When Prayer Goes Viral

Every time I hear the word ventilator, I’m transported back to a tiny hospital room at the end of a corridor, at Albany Medical Center. It was January of 2010, and our sweet, vulnerable Catie was seemingly dying. Mark and I had been keeping vigil for several days as Cate’s blood pressure began dropping to forty-something over twenty-something.  Her respirations were shallow, rapid, and so labored that her huge, now sunken, hazel eyes pleaded for mercy.  Catie was septic and her blood gases were all dangerously abnormal.
Dr. Farkas, from ICU walked into the room followed by three or four residents.  Linda, Cate’s primary nurse, and the attending physician, from the medical unit, Dr. Thomas, were already with us.  Their faces were somber as they all squeezed around the bed.
Dr. Farkas broke the silence with “You don’t have to make a decision right now Mr. and Mrs. Roche, but within ten or fifteen minutes I need to know if you want me to transfer Caitlyn to ICU so we can put her on a ventilator.”
“Is that what’s best for her Doctor? Is there a down side?” I had entered nurse mode, but with the enormity of having to make such a decision within minutes, I was beginning to panic.
“She’s struggling to breathe without help, but she’s young, and she has a strong heart so she could possibly manage to pull through this on her own. The down side would be that she may not be able to come off the ventilator when the crisis passes because she can’t follow the instructions that would be required to make that transition.  We’ll let you both think things over now.”
Everyone in a white coat turned and left as a unit.  Linda, placed her hand near my shoulder and squeezed my arm.  A lovely gesture infused with solidarity.  She then followed the rest of the medical team out the door and left us alone in the sparse, dimly lit room where the weight of the world was descending upon us.

“What should we do Irish?”  I bent over Catie’s tiny, skeletal body struggling for air and held her as I wrestled with Mark’s question.  We couldn’t stop weeping.  Then, for a fleeting moment, a vivid image of Jesus on the Cross transposed over her. Agony.  Cate was in agony. Jesus was with her.  Mark and I were frozen in time.  In fear. We didn’t want Catie to die.  And there was no way we wanted to give her one more medical “THING” to have to live with if she recovered.

“We have to call people to pray.  That’s all I know to do.  Can you call Father Carlino and ask him what we should do?”  Father answered immediately and told us either decision would be alright. He said morally there was no “right” decision here.  But we still couldn’t see clearly what was best for Catie, and the minutes were slipping away.

I called Marianne, our beloved elderly friend from church. She had been our unofficial spiritual director since Cate was an infant. Marianne, is the local saint and the spreader of the ‘Good News’ in Schenectady and beyond. Since experiencing deliverance from alcoholism years ago, she has lived a life of prayer and service to St. Paul’s Community, the area hospitals, and the Albany diocese.  A believer in God’s desire to heal his people by prayer as well as medicine, she was, and still is at ninety-three, a beloved force to reckon with. If every community had a Marianne, parishes would be transformed. This dear mensch of a Catholic, immediately mobilized St. Paul’s prayer line.
Not two minutes passed and Catie started to look better! I checked her pulse. It was slower, stronger, less thready.  Her blood pressure was rising and her eyes were no longer wide with terror. One of the medical residents stood in the doorway and observed Catie briefly.  He took note of the monitors and left.  I can still see his compassionate eyes.  They told me he too was pulling for Cate.
Something was taking over. I KNEW it. The paralysis of indecision was lifting. Catie was quieting.  The fear in her eyes had given way to peace.  She was beginning to rest.  Hopeful, and invigorated, as I rushed toward the door, I yelled back to Mark, “I’m going out to the desk.” The team of men in white coats were all hovering around their instructor, Dr. Farkas, discussing our precious girl.
Heading straight into the center of the group, I blurted out, “Can you order another set of blood gases for Catie? She looks better to me. Her vitals are improving too.”
The resident who had just peeked in the room, piped up from behind me, reinforcing my assessment by saying,  “Yes, she does look better. I was thinking the same thing.”
Dr. Farkas agreed to my request.

Within moments, the same lab technician who had struggled to get blood out of Cate’s frail little body for the previous two blood draws was back.  And, despite the graveness of the situation, she was just as disgruntled and vocal, maybe even more so, at having to go through the procedure one more time. “Easy for them to say. Get another blood sample.”  was all she muttered as she rolled her eyes and jerked her little basket of supplies off the counter.

We NEEDED that blood.  So once again Mark and I held hands and silently prayed for her success.  And once again blood began flowing into her tubes as soon as we prayed.  Still complaining to herself, she mouthed “They should really give me a raise!”
Within ten minutes, Dr. Farkas returned to Cate’s room, lab report in hand.
“Everything is NORMAL??” He spoke clearly, but the look on his face spelled utter confusion. I’m sure he was over-joyed that Cate was now stable, but he had absolutely no idea of how to make sense of what he’d just witnessed. He paced in small circles,  shaking his head slightly from side to side, and muttering “I don’t think she’s as sick as I thought she was. I don’t think she’s septic.” He stopped moving and his eyes searched mine briefly. Then, shaking his head, he stared off into the heavens again, deep in thought.
“Dr. Farkas, (I interrupted his interior chaos) we called our priest and a prayer chain we’re part of, to pray for Catie.”
He turned abruptly to look at me as I spoke, but didn’t say a word. He knew what he’d seen, and what the reports had verified, but thought,  “How could this be?”  This bright man of science was not the first, nor was he the last soul, that broken little Catie, without so much as a word, introduced to Jesus, the Divine Physician.

“She seems to be out of the woods now, but I’d still like to put her in ICU so we can observe her tonight.”  Cate’s instantaneous recovery had rocked his world.  At first I bristled inside for a moment, but as Mark leaned in and whispered “Irish, we can sleep!”, I agreed.

We met Catie’s wonderful young ICU nurse and then left our girl to her care.  The two of us slept so deeply on the hard, short sofas in the visitors lounge next door . . . .  with a peace that passes understanding.  Catie did too.