Amid Devastation, There Was Joy

Peggy O’Donoghue tossed and turned on the rollaway bed. Nine months pregnant, eight days overdue and already the mother of two toddlers, her mind and body were exhausted.

She listened to her husband Tom’s even breathing. Eighteen-month-old Sean stirred in his playpen. Three-year-old Rory was asleep in the next room.

Knowing that Peggy could give birth at any time, the O’Donoghues had left their Chatsworth house the night before to stay at her parents’ home in Granada Hills, which was closer to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in nearby Mission Hills where Peggy planned to have the baby.

She felt her first hard contractions about 3 a.m. After the pain subsided, she pushed herself up off the rollaway and walked around the house before going back to bed about an hour later.

Not long after, the earthquake struck.

“I heard it coming,” Peggy, now 38, said, recalling that terrifying jolt at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994. “I heard an actual roar that lasted for a split second and then I was thrown out of the bed. I was crawling on the floor to get out of the house. There was broken glass everywhere. I got out onto the front porch. I told everyone I was in labor and I needed to go to the hospital.”

A few miles away in Northridge, obstetrician John W. Aiken II was shaken from his bed. He checked his home phone, cell and pager. All were dead. With no way for his patients to reach him, he realized that he had to get to the hospital to check to see if any of them had gone into labor.

A portion of the Ronald Reagan Freeway had collapsed during the magnitude 6.7 quake, forcing Aiken to take surface streets to Providence Holy Cross. Minutes later, he delivered the baby of a woman whose doctor couldn’t get to the hospital in time.

Meanwhile, Tom O’Donoghue, now 41, watched flames from ruptured gas lines dance on water gushing from broken mains as he drove to the hospital. “I thought I was in a Dali painting,” he said. “It was surreal.”

Peggy reached the emergency room about 5 a.m. She was told the hospital was being evacuated, but hospital workers put her on a gurney and wheeled her into a supply closet until they could figure out what to do.

“I said, ‘Honey, just breathe and pray,’ ” Tom said. “We just prayed for God’s protection over us and the baby.”

More than two hours had passed when the O’Donoghues heard a familiar voice in the darkened hall.

“What are you doing here?” Aiken joked as he stood in the doorway. “This place is a wreck.”

Peggy was relieved. “I was a lot more anxious before he showed up. After I saw him, I was more calm. I kept thinking, ‘It’s OK. Our doctor is with us.’ ”

Aiken told the O’Donoghues that the hospital’s maternity ward was flooded. The best thing would be to try another hospital.

If worse came to worse, he said, they’d deliver the baby in the car. But, he joked, not on the leather seats in his new luxury sedan.

As he drove toward Granada Hills Community Hospital, Aiken was overwhelmed by the devastation. He remembered thinking: “This is like Armageddon. The world is coming to an end.”

The hospital’s hallways teemed with patients being evacuated and injured people seeking treatment. Aiken and the O’Donoghues were turned away.

Next, they tried Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where medical staff were treating victims of the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex, where 16 people died.

“There was just a sea of people,” Peggy recalled. “They were performing open-heart surgery in the parking lot. There was blood everywhere. It looked like a war zone.”

Peggy was put in a glass-walled room with two other women in labor.

“One of them was a first-time mom. I held hands with her. I felt so badly that she had to go through this with her first baby,” Peggy said. “The other mother had a premature baby that did not survive.”

At 9:09 a.m., 4 1/2 hours after the catastrophic temblor, Peggy gave birth to a third son, Ryan. There was no scale to weigh him. No running water to bathe him. He was wrapped in a towel without a diaper.

“We sat for about an hour and then they said we had to go because they needed the bed,” Peggy said.

Aiken would deliver seven more babies that day under the most arduous conditions.

“We had old-fashioned stethoscopes. When they felt like they needed to push, they pushed. The entire building was swaying from aftershocks,” he said. “It was the most intense day of my professional life.”

Physically and emotionally drained, Tom and Peggy headed back to her parents’ house. They turned into the driveway and saw Rory and Sean sitting in their strollers. Peggy’s mother, Patsy Wilber, came out of the house with a look of bewilderment that quickly turned to joy when she saw her new grandson.

“Tom and I just sat on the driveway, just dazed. We just sat on that driveway all day holding Ryan,” she said. “We were handed a gift that morning when most people were not.”