Laurie Michelle Baer

Laurie was born at 1 a.m. Sunday morning October 31, one week early, weighing 5 lb 10 oz and measuring 18 inches... She looked perfect, had all her fingers and toes. She was just too precious, too unbelievable that she was my baby. I was 27, almost 28 and she was the result of my first pregnancy which turned out to be my last pregnancy.

At six weeks of age she got sick and she was diagnosed with an uncommon heart defect... Three weeks later she went into congestive heart failure and had to be admitted and catheterized and the diagnosis was confirmed. She had one ventricle instead of two, one A/V valve instead of two, a hole in her atrium, pulmonary stenosis and two right sided lungs. The major defect (one ventricle and one A/V valve) was inoperable but she would eventually need a bypass for the pulmonary stenosis when her blood got too thick.

She had a gortex shunt placed when she was five years old, two months before she turned six. Her color became much better, pink now instead of bluish. She did well until she turned 11 when her heart rate went up to 220 and she had to go on medications to slow it down. These worked for 11 months and then she had four episodes in one month of increased heart rate, had to be hospitalized and put on new medications.

When she was 14 I asked about surgery for her condition and was told that if i had asked four years ago the surgery could have been done where it worked (UTMB in Galveston, TX), but now she was too old and had to be done out of state, only four other places did it. She had an MRI in August and a heart catheterization in December and her results were sent to California. Almost two years passed before i heard any results... By now her doctor decided to send her to Boston to have it there.

We went to Boston in December 1992, arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. I should have left when we realized that the cardiologists there hadn't even reviewed her cath films yet or told the specialist that a special cath needed to be done for her arrhythmia. They acted like they were completely unprepared for her. When we got there we were talked to in Spanish. That should have told us something. Well to make a long story short, after the cath Thursday afternoon, she got back to the room at 6 pm, the surgeon came in and said she couldn't have the procedure we went there for, but he would do a better one. I cried.. He said her heart wasn't as bad as we'd been told all her 16 years of life. Everything I asked him about her condition and how he was going to fix it was met with arrogant answers and how he knew what he was doing and he did it all the time, she'd be running the malls in two weeks, and on and on.... Laurie only woke up once after her cath and i told her about the surgery and she said "good". Friday morning they took her, she got off the bed and walked to the gurney herself. I told her when she woke up she'd feel better than she ever felt before and that I loved her. Then the nurses said they would take good care of her and they wheeled her away. That was the last time I saw my daughter alive.