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Late on a Sunday evening last February, George and Amanda Thomas arrived at the emergency room of Providence Holy Cross Medical Center outside Los Angeles. Amanda, 26 and nearly six months pregnant with her second child, was having trouble breathing. Neither she nor her husband thought it was anything serious.Just the day before, the Thomases had hosted a boisterous birthday party for their two-year-old son in their new house in Palmdale. George, a phone company technician, supervised the toddlers merrily tumbling in a rented backyard Moon Bounce. Amanda, a dental receptionist, created a festive Hot Wheels-themed birthday table in honor of Baby George's favorite toy. Although she felt slightly under the weather, Amanda thought it was "no big deal." She was rarely sick -- hardly ever caught a cold -- and her pregnancy was right on track. The baby, a boy, was due June 10.
After the party, Amanda retreated to the bedroom and fell into a deep sleep. She woke feeling feverish and, thinking she was coming down with the flu, decided to see her doctor on Monday. But by the next evening, she could not breathe. She told George they needed to get to the hospital.
"In the emergency room, a doctor put a breathing mask on my face," says Amanda. "That's the very last thing I remember." The diagnosis: acute pneumonia.
When Dr. Garbis Kassabian, a 35-year-old pulmonary specialist, first saw Amanda in the ICU, he felt some alarm. The pregnant woman was hypoxic, with a low oxygen level in her blood, and seemed to be getting worse. He briefly wondered if he was witnessing the area's first case of SARS, but ruled it out since she had no exposure. Some 48 hours later, a Code Blue signaled impending respiratory arrest. Amanda was placed on a ventilator and, because a tube in the throat causes gagging and choking, she was sedated to relax her airway and allow the machine to breathe for her.
The diagnosis was now dire: Amanda had ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome), a dangerous inflammation of the lungs with a 40 percent mortality rate. (According to the American Lung Association, 150,000 people become infected with ARDS each year.) Amanda's pregnancy further complicated her situation, as those treating her had to avoid using drugs that might harm the fetus. "The uterus was also pushing on her lungs, giving them less chance to expand," explains Kassabian, who admits he became emotionally caught up in the case. He had a two-year-old of his own who'd just celebrated a birthday. "I'd look at Amanda's husband, George, and think, This could be me."
George was reeling. "Things went from bad to very bad to very, very bad very fast," he remembers. "I was petrified, big time." As specialists streamed through Amanda's small room in the first-floor ICU, George settled into a chair by his wife's bedside and rarely left, day or night, for the first seven days. His employer, SBC, told him to take off as much time as he needed.
Back in Palmdale, George's mother, Donna, was caring for Baby George, who displayed his own anxiety by refusing to take off his shoes, even in bed. Donna would creep into her grandson's room at two o'clock in the morning to remove them, and he would instantly awaken. "To him," she realized, "keeping his shoes on meant that his mommy and daddy would be coming back to take him home."
The infection began to spread throughout Amanda's body. Her heart swelled, and she was put on a blood-thinner. "It seemed every eight hours another system would start to fail," says George's father, who visited regularly. On the third day, physicians took George aside to give him some grim news: Despite their intensive efforts, there was a strong chance they might lose both Amanda and her unborn child. The young husband went back to his wife's room and wept.
He then called Amanda's parents, Charles and Nancy Houston, in Fernandina Beach, Florida. They were on a plane to California within three hours. Please, they begged in silent prayer across the country, don't let anything happen before we get there. Amanda was their only child.
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