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

  Immediately after the surgery, we were told about all of these hurdles that Paulie would need to get over to get to the “next stage” of recovery (e.g., he needed to urinate a lot, or he needed to breathe on his own for a certain amount of time, or he needed to start eating out of a bottle). Paul passed all of those tests with flying colors DAYS, if not weeks, ahead of schedule. He was out of intensive care in a record four days after surgery.

  The people who work at Children’s are extremely caring and very good at what they do. All of them obviously try not to cause pain to the child. But part of the recovery process involves constant prodding, poking, sticking, blood testing, weighing, attaching wires, adding tubes, detaching other wires to add other wires, changing more tubes, and applying sticky tape to hold it all on Paul’s tiny little frame. Paulie’s a fair-skinned part-Irishman who doesn’t take to the tape too well.

  All of the things they are doing are essential to make sure his heart is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Well, Paul had had enough of it by about day three postsurgery, and he let his doctors and nurses know it every single time. Paul got a lot of lung practice during the past week. He’s definitely going to win the “I can swim to the other side of the pool underwater contest” when he’s a little older.

  The funny part is, after the doctors or nurses are finished and he’s screamed so loud the next floor takes notice, Paul then chills out completely like nothing has happened. He sucks on his pacifier and saves his strength for the next bout with another wire-fixer or tube-tweaker. To put it simply, he has heart.

  We can’t thank Dr. Richard Jonas and his staff enough for the work they did on Paul’s walnut-size heart. I won’t go into too much detail here, but there were five major congenital defects in Paul’s heart, an extremely rare combination. Added to that, one of the main fixes was not possible because of the way Paul’s coronary arteries crisscrossed his heart.

  So part of the six-hour surgery involved attaching a donor baby aorta to Paul’s heart (specifically his right ventricle), then linking that donor aorta to his pulmonary artery, essentially rerouting the blood over the top of the crisscrossed arteries like a major highway overpass. The conduit was a tiny tube from another baby who died and whose parents agreed to allow that baby to be an organ donor so our baby could live.

  It’s an amazing thought: a selfless decision made by one family during a moment of ultimate grief provides another unknown family ultimate joy after their darkest hours. In a few years Paul will have at least one more surgery to change that conduit as he grows. But the surgery—or surgeries (he could be a big boy and might require a third surgery as a teen)—will be nowhere near as complicated as the one that he just went through.

  I know these e-mails are long, but just a couple more thoughts. I am amazed at how much Paul has managed to DO in his first 21 days of life. He has brought our extended family much closer (they rallied around us from the beginning). He made me love my wife Amy even more than I could have imagined. He opened our eyes to the goodness and caring in so many people, some we barely know, and we’ve been humbled by their actions and words. He reminded us how fragile life really is. He’s inspired us to be better (if he can fight so can we). He showed us just how far modern medicine has come. And most of all, he renewed our faith and belief in the power of prayer.

  We could not have made it through this without our faith, and without the comfort we received knowing that hundreds of people were praying (and are praying) for Paul’s recovery. We literally thank God for every single day we have with our son. And I know from dozens of e-mails, Paulie’s battle made many fathers and mothers hug their kids a little tighter. Paul has given us all PERSPECTIVE…

  Thank you all. This is my last update—I plan to spend any extra time I have getting to know this little guy and enjoying every minute. Amy and I will surely have an anxious road of parenting ahead (especially at the beginning), but all of the teary high fives at the end of the day leaving the hospital and the mantra of “We’re one day closer to getting Paulie home” paid off. Today is our day!

  Sincerely,

  Bret and Amy

  * * *

  With Amy and Paulie nestled in back at the condo and me back at work, the Baier clan could not have been happier or more content. Everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be and doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Apart from the fact that the plastic golf clubs kept falling over on Paulie and had to come out of the crib, life could not have been any better for us.

  Amy was ecstatic about being a new mom and enjoying time with her son at home. And Paulie was coming along exceptionally well other than a little difficulty he was having keeping his food down. We got to the point where we had to keep him upright when we were feeding him, otherwise Paulie would often rocket his food back in our direction like he was waiting at the net ready to pounce on a lazy overhand volley. I believe the medical term for this is “projectile vomiting.” And although it is not yet an officially sanctioned Olympic event, Paulie definitely seemed interested in going for some kind of distance record. Movie buffs might appreciate knowing that our condo was just a few short blocks from the stairs featured in the 1970s film The Exorcist, a fact that entered my head only about every seventeen seconds during Paulie’s projectile phase.

  Doing her best to stay out of the line of fire, Amy was keeping a close watch on the situation and had spoken to the doctors about it. They said they would look at Paulie the next time Amy brought him in for one of his checkups at Children’s. After everything Paulie had been through over the past month, having trouble keeping his food down didn’t seem like that big a deal to me, so I didn’t worry too much about it as I got back into the groove covering the White House.

  My bosses at Fox had been incredibly supportive in giving me all the time off I needed during Paulie’s hospitalization. But reporting assignments bureauwide had to be shifted around to cover for me while I was gone, so I was extremely grateful to my colleagues whose schedules and lives were affected by Paulie’s hospitalization and my time away from the bureau.

  My first day back at the White House, spokesman Tony Snow and all my competitor/colleagues made me feel right at home when they spotted me in the media work area or the briefing room for the first time. To a person, colleagues from the other networks and newspapers seemed to know something about Paulie’s situation. All day long folks were coming up to me wanting to hear the latest. Interestingly, most of the male reporters were extremely interested in the medical details, while the women mostly wanted to know how Paulie and Amy were doing.

  Paulie even achieved a bit of nationwide notoriety among the C-SPAN viewing audience when Tony entered the briefing room and spotted me in my normal seat for his 1:00 p.m. televised news conference. The entire exchange made it into the official White House transcript that day.

  MR. SNOW: As Bill Plante just said, let’s begin by welcoming back Bret Baier. You’ve been in a lot of our thoughts and prayers, and very happy to hear that Bret’s son has come through some very testing surgery, coming through with flying colors. (Applause.) There’s no fear like a parent worrying about a kid. So, God bless you. Just very happy to hear it.

  We are going to give you some audio-visuals—or some visuals today.

  Q: Oh, boy.

  Q: Pictures of Bret’s baby? (Laughter.)

  MR. SNOW: No, but I’ll tell you what, we expect to see those soon.

  After the important news of the day about Paulie, Tony took questions on an array of non-Paulie topics including the ongoing war in Iraq, the military surge, al Qaeda, Pakistan, the Middle East, American citizens being held in Iran, commutation for some imprisoned border patrol agents, nuclear plant security, and the story I was working on my first day back, trade with China.

  President Bush had set up something called the Import Safety Working Group, a task force designed to come up with recommendations to minimize dangers from food and other products shipped into the United States. To be perfectly
honest, knowing Paulie was recovering and safe at home with Amy, it was nice to be able to transport my mind thousands of miles away from intensive care units and open-heart surgeries for a brief spell, even if it took contaminated Chinese cat food to do it.

  The White House was an amazing place to go to work every day. The range of stories was always vast and wide, and power politics between Capitol Hill and the White House was something I had been fascinated by my entire life. It was an honor and privilege to cover the White House for Fox News, and I pinched myself every day just to make sure that was really me sitting there in that briefing room asking questions and covering the stories I was covering.

  Truth be told, it was a little ironic I ever wound up working as a reporter at the White House, or anywhere else for that matter.

  After I was elected student council president at the Marist School in Atlanta back in the late 1980s, I was chosen to travel to Washington, D.C., with our headmaster, Fr. Joel Konzen, and another teacher to accept a national excellence in education award being given to Marist and several other private schools from across the country.

  It was a huge honor for Marist and me to be able to go to Washington, meet President Ronald Reagan, and participate in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden—a real dream come true. Embossed White House invitation. Rose Garden ceremony. Meeting President Reagan. Seeing the White House press corps up close. All on the same day. Wow! Pretty heady stuff for an idealistic seventeen-year-old high school kid from Georgia.

  During the ceremony the president delivered remarks on education and then presented the awards. After pictures were taken and when the event was wrapping up, President Reagan turned and started walking toward the familiar white marble colonnade and back to the Oval Office. Just as the president was leaving, with all the award winners still assembled and basking in the glow of the event, ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson shouted out a question, asking President Reagan if he was going to withdraw his nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court.

  “Over my dead body,” President Reagan replied as he continued walking away.

  The reporters continued yelling questions at the president until he disappeared through the door and into the White House. It wasn’t long before a few of the school principals started exchanging words with the reporters, accusing them of stepping all over our sacred event. Standing their ground, the reporters charged right back and told the principals the event was over and this was the only chance they had to put their questions to the president.

  First Amendment rights trampled on or not, to my impressionable seventeen-year-old mind, my once-in-a-lifetime moment at the White House was trampled on by Donaldson and the other reporters gathered in the Rose Garden that morning. I was so angry that when I got back to Atlanta I penned an op-ed piece for the Marist school newspaper, The Blue & Gold, where I served as sports editor. Titled “Press Needs Etiquette,” my editorial took Donaldson and the other reporters to task for their “obnoxious” and “disrespectful” behavior during this solemn ceremony honoring excellence in education, Marist, and, of course, me.

  Years later, as I started my second week as Fox News Channel’s chief White House correspondent, a former Marist classmate of mine was kind enough to send me a copy of the editorial I wrote all those years ago. On a campaign trip I once met the legendary Donaldson and regaled him with the story and the highlights of my stinging editorial rant. Sam and I had quite a good laugh about that. With raised eyebrow, he quickly asked me, “So how many questions have you had to yell?”

  I have to admit I have employed the Donaldson Rule a few times over my career, without yielding the same kind of result Sam got that day in the Rose Garden in 1987. Shouted questions seldom yield much news, but occasionally every White House reporter has to do it, especially if a president isn’t holding regular news conferences or is being evasive on a particular issue.

  I obviously have a different take on things now than I did as an idealistic student council president trying to soak in all the pomp and circumstance of a White House Rose Garden ceremony. Now, with the instant and never-ending constancy of the Internet, most White House reporters are editorialized and beat up on regularly—sometimes hourly—for the questions they ask, don’t ask, should have asked, forgot to ask, were too afraid to ask, and on and on. My only advice to any aspiring young journalist who might aim to one day be a news reporter in Washington? Think twice before writing those editorials. They surely will come back to haunt you!

  For the record, with the long lead times required for school newspapers and before the Internet came along, by the time my editorial was actually published, President Reagan had long stopped using the “over my dead body” phrase when asked about pulling his nominee’s name, and the full Senate had rejected the Bork nomination 58 to 42.

  Along with covering the White House for Fox, I had also been given the opportunity to fill in for my mentor Brit Hume as substitute anchor for Special Report on Friday nights. Anchoring and field reporting are two completely different animals, so hosting Brit’s show was a lot of fun and a wonderful opportunity for me.

  I was also anchoring on the weekends for a Fox News show called Weekend Live. Pretty much working seven days a week, I was putting in a ton of hours at the network, and, like most couples, Amy and I had a running discussion about my work schedule. Despite the normal “two places at once” dilemmas all parents face, with her father’s incredibly strong work ethic as a lifelong example, Amy supported me 100 percent in taking advantage of every opportunity that came my way.

  There was a practical side to my work schedule as well. Paulie was just a few weeks old and not exactly pestering me every night when I came home from work to take him camping or asking me if I knew anything about rebuilding the carburetor on a 1957 Chevy he bought online. So until he got a little older, Amy and I decided this was the perfect time in my life and career to say yes to just about every opportunity that presented itself. And I did.

  Also, let’s face it, the news business is the news business. News happens every hour of every day, seven days a week. It never stops. Trying to keep up with it all is sometimes like trying to take a sip of water from a full-pressured fire hose. And now with the advent of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, blogs, online streaming, and all the rest, the continual flow of news is at an all-time high.

  But in reality, it’s not just the news business. Being able to be reached anywhere on the planet every second of every day pretty much affects everyone in the workforce these days. For better or worse, with e-mail, cell phones, and texting, few people are really off the clock at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. like they used to be, whether they’re in broadcasting, banking, or bricklaying.

  As a husband and father, trying to strike the proper balance between life at home and life on the job and knowing when to disconnect is something I am constantly thinking about. One of my colleagues who also thought a lot about that topic was ABC’s national security correspondent, Jack McWethy. A fellow graduate of DePauw, Jack became a great friend during my time at the Pentagon, and he really went out of his way to help me when I first arrived in town.

  Once, on a very long trip to Iraq, Jack and I got into a lengthy discussion about family, work, the news business, priorities, life, and just about everything else under the sun. During that conversation Jack said something to me that I totally embraced and have tried to use in my own life ever since: “If there’s one thing I can tell you, Bret, it’s that as you get more and more into this day-to-day coverage and work becomes your life, just make sure when you walk through the door at home you hang up your work along with your coat. When you’re at home you’re at home, when you’re at work, you’re at work,” he said. “Never confuse your career with your life. If you can do that, then you win.”

  I will never forget that conversation with Jack. The thing that made it such a powerful message was the fact that those were not just idle words with him. Jack lived them. Totally old-sch
ool when it came to news reporting, Jack started out in the business long before the tsunami of twenty-four-hour cable or the Internet arrived. Now that they had, he could clearly see that younger journalists coming along were going to have a much tougher time than he did to maintain and nurture family relationships in the midst of the nonstop gears of the news business. Jack somehow figured out a way to keep those gears from chewing him up. Despite the fact that I seldom wore one, I think a lot about what I affectionately call Jack’s “trench-coat sermon” to me during that long trip to Iraq.

  With Paulie at home recovering and me back on the job at the White House, Amy and I were both feeling pretty good, even confident, about our roles as parents and finding the proper balance in our lives. I knew we were far from being out of the woods with Paulie’s heart issues, but at least we had a sense things were on track and everyone in the family was recovering and becoming better equipped to deal with whatever might come our way over the next few years.

  One Friday in the middle of August, just a few weeks after Paulie had come home from the hospital, I was in the Fox bureau getting ready for Special Report when I got a call from Amy. Even though I was in the middle of a very hectic day and the clock was quickly marching toward 6:00 p.m., I was happy to take the call. Amy had taken Paulie to Children’s for his checkup earlier in the day, and I was eager to find out how things went and also hear what ideas the doctors had about Paulie keeping his food down.

  Once I got on the phone, by the background noise I could hear on the other end of the line, I knew instantly that Amy was still at Children’s several hours after she should have returned home.