Children Get Mom Back for Christmas : Families: She spent three months in a coma, then revived only to discover she had breast cancer. Husband credits children’s voices with her recovery.

Some days, Janette Nadesan sits and watches a video of a new mother lying in a hospital bed, slowly emerging from a coma. She is transfixed by the strange face on the screen.

“I put it on pause and stare at it and stare at it,” she said of the bloated face on the homemade video. “And then I say, ‘How did I ever go through this?’ ”

She may never have the answer. She may never know whether sheer guts, whiz-bang medical care, divine intervention, or perhaps all three, pulled her through a three-month coma, a staggering series of operations, dialysis, hemorrhages, infections and more--a harrowing ordeal that pushed her so close to death that her husband was urged to plan her funeral.

And that all happened before her latest battle: breast cancer.

But here it is, six months since she left the hospital, and here Janette Nadesan is, sitting with her husband and three children--including baby Anna Marie, to whom she gave birth three days before lapsing into a coma--celebrating a holiday of miracles.

“Yes, I’m lucky,” she said softly, her eyes crinkling into a relaxed smile. “I’m blessed.”

“Christmas,” she added, “will have a different kind of meaning.”

*

The year began with promise as Janette and Aru Nadesan awaited the birth of their third child.

But late in her pregnancy, after being told that her baby could be born with a heart problem, Janette developed preeclampsia, a high-blood-pressure disorder.

On Feb. 28, she gave birth to a healthy girl by Caesarean section; she remembers holding her but little else before doctors rushed to perform a hysterectomy to stem hemorrhaging. More bleeding and more surgery followed.

“The situation deteriorated fast, very, very fast,” Aru said. “She just bled and bled.”

By the time Janette was transferred to the University of Chicago Hospitals, she had what doctors call multisystem organ failure. That meant nothing was working--not her kidneys, nor her liver, nor her central nervous system.

She was in a coma, dependent on a respirator.

Like a gambler holding out for better odds, Aru Nadesan anxiously listened as doctors estimated his wife’s remote chances for survival.

“There was a small window of hope, [though] our upfront conversations were, ‘This is as bad as it could get,’ ” said Dr. Jesse Hall, head of intensive care at the University of Chicago. Janette’s recovery chances were estimated as low as 5%.

Dr. Lawrence Gottlieb, a Chicago plastic surgeon who operated on her several times, echoed that grim assessment.

“The first time I saw her, I told her husband there was a good chance she would not make it,” said Gottlieb, who has since become friends with the couple. “The first two or three operations, the discussion was the same: We were taking a risk by taking her [into surgery] because she was so sick, but we [couldn’t] afford not to.”

Still, some things were in her favor: She was young, only in her 30s, and had been in good health. And everything that had gone wrong was potentially reversible.

So the doctors, nurses, hematologists, gastroenterologists and infectious disease specialists moved aggressively: Dialysis for her kidneys. A tracheotomy for breathing. A colostomy. A skin graft from the left thigh to rebuild an abdominal wall that had been nearly obliterated by repeated surgery, bleeding and infections. And some 200 pints of blood (an adult has 10) and blood products.

For Aru, it was overwhelming.

“I’d start crying my heart out, thinking, what is happening here? She’s in the bed all by herself. She left me with the kids,” he said. “I kind of scolded her, ‘You can’t do this.’ ”

Sometimes, he broke down talking to his mother, Neelambal, who had come from his family’s native Malaysia to care for Anna Marie.

The couple’s other children were shaken too: 4-year-old Narayan, a solemn-looking boy with deep brown eyes, became withdrawn; Nadia, a delicate-faced 6-year-old girl with a pageboy haircut, began waking in the middle of the night, screaming and throwing up.

Aru, 36, says friends and family told him to prepare his wife’s funeral.

He wouldn’t.

“I never, even with the slightest part of my mind, thought she would die,” he said. “I kept saying to myself, ‘She loves the family too much.’ . . . There’s no reason for her to die. . . . I was fearful, but I never gave up hope.

“I guess the only thing I did was pray.”

*

Aru Nadesan didn’t miss a day at his wife’s side. He took a leave from his job as a manager-trainee for the Eagle food chain.

Early on, a nurse suggested he talk to his wife because, despite her coma, she might be able to hear him.

“I thought, it’s great for her to hear me, but can you imagine if she hears the kids’ voices?” he said, his eyes flashing behind his glasses, his voice lilting with joy as he recounted the ingenuity of his plan.

So Nadia and Narayan taped messages and he took the microcassette recorder to his wife’s hospital room and flicked the ‘play’ button:

“Mom, come home soon.”

“Mom, we are waiting for you.”

“Mom, we love you!”

Their tiny voices mingled with cries and coos from Anna Marie, who was spending her first months in the world without her mother’s embrace.

What seeped into Janette’s subconscious is unclear, but she does remember a surreal dream about being in a pickup truck outside a hospital, asking her husband to take her home.

“He says . . . ‘I brought some tapes for you. I’ll let you play them.’ . . . but I said, ‘I want to see them [the children]. I want to go home.’ ”

For nearly three months, Janette remained in a coma while her husband stood vigil, reminiscing about their lives, beginning with their days as college sweethearts in Hawaii.

He laughs now when he says he was racked with guilt, thinking of things she had asked for that he hadn’t bought. So in April, he got her a watch for her birthday. In June, it was a camera for their seventh anniversary.

And as spring edged toward summer, Janette began showing signs of recovery.

“She kept making small improvements day by day, week by week. We knew we were going to be able to drag her back from the edge,” Hall said.

In late May, while Aru was standing by his wife’s bed, her eyes opened. She asked for a soft drink.

As she gradually awoke, Janette recalls saying: “Let’s go home. What are we doing here?”

When her husband told her she couldn’t get up, she responded: “What do you mean I can’t? Yesterday I got up,” thinking of how she had tried to walk the day after she gave birth.

Janette didn’t realize she had been in a coma until she heard nurses talking about something that happened in May. “I wondered what happened to March? What happened to April? I said, ‘What happened?’ ”

She was still fighting an infection; it wasn’t until June 23 that she was reunited with Anna Marie. She felt numb. The 3-day-old infant she remembered was now a 4-month-old girl.

“I said, ‘She’s not the one,’ ” Janette recalled, mimicking her surprised look when she saw the child. “I prepared myself to care for a little baby and here she is, she’s a big baby already.”

In the following weeks, Janette had more adjustment problems. She struggled with panic attacks. Sometimes, she felt as if she were choking.

On June 29, four months and one day after giving birth, she left the hospital for rehabilitation.

Three weeks later, she was back.

*

During rehabilitation, Janette Nadesan had to relearn how to use her muscles for the most basic tasks--how to walk, how to sit on the toilet, how to get in the bath.

Soon, there was another problem.

One day, as her husband applied lotion to her dry skin, he felt a lump in her left breast. Tests revealed a cancerous tumor. Again, there were tears.

“I told him, ‘We’ll just have to face it. What can we do?’ ” said Janette.

After a lumpectomy, after she had already lost her hair, Janette endured radiation five days a week for five weeks.

“She’s a very, very motivated person,” said Jennifer Sala, a University of Chicago nurse who cared for Janette earlier. “Her motivation was to get home, and she would deal with whatever she had to deal with.”

There have been physical obstacles: She has knifelike pains in her left leg and can only walk a few steps with a brace; she uses a wheelchair outside.

And she has grappled with depression. Though she practices meditation and sometimes laughs about her travails, Janette had to work up courage to face her scars and wounds in a mirror.

“Finally, I’d get to the point to look at my whole body and I’d start crying, thinking, why? . . . I’d get very angry and Aru would say . . . ‘You’re lucky you’re around.’ And that’s what I think.”

Now, the Christmas tree is up, and the Nadesans will be home together for the holidays.

But they face more hurdles. Janette’s medical bills have topped $2 million, exhausting her insurance. She still is undergoing chemotherapy and needs more surgery to build an abdominal wall. She already has been in the operating room about 20 times.

Janette also is apprehensive about going in again. She sometimes looks at that video her husband took of her, or pores over her 2-foot-high stack of medical records. “It gives me the goose bumps,” she said.

But she stays busy: One night, she sewed three pairs of pants for her children in less than an hour. She and her husband also are working on a book about their experiences.

At home, her children rarely leave her side. Narayan, she said, sometimes curls up in bed at night with them and asks, “Are you dying now?” Nadia, meanwhile, hugs her tightly when she leaves for chemotherapy and says, “Take care, Mom. You’re coming back tomorrow?”

Bonding with Anna Marie is going slowly; Janette is too weak to carry her.

“I take the baby and stare at her. . . . She cries for everybody except me,” Janette said. “I feel left out. I missed something that I can’t identify. But it’s getting there. . . . I still need to know her more and do more things for her.”

Despite her physical limitations, her doctors marvel at Janette’s tenacity and spirit--and at her support.

“I have no doubt the circle of love and concern of her family that almost enveloped her, with her own incredible inner strength and focus . . . made it possible for her to somehow get through this,” said Hall, the intensive care specialist.

“Why was she able to [make it]?” asked Gottlieb, the plastic surgeon. “Superb care. Luck. Miracles. Who knows what? . . . No one was willing to give up on her.”

Most of all her husband.

He says he and his wife don’t want any Christmas presents.

“We have what we need--each other,” he said. “That’s the biggest gift of all.”

Contributions can be sent to the Janette Nadesan Foundation, Sand Ridge Bank, 450 W. Lincoln Highway, Box 598, Schererville, IN 46375.