A Few Toddlers Clinging to Life: the ‘Lucky Ones’

With trembling hands and an anguished smile, James Denny gently kissed the tiny fingers of his son, Brandon, who has spent four days strapped unconscious to a hospital bed twice his size.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Denny said, trying to ignore the maze of intravenous tubing that is keeping his 3-year-old boy alive.

A respirator, taped over his mouth, inflates Brandon’s lungs. A solution of paralyzing painkillers keeps him from squirming. An electronic monitor beeps with each beat of his heart. A child’s blanket, decorated with cartoon ducks, cushions his bandaged head.

“Daddy loves you, baby,” said Denny, who last heard his son speak on Wednesday morning, when he dropped off Brandon and his 2-year-old sister, Rebecca, at America’s Kids on the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The car bomb that leveled the structure, leaving 78 dead and an estimated 150 still missing, somehow spared Denny’s two children, at least giving them a chance to cling precariously to life. Rebecca, whose left side was scorched as if by a sandblaster, is in intensive care at Southwest Medical Center, but is expected to survive. Her brother, whose shattered skull forced doctors at Presbyterian Hospital to remove portions of his brain, faces a tougher fight.

“It’ll be OK,” Denny said at Brandon’s bedside, speaking as much to himself as to his silent son.

From the first day, it has been the smallest victims that have defined Oklahoma City’s tragedy, the image of lost innocents that has left its brand on the American psyche. In all, six of the toddlers from the ravaged day-care center remain critically injured in local hospitals, most of them lying motionless, with IV bags providing their only nourishment.

It is hard to think of them as being among the lucky ones, especially if you see them in the Children’s Hospital pediatric intensive-care unit, where four of the sedated youngsters sleep behind glass partitions in a semi-circle of life-support machines.

“We kept hearing that there were more children, but they never came,” said Dr. Morris Gessouroun, the unit’s medical director. “The reason they didn’t come was they were dead.”

One little boy, more than half of his body burned in the fiery blast, lay swaddled head-to-toe in white gauze like a mummy, only a pale mask of skin peeking out between his puffy eyes and tiny mouth.

Another child, a 4-year-old girl breathing so shallowly that her chest appeared not to even move, was dwarfed by the offerings of well-wishers: hand-drawn cards from playmates, herds of stuffed animals and a dozen Mylar helium balloons, one of which urged her to “Hang in there.”

A nurse, who spends most of her 12-hour shift studying the green blips dancing across the girl’s life-support monitors, stared straight ahead like a palace sentry.

“Don’t talk to her about the children,” cautioned Mariesa McNeill, another nurse in the unit. “It makes her cry.”

Despite the public outpouring of sympathy, the life-and-death struggles of these youngsters are being waged mostly in private, behind security checkpoints that limit visitors to two relatives at a time. But the outside world has still managed to intrude on Children’s Hospital, disrupting operations and exasperating the medical staff.

On Thursday morning, a phony bomb threat forced police to comb the rooms with a K-9 team, the dogs sniffing right up to the children’s beds. Technicians even had to disconnect all the life support equipment, plug it into battery packs and prepare to wheel every child outside.

Later that night, one child’s relative, apparently intoxicated, sparked a heated argument with another relative, prompting the staff to call police and have him arrested. The same day, Oprah Winfrey and her crew virtually took over the entire intensive-care unit, creating such a circus that nurses were reluctant to permit any more reporters inside.

“All the people coming in here are more disruptive and stressful than any patient could be,” McNeill said. “I wish they would let us get back to normal.”

For James Denny, normal has become a relative term.

On Wednesday, as usual, he dropped off his children at America’s Kids, the day-care center at which they had been enrolled since they were both 6 weeks old. Less than half an hour later, he was back at the building, desperate to pull Brandon and Rebecca from the smoldering rubble.

When they failed to appear, he grew even more frantic. It took hours before he learned that an unidentified boy with strawberry-blond hair had been taken to Presbyterian Hospital. He raced to the emergency room, only to find a face so swollen that he scarcely recognized his own son.

It was not until he spotted the red birthmark on Brandon’s left thigh that Denny believed he had found him. He was even more confident after examining Brandon’s feet, “just perfect little feet.” Finally, he saw his pull-up diapers, adorned with little airplanes.

“It was him,” said Denny, 50, a ruddy-faced man with a white mustache who works for his brother in Oklahoma City designing oil-drilling equipment.

Brandon, all 3 feet and 35 pounds of him, lay writhing on a gurney, a hole the size of a quarter blown from the back of his skull. He strained to cry underneath his oxygen mask but managed only a wounded whimper. The nurses who first bandaged his bleeding head feared the worst.

“It’s a miracle that he’s alive,” said Diana Spencer, a neonatal nurse, not the sort of person inclined to credit divine intervention over medical acuity. “He withstood so much pain.”

Since then, Brandon’s father has not strayed far from his side, savoring every moment with the shy, pudgy-cheeked boy who only a few days ago enjoyed chocolate bars and his “Lion King” video. Denny’s wife, Claudia, sleeps on a cot next to their daughter. Relatives relieve them for just a few hours every night.

When they are together, Denny massages Brandon’s legs, which sometimes twitch involuntarily. With a terry-cloth towel, he wipes the saliva dribbling from the tube in Brandon’s mouth. Their only communication comes when he asks Brandon to squeeze his fingers, a feat that buoys his spirit whenever his son is able to respond.

“People say, ‘Take it one day at a time,’ ” said Denny, as rain and thunder pounded the hospital Saturday. “We’re taking it one minute at a time.”

Even if Brandon survives--and his father has no doubt that he will--his prognosis remains uncertain. Doctors say his brain damage is severe, enough to cause some paralysis and impede his speech, if not restrict his life even more.

But after the torment of nearly losing a son, Denny looks at those challenges as a blessing. Survival is what matters right now. “After that,” he said, “the other stuff is easy.”