Making Deadline With A Transplant

Now, Jamie, an adorable showoff, is climbing the couch as if it were a mountain, pulling some hair, offering to put Daddy's tie on Mommy. Peter's gotten hungry, and Herridge has turned him over to the nanny. He's an eating machine these days, up to 14 1/2 pounds.

"We were joking today that it's time to put him on a diet," says Herridge, who is still recuperating and cannot engage in serious physical exercise -- or lift anything over 15 pounds.

Still, she is going back to work in September. Earlier in the day she was on the phone with the office, eager to hear reports about the terrorist threats that had resulted in mass arrests in Great Britain and had thrown air travel into chaos. This, after all, is her work universe.

Peter's crisis has changed her. Before, she thought she could handle anything. War zones. Terrorist attacks. This was the true test of her life.

"You start to think maybe you're pretty tough," she says. "But that's an illusion."

Peter, she says, taught her the value of time. Even when he was sick, he was a smiler, a happy baby. She felt like she needed to absorb every minute with him, because she didn't know how many more were left.

Now it's different. Now, she says, she's fearless. And it's affected her in ways she didn't expect.

Herridge has kept up with all the recent coverage of her female colleagues in the industry; the dustup over whether Katie Couric, as a single mother, would be willing to report from Iraq, the fact that Elizabeth Vargas's departure from the ABC anchor chair was attributed to her pregnancy.

Would she go back to Iraq?

Her answer is an unequivocal yes.

"I think this lack of fear I have is really going to help me as a journalist," she says. "As a woman in a tough field, it's going to help me fight for what I deserve."

The ordeal had an opposite effect on Hayes. Talk to him about the illness, about the wait for the transplant, about sitting in a waiting room for hours while his wife and baby were both in surgery, and he is very calm. He knew what had to happen, he knew what had to be done, he went forward with the plan.