Miracle on Christmas Day

By Deborh Morris

 

    Around midnight, Melinda wearily turned off the oven. Steve was already in bed; Brittany was on the floor, sound asleep. Their small Christmas tree twinkled brightly nearby.

    Melinda smiled down at her daughter. She looks so comfortable, she thought. I'll let her sleep here. Covering Brittany with a blanket, she kissed her cheek and went to bed.

    The clock read 9:33 a.m. when Melinda awoke with a start. Oh, I don't have to work today, she realized with relief. Then she noticed the house was unusually silent.

    "Brittany?" she called sleepily as she walked down the hallway. The moment she stepped into the living room an icy wind hit her. She looked around in confusion and saw the front door wide open. She pushed on the door. It was frozen in place. Good, Melinda thought with relief. She couldn't have gone outside.

    "Brittany?" she called again. Melinda thought her daughter might be playing a joke. Two nights before, Brittany and Steve had hidden in the hall closet and jumped out to surprise her. But the closet was empty and so was Brittany's bedroom.

    Melinda ran to wake Steve. "I can't find Brittany!" she cried. Together, they searched the trailer. Then Melinda's eyes turned to the door─and the cold landscape outside.

    "Oh dear God," she said. Throwing on jackets, the couple rushed out the door. The cold wind took their breath away. "Brittany!" they shouted, racing up and down the row of trailers. Why didn't I wake up earlier? Melinda thought. Why didn't I hear her open the door? Please, God, don't let anything have happened to my baby.

    Then she spotted something between two trailers. "Steve!" she cried out. Brittany, still clothed only in her underwear and nightshirt, was lying in the snow. Her eyes were frozen open, wide and staring, her mouth agape. With her face framed by soft blond curls, she looked like a porcelain doll.

    Steve took his daughter in his arms and raced for their trailer, shouting for help. Brittany's tiny body was stiff, unyielding. He laid her on the couch and started piling blankets on her as a neighbor rushed in.

    The man looked in horror at the frozen little girl, then checked for a pulse. Shaking his head, he placed both hands on her chest and began CPR. Steve, worried that Melinda would go into premature labor, sent her from the room with another neighbor.

    The phone rang in the local Emergency Squad room. Minutes later an emergency crew pulled up in front of the trailer. Brenda Dailey, a nurse, ran up the steps, her heart racing.

    When her fingers touched Brittany's neck to check for a pulse, she gasped─the flesh was cold and hard. She's frozen solid! she thought in disbelief. Dailey moved the child to the floor and continued CPR.

    A moment later Doctor Lora Eye and crew chief Delma Caudell rushed in with equipment. Caudell linked the child to a heart monitor. "She's got a flat line," she said grimly. As Steve turned away tearfully, Eye felt sad and depressed.

    The doctors placed chemical hot packs on Brittany and then inserted a tube down her throat to force oxygen into her lungs. After they wrapped her with blankets and loaded her onto the stretcher, Steve followed them to the ambulance. Assured that a neighbor would drive Melinda to the hospital, he climbed in, and sirens began to sound.

    Dr. John Veach was on duty in the hospital emergency room when Brittany arrived at 10:45 a.m. Her temperature was 23 degrees Celsius. She had been in a deathlike state for at least 40 minutes.

    The well-known rule in cases of severe cold, however, is that the victims aren't dead until they're warm and dead. "Get some heat lamps," Veach told the nurses.

    After taking a series of emergency measures, Veach asked Eye and Dailey to continue CPR. Until Brittany's blood circulated freely, the cardiac drugs they had administered would have little effect.

    Rushing into the room where Steve waited, Melinda held Brittany's favorite doll. "I thought she might want this," she said helplessly. Steve nodded, gently squeezing her hand.

    Huddled on the couch, Melinda felt a fresh wave of pain as she thought of the gaily wrapped presents─a toy kitchen set, a cartoon video, some new crayons─hidden away for Christmas morning. Would Brittany ever get to open them? Would she be there when her baby brother or sister was born?

    For more than two hours, in the heat of the eight lamps aimed at Brittany, nurses and doctors performed CPR. As the child's temperature approached 27 degrees with still no sign of life, the atmosphere in the emergency room grew increasingly tense. The unspoken thought hung in the air: It's time to give up.

    No one wanted to stop, however. Maybe it was because of the sad young parents outside, or simply because it was Christmas Eve. They continued to fight─forcing the child's stilled heart to beat, her empty lungs to fill.

    At about 1 p.m. Lora Eye noticed blood and liquid from Brittany's nose and mouth. "Look!" she shouted excitedly. Soon the heart monitor showed a subtle change─an uneven curve instead of a flat line.

  Over the next hour the screen showed increasing heart activity. At 2:15 p.m., Dr. Veach touched Brittany's neck. "I've got a pulse!" he exclaimed. Against all odds, the little girl's heart was beating on its own.

    Lora Eye smiled at Brenda Dailey and the other nurses. But even in that successful moment she felt a pang of doubt. The child had gone without oxygen for a long time─had they brought her back to a hopeless, vegetative existence? She quickly got rid of the thought. We did what we were trained to do, she decided. The rest is in God's hands.

    Melinda and Steve looked up fearfully when Veach walked in. "We've got your daughter's heart going again," he said. "We're transferring her to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh." The couple followed the doctor down the hall to see their daughter.

    Melinda gasped. Brittany was wrapped in warm blankets; only her blue lips and nose were visible.
    Stepping forward, Melinda laid Brittany's doll next to her. "Mommy's here," she whispered. "You're going to be okay." Minutes later the child was quickly sent to an ambulance. She'd be driven to a nearby airport, then flown to Pittsburgh.

    At Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Dr. Shekhar Venkataraman received word that a child with severe cold injuries was being airlifted in. The doctor shook his head; such unfortunate things were always wrenching. There was one positive factor, however: severe cold injuries sometimes have surprising outcomes.

    When Brittany arrived at 4:30 p.m., Venkataraman tried to assess the child's condition. She didn't respond even to painful stimuli, and her pupils didn't react to light.

    Melinda and Steve, who had been driven to Pittsburgh by relatives, rushed into the hospital two hours later. "Your daughter's heart rate and blood pressure are becoming stabilized," Venkataraman told them, "but she's still very cold─only 29 degrees. We won't be able to run an EEG to evaluate her brain activity until she's a lot warmer."

    As dusk fell on Christmas Eve, the couple began a silent watch at their daughter's bedside. Melinda's eyes were full of tears as she looked at Brittany's face, so beautiful and so still. Please, God, she prayed, let her be okay.

    Then, early Christmas morning, the little girl's eyes suddenly fluttered open. "Brittany?" Melinda said breathlessly. " Can you hear me?" The eyes closed again, but Melinda was certain she had understood. "She's going to be okay," she told Steve excitedly. "I just know it!"

    Brittany seemed to grow more alert as the day passed slowly. Several times it looked as though she was trying to focus on Melinda's face.

"She's coming around pretty quickly," Venkataraman told Melinda and Steve, "but until we take her off the respirator and see if she recognizes you, we won't be able to assess how much brain damage has occurred."

    The next afternoon, Venkataraman and several nurses gathered around Brittany's bed in the Intensive Care Unit. As Melinda waited nearby, they carefully slid the respirator tube from Brittany's throat. She coughed for a moment, then began to cry and call out, "Mommy, Mommy!"

    Melinda rushed to Brittany's bedside. As she tearfully kissed her daughter, the doctor and nurses watched with wide grins. The Christmas they had missed in doubt and despair had finally come, bearing the priceless gift of a child's life renewed.

    Brittany's discolored skin soon regained its normal color. Physical treatment restored full use of her hands and feet, and helped solve the problem that occasionally left her off-balance. By the time her sister, Kristin, was born in March, Brittany was walking and playing again, a happy three-year-old.

    Today Melinda and Steve still shake their heads when they recall the Christmas Eve their precious little girl was lost, then miraculously restored. "It didn't seem possible that she'd ever wake up," Melinda says. "But getting her back was the greatest Christmas gift of my life!"

(1,650 words)

(From Reader's Digest, Dec. 1994 )

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