a vasectomy. The procedure was and is simple, is done with a local anesthetic, involves little discomfort, and the risks are tiny—there is only about one failure per thousand vasectomies. So in due course I presented myself one morning for outpatient surgery to a veteran urologist at nearby Evanston Hospital.

Unlike most doctors I had encountered, the urologist was sensitive to my deafness. It was his habit to give vasectomy patients a cut-by-cut, stitch-by-stitch account of the surgery, much like a baseball broadcaster. To ensure that I knew what was going on, he pulled down his gauze mask so that I could read his lips as he gave the play-by-play. That was very decent of him, I thought, but after a few minutes of lying flat on my back while the doctor waved a sharp blade in the most sensitive of my neighborhoods, I decided I would rather not know the details. Until the game was over I looked straight up at the ceiling.

But during the spring of 1980, Debby discovered that she was pregnant, and we were thunderstruck. This was an eventuality we had not anticipated, and in the early days we were shattered. The doctors and nurses at our health maintenance organization seemed cold and disapproving, as if they believed the pregnancy must have been the result of an extramarital affair, and that a quick abortion would be Debby's wish.

The HMO staff's attitude quickly changed after I visited the urologist and the results of the sperm test came in. It was, of course, positive. Somehow the cauterized ends of one of my severed tubes had regenerated themselves enough so that the horses could escape the barn.

Debby and I are both very much in favor of a woman's right to choose between ending a pregnancy and carrying it to term. Together we decided that the best course for us was the latter. We could easily afford a third child; we were uncomfortable with the idea of abortion for simple reasons of convenience. Besides, a couple of boisterous boys bouncing around the house for years made both of us look forward to the prospect of a quiet, civilized daughter. Soon it became an eager anticipation, for an amniocentesis showed that the growing fetus indeed was female as well as healthy.

Meanwhile, I returned to the urologist for a repeat performance. He had also been stunned by the events, and seemed much relieved when we told him that we had decided to treat our seeming misfortune as an unexpected gift. Naturally he would redo the operation without charge. He is one of the most sensitive and compassionate doctors I have ever encountered, and he smiled sadly as he reflected on the irony of having just had to tell one couple that they would never be able to have children, then consulting with another who had proved, the hard way, exactly the opposite. In a few days the deed was again done, and this time he lengthened the odds against another accident by removing a good length of each vas instead of just snipping it.

As summer deepened, so did Debby's pregnancy. Like every other expectant couple, we contentedly ruminated over what to name the baby, what her temperament might be like, how to decorate her room, how her brothers would receive her arrival. With her first tentative kicks she took on a distinct personality in our imaginations. We had never seen her, but she had already become part of our lives.

Then one day a reporter who sat at a desk next to mine tapped me on the shoulder, phone in hand. Her face was white. “Claire Peterson just called,” she said. “Meet Debby at the doctor's. Right now.”

Instantly, instinctively, I knew what had happened. If Claire, one of our closest friends, had had to call for Debby, something was terribly wrong. Wordlessly—I could not trust my voice not to break—I dashed out of the office and into a taxi. Forty minutes later it drew up at the entrance to the HMO just as Claire and Debby arrived there. Debby began to weep, and so did I.

Earlier in the day she had gone to the hospital for a routine check. There was no heartbeat inside her womb. The baby was dead.

We were devastated, but it was just the beginning of a week-long ordeal. As we took our seats in front of the doctor's desk, he casually placed a box of tissues in front of Debby as if expecting her to crumble into hysterics. “Let's face it,” he said briskly. “This pregnancy is over.”

But Debby, who has a steely will, had marshaled her emotional resources. She questioned him coolly, with dry eyes and level voice, asking what we had to do next. (He barely acknowledged my presence, as if I were a silent stick of furniture.) She would have to go to the hospital, where labor would be induced, he replied, so that she could deliver the fetus. The procedure, however, couldn't be performed for five days, he said, because the hospital was full.

I will never understand how Debby managed to carry a lifeless child inside her for nearly a week without losing her mind. It's like endlessly carrying your baby's coffin in your arms without being able to lay it down, to relieve your mind and body of an unimaginable burden. But she managed. There was nothing else to be done, and she knew it.