A Life Lost, a Life Regained

Through the awful hospital weeks, once their worries had been fully shared, the two would sometimes talk about that bottle of wine. For theirs was a waiting-room union of tears and exhaustion and dread, but also of hope: Surely, surely her mother with the bad heart and his wife with the brain malady were going to get well. And on that better day, all four of them would laugh and raise a glass together.

Carman Moloney and Bob Bradshaw met in January at the University of Maryland Medical Center. She had been all but living there for more than two months, ever since her mother, Bobbie diSabatino, suffered a heart attack and began a gentle descent toward the grave. He had just arrived with his wife, Cheryl, who was facing brain surgery.

They saw each other daily, Moloney remembers. The conversational topics were pretty consistent: her mother, his wife, time away from their children. Each became invested in the other’s pain, and as the weeks went by, the friendship--and the interdependence--became ever more intense.

Moloney shakes her head, as if to dislodge the memory. She’s seated in her mother’s big paneled kitchen, and a smile comes to her face as she gazes across the table. There, DiSabatino sits demurely, enjoying a story she has heard many times before.

When trouble leads to a happy ending, it changes colors in the remembering. There is something close to pride in DiSabatino’s voice when she says, “I was on the Eastern Shore at my grandson’s Grandparents’ Day at school and suffered a massive heart attack and died. I mean I literally was dead.”

What saved the 57-year-old retired secretary--just as her situation threatened to slip from dire to desperate--was a heart transplant. “I always had faith that someday the right heart would come and I would be OK,” she says.

DiSabatino’s manner is sweet and reserved. Moloney, who didn’t always share her mother’s optimism, exudes the kind of glad-that’s-over ebullience that often comes when a story turns out the right way.

“I always think to myself, ‘Jeez, how screwed up must I be that God thinks I still need my mother?’ ” she says, laughing. “God must say, ‘Oh, man--she’s really a wacko!’ ”

We can say that DiSabatino’s prayers--and her daughter’s--were answered. But of course that gets a little dangerous because some people’s prayers get no response. And don’t the sick and those who love them always ask for the same things?

The surgery began late on Feb. 13. “I went into surgery on Friday the 13th and woke up on Valentine’s Day with a new heart,” DiSabatino says. “Went in on a bad-luck day and woke up on Sweethearts’ Day.”

The donor of the heart--by her husband’s choice--was Cheryl Bradshaw, whose luck had run out.

Illness’s First Signs Came Suddenly

A successful heart transplant is a medical triumph, but it does require a defeat, a death. On the night of Dec. 13, Cheryl and Bob Bradshaw were celebrating. The tunnel construction company he runs with his three brothers was holding its Christmas party at a Holiday Inn near Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The couple brought along their three children, Kristen, 12, Sara, 10, and Kyle, 7, and stayed over at the hotel.

Cheryl, 38, had been having terrible migraines for a couple of months, but they were forgotten that night as the couple ate, danced and posed for pictures. Then, about 3 in the morning, Bob, 35, awakened to the sound of gurgling. His wife was in the midst of a grand mal seizure.

As he tells the story, gesturing occasionally at one of the numerous pictures of Cheryl and the kids that brighten his Ellicott City office, he gives the impression that the chilly facts of his wife’s death still wash over him fresh every day. And grim as it is, the tale seems like a respite--a little visit to the past, where his wife is ailing but alive and his own role is very clear.

The seizure that night was terrifying, and afterward it took her about a quarter-hour to get her bearings. She had awakened with a terrible headache that was to last the rest of her life.

At the hospital she was sent immediately for a CAT scan. After reading the results, “The radiologist just looked at me and said, ‘How’s this woman lived all this time and nobody’s known about this?’ ”

Cheryl had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a congenital defect afflicting one in every 10,000 people. Normally blood is carried to the brain by arteries and, after passing through, is returned to the heart by veins. In patients with this defect, some arteries bypass the brain entirely, routing blood directly to veins and back to the heart. Veins are not designed to handle as much pressure as arteries, and over the years, the affected veins swell and multiply to escape that pressure.

In most patients with the malformation, one or two major arteries are affected. With Cheryl there were eight, meaning that 50% of the blood flow to her brain was actually bypassing it. Through the nearly four decades of her life, her overworked veins had formed a pulsing mass the size of an orange.

The surgery was a parlous two-day procedure in which the offending veins were first sealed off and then, after a craniotomy--the opening of the skull--removed.

“For the next few days, she was a normal recovering craniotomy patient,” Bradshaw says. But then she began to hemorrhage. The next weeks were a horrifying riot of strokes and improvements, comas and emergency surgery. At one point after another hemorrhage, doctors removed most of the right frontal lobe to give the rest of the brain room to swell. Bradshaw worried about the consequences of all the bleeding and the surgery, but doctors were reassuring. “All her hemorrhages have been on the right side, which is not the dominant side,” he remembers a surgeon telling him. “The person you know is in the left side, and there’s no damage there.”

Recovery Seemed Normal--and Then Devastation

The Bradshaw children were having a hard time. The younger two hadn’t seen Cheryl since she entered the hospital. “Every day, every one of my kids would write a letter to their mother,” he says, the strain creeping over his face. He exhales and gestures at a folder. “I’ve got hundreds of these. Cards and letters that I would go in and read to her daily from the children.”

Finally, Cheryl started getting better. For 12 days, there was nothing but improvement. She went off life support and was alert. Doctors were telling Bradshaw he needed to find a good rehab center, because she’d be leaving the hospital soon.

And then came one more major rupture, this time on the left side. Bradshaw had stepped away from the room for a few minutes. When he returned, “there were 12 people in there working on her, surgeons and nurses, getting her hooked up to those 12 IVs, the respirator, the heart catheter.

“I never thought my wife was going to die,” he says. “Ever. Ever . . . until two days before she died. At that point I had her cousin come in and clean her up, put makeup on her, they put bandages back on her head, and a cap--and she looked just like Cheryl lying there. And I brought those two little ones in for two days.

“They spent two afternoons with her. They hadn’t seen their mom for five weeks. That was the hardest thing of my life. The 7- and the 10-year-old--they had been working for weeks on her Valentine’s Day present. They had hooked her heart-shaped pillows. They brought them in and made cards and posters. The room was just decorated all over the place. It looked like a shrine.

“And they took those pillows and they propped her arms up on them. And then they climbed up on each side of her and lay down in bed with her, and they’d just look at you and say, ‘When’s Mommy going to wake up?’

“And I said, ‘Honey, Mommy’s not going to wake up. Mommy’s going to die.’

“And they can’t grasp death. It’s too painful. Fifteen minutes later, they’d look at you again and say, ‘When’s Mommy going to wake up?’

“And you’d tell them again.

“And then eventually they look at you and say, ‘Well, is Mommy going to wake up on Valentine’s Day to see our present?’ ”

Cheryl died at the end of the second day, Feb. 12. He had never been crazy about the idea of organ donation, but she was adamantly in favor of it: “She would argue with me--’You fool, what are you going to do with them when you die? Why wouldn’t you want to save somebody?’ ”

As Bradshaw remembers it, “It just clicked in my head: I know a family who could certainly use that heart.”

The day after their mother died, the couple’s three children, instrumentalists all, decided they wanted to perform at her funeral. They didn’t yet know about the transplant, Bradshaw says. Nor, after many weeks of doing little besides eat, sleep and haunt the hospital, was he familiar with the song they chose. But the irony must have chilled some of those attending when Kristen and Kyle took the piano and Sara a flute and they played the theme from “Titanic,” which of course is titled “My Heart Will Go On.”

Offering the Gift of Life to a Friend

As with much of the rest of Cheryl Bradshaw’s story, the average TV movie seems subtle by comparison.

After Bradshaw offered his wife’s heart to the mother of his friend, “Carman came unglued,” he remembers.

Moloney: “Because that was like offering to give my mother back to me--to end the suffering for me. He didn’t know my mother. He was doing this to end the suffering for me.

“I said to him, ‘Do you realize that if Cheryl’s heart is a match for my mother and my mother gets this heart, we’re going to be bonded for life?’ ”

Still, the young woman from the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville couldn’t get her hopes up. Her mother’s blood type is B-positive, not terribly common, and under the rules she had to wait for a B-positive donor. Moloney consulted a transplant doctor and learned that donors are allowed to designate organ recipients, meaning that Bradshaw’s wishes could supersede the transplant rules.

But it is very unusual. Not only must blood type be compatible--Cheryl was Type O, the universal donor, but also the organ must be the right size for the recipient.

“I can’t say it’s a million to one, but I’ve got to tell you, it’s pretty close,” says John Conte, director of heart and lung transplantation at the hospital. “I’ve done a couple hundred transplants, and I’ve never been involved with a directed donation.”

After Cheryl died, Bradshaw made one last stop before going home. “He did come to my room the night before surgery,” DiSabatino says. “And I had never met him. I was saying the rosary for him and his wife.

“I try--and it’s a conscious effort--I try not to think about someone else’s organ keeping me alive. I think if you went that route, you would have very guilty feelings, and I really don’t feel guilty about this new heart. But I feel sorrow for Bob and his children, and they’ll always be in my prayers. But I have no guilt feelings, because I wasn’t the cause of Cheryl’s death. Only God can decide that.”

Moloney breaks in: “I’m the one who seemed to have the problem psychologically the day of the transplant. It was hard at one point for me to even look at Mom. I kept walking out of her room. Because I knew at that point I needed to be a friend to Bob. It wasn’t my time to be happy. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end.”

Firmly, she says, “I will never turn my back on Bob. He and I will always be good friends. We saw each other through the worst possible times in our lives, you know? And that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

We keep expecting life to be fair even as we remind ourselves it’s not. There are people among us who, not wanting to, carom from disaster to devastation, chaos to calamity. And they’re hard to think about because they explode any comforting notions we might retain about life, justice or even the randomness of fortune. Long before she got sick, Cheryl Bradshaw was one of them.

When Bob first met her in 1983, she was a deeply troubled woman. It was the fall, in a math class at Catonsville Community College. “I thought it was strange because people treated her with such respect and such compassion,” he says. “I’m sitting there, and this girl in class, she gets all this special treatment.”

Bradshaw didn’t understand because he’d been living until quite recently in South Carolina. Soon after they met, Cheryl, then 23, asked him to lunch and “kind of spilled her guts on me.”

Almost a year earlier, she and her husband, Scott Piechowicz, had been working at the Warren House motel in Pikesville, northwest of Baltimore. Piechowicz was the manager. They lived in nearby Owings Mills with Sherrie, her 5-year-old daughter from a brief first marriage.

That month the FBI arrested a suspected drug dealer named Anthony Grandison and found on him a Warren House room key. Four ounces of heroin and 4 1/2 ounces of cocaine were discovered in the room, and Grandison was charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine and possession of a handgun.

The Piechowiczes were the only witnesses who could tie Grandison to the motel room. They testified at two hearings in the spring and were scheduled to do so again at the trial. And then one night Cheryl was up until 5 a.m. wallpapering Sherrie’s bedroom. Exhausted, she phoned her 19-year-old sister, Susan Kennedy, who also worked at the motel, and asked her to fill in for her that morning.

And so it was that her sister was there with her husband on April 28, 1983, when the hit man showed up in the lobby and opened fire, pumping 17 rounds into them at point-blank range from a Mac 11 submachine gun.

Cheryl never doubted that half of those bullets had been meant for her. Immediately she was put in the witness protection program. Telephone interviews at the time reflect a sad, frightened, determined young woman.

Ten days after the murders--and two days before she would testify at Grandison’s drug trial that she was “100% positive” he was the man who had checked into the motel--she told the Washington Post: “I’m still afraid. I think my life is very much in danger. But I know I have to [testify]--for Scott, for myself, for everyone involved.”

The federal drug trial ended in Grandison’s conviction. Afterward, the FBI offered her a new identity and gave her a list of cities where she could live. But she decided to move back into her house and enrolled in school.

Within a month after she and Bradshaw started dating, they were living together, he says. They married and settled in Marriottsville, and with the coming of children, a patina of normalcy descended on the household. Cheryl took on the role of happy stay-at-home mom, raising her four kids and volunteering frequently at the local elementary school.

“She was very lighthearted--a funny person,” says daughter Sherrie Waldrup, now 20 and a sophomore at Duke University. She mentions a business convention her mother attended last year in San Antonio. Former Vice President Dan Quayle was also there, and Cheryl spent much of the evening comically bird-dogging him in an effort to fix Sherrie up with his son, also a student at Duke. “The fact that she would chase this man around tells you something about her,” she says.

“She hounded that poor man to death,” Bradshaw adds, laughing. “She always made everyone smile.”

Most people didn’t know it, but some of Cheryl’s own smiles were forced. The Bradshaws’ years together were punctuated by her periodic court appearances--first to testify at the murder trials of Grandison and the hit man and then, after their convictions, to do the same at various appeals over the years. “She would get terribly afraid when the trials were coming up,” Bradshaw says.

Cheryl Bradshaw lived a life almost ridiculous with drama. Some people, meaning to help, have tried to wrap up that life and its end in tidy ribbons of solace: “God’s will.” “God’s plan.” “Meant to be.” It’s comforting to believe things happen for a reason, but sometimes it can’t be done.

Moloney says: “I figured God wouldn’t have put my mother through what she went through that first day for her to die two weeks later. I just couldn’t see it happening.” And you can see why she says it. But where does that leave Cheryl Bradshaw? What do you do with a life that seems to hold too much horror and too much pain? Her husband is working on those answers.

A Memorial to a Wife and Mother

After the successful transplant, the hospital held a news conference to salute it. It wasn’t easy for him, but Bob Bradshaw was there.

With the media assembled, Cheryl’s surgeon stood up and said that if neurosurgery received the attention and the research funding that transplants did, they wouldn’t be having a news conference that day. Because Cheryl would be alive.

Not much solace in that. “Right after the press conference I went up to the ICU, where she was all that time, and I told the surgeons, ‘Watch the news tonight, because I’m going to raise enough money that you all are going to learn how to do the job,’ ” Bradshaw says. “I was livid.”

Toward that end, he has formed the Cheryl Bradshaw Memorial Foundation in Ellicott City. In addition to raising money for research on arteriovenous malformation, the organization is intended to fund victims’ rights groups and finance a memorial to Cheryl at her children’s school. “I was going to bring something positive out of the most negative thing that ever happened to me,” he says, adding that it comforts him that through the transplant “Cheryl was able to do one more good thing for somebody.”

Actually more than one good thing and more than one somebody. A lung, both kidneys and her liver were also donated to needy recipients.

Healing comes at its own pace, Bradshaw knows: “There’s not a day goes by when I don’t break down and cry one to three times.” At the time of his wife’s death, he says, he had finally persuaded her to authorize a book about her role in the murder case. “It’s going to get written,” he adds. “And I feel exactly the same way about this story--the last chapter in her life. Unless people are made aware of the good things of organ donation and the inadequacies of neurosurgery at this point, then Cheryl died for nothing.” He breaks into quiet laughter. “I’m dangerous. I’m a man with a cause.”

He thinks a minute. “You have to understand, that was the center of my world,” he says. “She was it. I just can’t let her die.”