Our first date was racquetball and lunch. Not exactly high romance. But it didn’t matter. I was sold on Jeff’s warm, friendly smile and good looks. The guy could talk to anybody about anything. He was also highly ambitious, same as me. He wanted everything excellent that life could offer, and that meant a fantastic job where he made a lot of money so he could afford a nice house, the right cars, and a lot of fun. Jeff was a year older than me and had already graduated from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Now he was flying up the corporate ladder, already promoted to his second position with Riegel Textile. The guy had everything I was looking for. He was husband material, exactly the type of young man you bring home to meet your parents. After our first date I went home, called my mother, and said, “I know who I’m going to marry.”
“But what about Bill?” my mother asked.
“I’ve met someone else,” I said. “And I’m positive he’s the one.”
Jeff and I began spending every minute possible together. I graduated college and started my first job in sales for an office equipment company. A little over a year after our first date, we married and moved to Los Angeles, where Jeff had been transferred.
We threw ourselves into newlywed life. I got a new sales job, and we both dived headlong into our work. Jeff was twenty-five; I was twenty-four. We were making good money for being so young. We bought a condo, ate at all the nicest restaurants, shopped at the finest stores in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, and went to movies and concerts and to the beach on weekends.
Four years later we had climbed even higher. It was 1986, and we splurged on our first house in an upscale community called Palos Verdes. The house had four bedrooms and an ocean view that took our breath away. We couldn’t have been happier.
The only thing that felt weird was having all these empty bedrooms in our new house. It was a problem we planned to remedy soon. We had carefully crafted a mental list of how life was supposed to progress. If we wanted something, we went for it. If we attempted something, we succeeded. We agreed it was time to start a family. I went off birth control. Imagine our surprise six months later when I went in for my normal ob-gyn checkup and found out something was wrong. My doctor was also an infertility specialist. “I think we’ve got a problem,” he said.
The doctor shot dye up into my fallopian tubes. They were as clogged as an LA freeway in rush hour. I felt devastated. Guilty. Flawed. I was never going to be able to give my husband children. Everything in our lives was perfect—except me.
One option was to have surgery to open my tubes. After that we’d have a narrow six-week window to get pregnant before scar tissue closed my tubes again. A pregnancy absolutely needed to take place during that window, because afterward we’d have even less chance of getting pregnant than before. We ruled out that option.
The other option was more experimental. More radical. More controversial.
A test-tube baby. Or, as it came to be known, in vitro fertilization.
Jeff and I both went through a battery of tests. They wanted to make sure Jeff was fertile before putting us through everything else. Jeff was functioning fine, so we began the process. Our marriage turned into a science project. Nine months went by while they prepped my body and we waited. I had hormone shots. Endless bloodwork. Levels were assessed and regulated. We heard a lot of stories about in vitro—some successful, many not. Friends of ours went through the in vitro process, waited a long time without any results, finally adopted a girl, then got pregnant and had quadruplets. Clinic staff knew how difficult the in vitro process can be for a relationship and offered us free marriage counseling, but we shrugged it off. Everything we went after, we accomplished. That was our pattern of approaching life.
Finally my body was ready, the doctors said. Our window of opportunity opened. They filled me with a hormone that causes ovulation. Jeff gave me my last hormone shot at home one night. The next morning we went in, and medical staff retrieved the eggs with an aspirator. They blended the eggs with the sperm, inserted six fertilized eggs inside me, and commanded me to go home and lie in bed for four days with my feet elevated.
I wasn’t a Christian back then. Though I was a nominal Catholic, my faith had lapsed by every stretch of the imagination. Mostly, my religious affiliation was only something I wrote on a medical form. Jeff had grown up Baptist, but he had strayed far from his faith during his high school and college years. We were prodigal children running from God, and we were still a long way off.
I distinctly remember, however, while lying in bed during four days of required bed rest, experiencing a moment that could only be described as supernatural. The bedroom window was open, and a breeze was blowing onshore from Catalina Island. As the breeze entered through the window, an incredible peace came over me—a peace like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was like a wild lion exhaling warm breath from heaven. The lion was sitting on a hill somewhere in a country I couldn’t imagine, and his breath was carrying an adventure from across the sea. It wasn’t a fearful adventure. It was warm, steady, and secure.
I knew I was pregnant.
I absolutely knew it. In that moment, I was as certain of it as I was of my own name. I felt humbled by something I couldn’t control, perhaps for the first time ever in my life. Science might have helped produce this pregnancy, but something beyond science had created this life. It was less than four days after the in vitro procedure, but already I knew a child was being wonderfully formed inside me. I knew he or she was already being intricately knit together. I sensed that whoever had sent this breeze through my window could also see this unformed substance, and that he had mapped out every day to come.
Sure, the statistics were against us. We had heard that in vitro fertilization was a long shot, even when everything looked smooth. But we were not people of statistics. We were people of drive and accomplishment. Winners. The possibility of losing the baby never even crossed my mind.
I had no way of knowing some very difficult days would be right around the corner.
CHAPTER 5
Mimicked
Jeff
One and a half weeks after the in vitro fertilization process, we went to South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach, where doctors did some tests and told us to come back in forty-five minutes. We walked around the block, our cheeks turning bright from the early fall breeze coming off the water, then reentered the building. The nurse met us with a big smile and said, “Good news. You’re very pregnant.”
“Very pregnant,” I said. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Triplets. At least twins.”
Cheryl buckled at the knees. We’d known that the process of in vitro fertilization came with a tendency to produce multiple births, but having two or three babies wasn’t yet on our radar. We considered ourselves lucky to be pregnant with one child, let alone two. But it made sense. Everything we did, we did in a big way.
As far as a husband is ever conscious of these matters, the pregnancy seemed to go perfectly. All the tests said things were fine. We purposely didn’t find out the gender of the children, so we picked names for both boys and girls. Brittany Marie—we were sure of that name. We just liked the sound of Brittany, and Marie was Cheryl’s middle name. A boy would be named either Mark Thomas or Adam David. But what if we had two girls? Well, we’d cross that bridge if we came to it.
During her entire pregnancy, Cheryl was confident, but also very cautious. Twins are almost always born at thirty-six weeks or earlier, rather than the normal forty-week gestation period. There’s a danger of twins being born underweight, and any number of complications can result if that occurs. Cheryl’s high caution put some strain on our marriage, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I reminded myself that a man needs to make certain concessions to his wife when she’s pregnant. I was sure everything would return to normal once the babies were born.
Cheryl was a real trouper and carried the babies two weeks longer than scheduled, to thirty-eight weeks, almost full term, whi
ch we both were ecstatic about. The doctor scheduled a C-section for July 18, 1988, and we went to the hospital at the appointed hour.
And out they came.
Baby girls!
Two of them!
Each was almost seven pounds. Perfectly healthy. They were gooey and slimy and screaming. Their faces were all scrunched up. The nurse handed them to me, one by one. I thought they were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen.
Our first daughter was born at 1 p.m. She was angelic, with dark hair and a perfectly formed head, face, and nose. Brittany Marie.
Our second daughter was born at 1:01 p.m. She was hairless and peachy and looked like a perfect little princess. We’d used up our one girl name, and we had no idea what to call our second child. The nurse wrote “Baby B” on her chart, and that’s what we called her for the first couple of days. I was so proud of my two girls. If I had smoked, I would have passed out cigars by the box.
A few days later we settled on the name Lauren Nicole. Lauren sounded sophisticated and fun, like the actress Lauren Bacall. I had known a little girl at the church where I grew up who was named Nicole. Everybody liked her. The two names sounded good together. Lauren Nicole.
We took our daughters home to our house in Palos Verdes and settled into our new life together. Cheryl took a six-week maternity leave then went back to work. It never crossed my mind that she would do differently. We certainly never talked about it. Hey, with two more mouths to feed, we needed the extra income. We hired a nanny from El Salvador named Zoila who lived with us and took care of the girls during the days. But the girls were not at all fussy. Brittany was more outgoing, with a loud, boisterous cry. She took to me immediately, and we formed a special bond. Brittany was eager to express that she was going places in life—and wanted to get there fast! She fit Team Scruggs to a tee. But Lauren was more timid and shy. She didn’t make a lot of noise. I loved her dearly, but it took awhile for her to warm up to me. Lauren was Mommy’s girl from moment one.
Cheryl seemed to adjust well to her new role. She often shopped and bought things for the girls. Little dresses and toys. At home she held our daughters, rocked them, and read them books way ahead of their age. She was always hovering around them, giving them the fullest expressions of her love and devotion. Things weren’t back to normal in our relationship yet, but I was still confident we were only in the adjustment phase.
One evening at dinner when the girls were about sixteen months old, Zoila kept talking about how she thought Lauren had been looking pale. It took awhile to figure out what she was saying. We thought maybe Lauren was going through a growth spurt. It’s hard to tell with babies. But a day later our neighbor said the same thing. She’d seen Lauren out in the yard and thought she looked thin, her skin almost yellow.
We took Lauren to the doctor that afternoon. It was about 3:30 p.m. They tested Lauren’s blood and said they’d call us the next day if anything looked out of the ordinary.
At 9 p.m. that same night the phone rang. “I’ve made an appointment for you first thing tomorrow with a pediatric oncologist,” said our doctor. “Now, don’t freak out when you go there, but there’ll be a lot of kids with cancer at the clinic.”
Cancer?!
The mere word sent shivers down our backs.
We took Lauren in for some initial tests. Soon more tests were scheduled. Then even more. For two to three weeks, every two to three days, they called her in for bloodwork. Each time they gave her a little Felix the Cat Band-Aid for her finger. Her health continued to deteriorate, yet everything came back inconclusive. Still, there was one word they kept repeating. At first it was just mentioned in passing, like it was only a remote possibility. Then it was repeated. Until it became a definite possibility.
Leukemia.
They scheduled a spinal tap for our baby.
“You need to hold her down,” the doctor said to me. “Hold her down and don’t let her move.”
Lauren lay facedown on the doctor’s table. My hands pressed down tight on her tiny back. She fought, screamed, and tried to twist her face around to see why I was holding her so uncomfortably. The doctor inserted a huge needle into her lower back. Lauren gave one of those cries where a kid screams but doesn’t make a noise. Then she let loose. Wailing. Shrieking.
The results from the spinal tap came back: Lauren didn’t have leukemia. While we were greatly relieved, we knew she was still in danger.
“We want to give her blood transfusions,” the doctor said.
I shook my head no. Lauren’s health was still going downhill, but these were the days when we were hearing a lot of news reports about AIDS. Unless blood transfusions were absolutely necessary, we didn’t want to risk the procedure. What we wanted were answers. Why was our daughter dying? We waited and paced and wrung our hands helplessly. We checked with neighbors, people we knew, trying to pinpoint and line up donors with Lauren’s blood type.
At last a final report came back. A concrete diagnosis was in.
The report said . . . nothing.
Lauren was absolutely fine.
Even now, I can’t tell you the name of what she’d contracted. It was some rare, super-long, Latin-sounding, one-in-five-billion medical condition. It basically meant that Lauren’s hemoglobin levels were stuck—sometimes that happens when you get a virus. All we needed to do was let time pass, and the levels would get unstuck.
Slowly Lauren’s color returned to normal. Her weight began increasing as it should. For months afterward we regularly took Lauren to the oncology clinic to get her blood checked. Sometimes two to three times per week. Every test came back perfectly normal. Whatever calamity had visited our family had left as quickly and silently as it had come.
At the clinic, there were always these other little kids. The ones with the sallow faces and bald heads. The scene put a catch in my throat every time. That could easily have been Lauren, I thought.
The thought of losing Lauren put a scare into our family that we would not easily shake, but for that next season of life, all seemed right with the world. From then on I held Lauren more closely. I became even more protective of her, perhaps overly protective. My little daughter had experienced a brush with death, and I vowed to do everything in my power to protect her from every evil in the world.
Little did I know, another evil lurked in the shadows. It was just down the line, and I wouldn’t see it coming. It would blindside me with such force that our entire world would crumble.
CHAPTER 6
A Jolting Heartache
Jeff
On a Saturday morning in March 1990, Cheryl and I set off for a bike ride on the beach—something we’d done countless times before. Cheryl and I strapped the twins into their car seats, loaded our bicycles onto the rack on our car, and drove from our home in Palos Verdes down to Redondo Beach, just a couple of miles away. We unhooked the bicycles, put helmets on the girls, and each strapped a daughter to the toddler seat fastened to the back of our bikes. Cheryl took Brittany. I took Lauren. As I doubled-checked Lauren’s straps to make sure she was secure, I tickled her underneath her chin. “Again, Dada,” she said, grinning and giggling.
The girls were dressed like warm little berries in matching OshKosh B’gosh outfits with different colors—Brittany in purple, Lauren in pink. The girls wore a lot of OshKosh outfits. Easygoing overalls. Fleecy jackets. Colorful knit tops. I’d been working as a sales executive with the company for the past few years, and I thrived in the job. It felt like the company was doing something good—we were helping families have fun. But mostly, it was a career that seemed to be leading somewhere. The harder I worked, the more money I made. And that suited my life’s goals exactly.
With the sun full on my face that day, I chuckled to think of how perfectly my life was turning out. I had everything any man could ever want, or so I thought. I had two miraculous daughters, one of whom had beaten the odds against a leukemia scare. I had a gorgeous wife, and she and I got along fantastically. Cheryl worked
hard as a sales rep for Konica Business Machines, and with our two combined incomes, we were able to do anything we wanted. We had the right cars. We had the right house. We were going places in a really big way.
Cheryl, the girls, and I set out on our family bike ride. I rode first, and Cheryl brought up the rear. The twins laughed and cooed from their seats. They could already talk to each other in long, babbling toddler conversations. They really seemed to be communicating, even finishing each other’s sentences like mind readers. Cheryl and I pedaled along the serpentine bike path that parallels the beach up through Hermosa.
“I’m getting a little tired,” Cheryl shouted to me. “You think we could stop for a while and just talk?”
“We’re almost to Manhattan Beach,” I called over my shoulder. “We can make the state park if we hurry.”
No way was I stopping. The morning was perfect. It wasn’t too windy. The sun was warming the waves, drying up the mist along the shores. The girls were happy. The whole purpose of coming to the beach was to ride our bikes, wasn’t it? To go places and do things. Cheryl didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t give it a second thought.
We made the state park in good time, circled back south, and pedaled into the city. After riding a few blocks, we stopped at our favorite breakfast joint. I had worked up an appetite and ordered a full farmer’s breakfast with two slices of ham, three links of sausage, three eggs, hash browns, and toast. The girls munched on waffles and drank milk from their bottles. Cheryl ate half a bagel and a slice of fruit.
“Jeff,” she said, then paused.
“Yeah?” I looked up between bites of eggs.
“Um.” Cheryl straightened her napkin. “It’s . . . uh, never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She gave a half smile. “It’s a perfect morning, isn’t it? That’s all I was going to say.” She turned her attention back to the girls, picked up Brittany’s bottle, which had fallen, and wiped Lauren’s syrupy face.
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