Making Deadline With A Transplant
For Catherine Herridge's Top Story, a Happy Ending

By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 13, 2006

It was night in the intensive-care unit when she finally gave in and let the sobs take her. Her belly had been split wide open; dozens of stitches formed an angry upside-down Y across her abdomen.

It had taken a few days, but Catherine Herridge had managed to stand, to struggle a few steps to a wheelchair. As a reward, the medical staff let her go see her baby.

Her baby, terribly sick for all five months of his life. Her baby, now with a piece of her own liver resting inside him.

He was on a ventilator, she remembers, with tubes and wires everywhere. Heavily sedated. She just sat there and talked to him.

"You're a really strong kid, and I know that you're going to be fine," she told little Peter.

And, for the first time, she believed it.

"It's upsetting to even think about it now," she said this past Thursday, more than two months later. "I just had a feeling in my gut that it's going to be okay. I felt that in him ."

So when the tears came, later, in the darkness of the ICU, it wasn't about pain or fear or worry. She'd held on to the tears through all of that. She'd saved them for relief.

* * *

Herridge, 42, is the small-boned, pixielike woman from Fox News Channel with the kind of short, tousled hair that's convenient for reporting from places where using a blow dryer can't be a priority. She covered the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia; she was in New York when the towers fell. Her specialties of late have been homeland security and terrorism.

She's learned to go with her instincts, so when she initially sensed that something might be wrong last winter during her second pregnancy, it gave her a start. "Toward the end, I just had this sense that the baby was sick," she says, sitting in the living room of her Southwest Washington townhouse with Peter gurgling on her lap. Out in the garden, her other son, 23-month-old Jamie, is playing ball with his grandfather.

"I kept telling the doctor," she recalls, "but all the tests, the sonograms, were normal."

Delivered on Dec. 30 at Georgetown University Hospital, Peter was yellow with jaundice by his second day of life. Liver tests showed severe elevations of certain enzymes. It took more than four weeks to determine the diagnosis: biliary atresia, a rare condition -- only one in 15,000 U.S. children a year is born with it -- that causes the liver to destroy itself. Despite stopgap surgery when Peter was 6 weeks old, Herridge and her husband, J.D. Hayes, came to understand that only a liver transplant could save their son.

"When they told us he needed the transplant, it was difficult," Herridge says, "because you know that to get another organ, another child is going to have to die."

Peter went on the transplant list at the end of March. On April 26, Herridge got a call: There might be a liver for Peter. Herridge and Hayes had decided beforehand to have the procedure done at the renowned liver transplant center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Herridge was at a courthouse in Virginia, awaiting the verdict in the trial of (eventually convicted) terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. She called Fox News and begged her boss to send a backup immediately.

The liver went to another child.

Shortly after, Herridge went to Pittsburgh to be screened as a potential live donor for her son. Because the liver is an organ that can regenerate, a healthy individual can donate a portion of her liver and go on to live a normal life.

According to George Mazariegos, the hospital's director of pediatric transplantation (and Peter's surgeon), hospitals exercise caution about recommending live donation as a first option because there is a "small but real risk" to the donor; generally, he says, recommendations are heavily influenced by the status of the patient. In Peter's case, he was deteriorating rapidly.

Peter's mother was a "perfect match," says Amadeos Marcos, chief of the transplant division at the hospital and the man who performed Herridge's surgery.

"I felt that whatever happened, even if it didn't work out, I would know that I had gone to the mat for him," Herridge recalls. "That, as a parent, there was nothing else I could have done."

The surgeries took place on June 6. Herridge's lasted 7 hours; Peter's, 10. Afterward, the medical team told Herridge that, judging from the scarring on his liver, Peter had been so sick by the time they operated that he probably wouldn't have lasted the summer. He might not have been able to survive a surgery if they had waited even a few weeks.

The family remained in Pittsburgh for two months; while Herridge was released after eight days, Peter needed to be constantly monitored, and struggled with a collapsed lung and not-unusual rejection symptoms three weeks after the transplant. But overall, he responded very well, and the family returned home last week. Hayes, a matter-of-fact guy who works as an independent contractor doing science and technology research, spent his days with Jamie, a generally happy-go-lucky kid.

Jamie, his parents say, seemed pretty resilient, save for the day when his father heard him crying in the bedroom of the family's rented apartment in Pittsburgh. Hayes found him sitting in the middle of his mother's open suitcase, holding two of Peter's little undershirts, each pressed to a cheek. "Baby! Baby!" he wailed.

* * *

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.

What comes next seems, to Hayes, so much more fraught with peril. What happens the first time that Peter -- whose immune system is suppressed by the antirejection drugs he must take -- catches a virus? Hayes can clean the house vigorously, he can try his best to protect his little boy, but he can't stop it from happening, he can't predict when it will happen, he doesn't know what effect it will have when it does.

"I worry much more now than I did then," he says. Both Marcos and Mazariegos stress that the levels of immunosuppressants used are lower now, and Marcos says Peter can have very close to a "normal life."

Herridge is doing paperwork to apply for Medicaid for Peter. The family has good health insurance but, as a social worker advised her, in Peter's case it will run out. That's the reality of being a transplant patient. She's also overwhelmed by the stacks and stacks of letters and e-mails of support and encouragement she received after her Fox colleague Greta Van Susteren broadcast parts of the family's story on her show.

Then there are the people who donated money to the liver center at the hospital in Peter's honor. And Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff -- whom Herridge snagged for his first interview after he was appointed -- who personally called to give her his best wishes.

So many letters to write, so many people to thank.

"Mostly," she says, "I'm trying to decompress and get my mind out of the Peter-sick mode and into the Peter-well mode.

"Oh, and trying to get some sleep. Peter never sleeps now!"

Maybe not at night. But, at the moment, he's tucked into a portable crib next to the kitchen table, sleeping the sleep of a tired little baby boy. His chest rises and falls gently, his now-chubby cheek pressed against the sheet.