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by Michael Daly
Forget baseball and the flu and the election and even the war for a moment and consider the smile of 5-year-old Lauren Leeber, who seems the happiest of little girls despite the loss of both feet and her right hand as well as the use of her kidneys.
"Lauren, you're so happy now," her father said the other day, worried she might be in some kind of denial. "Do you realize what happened?"
Victor Leeber meant all she had suffered in the year since she was struck by an infection so savage that she went from perfect health to the brink of death in a few hours.
"I know," Lauren said. "It doesn't bother me."
The father is a firefighter at the "Harlem Hilton," quarters of Engine 69, Ladder 28. He has worked with some of FDNY's true greats, but he can only gaze with wonder at this child who scoots about with as much spirit and zest and sparkle as before that morning a year ago when she suddenly complained of a stomachache.
Thirteen hours later she was at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, near death from a meningococcal infection caused by a common bacteria called neisseria that resides at the back of many people's throats. On extremely rare occasions, neisseria enters the circulatory system and proliferates so as to turn the blood to sludge.
"I said, 'Is my daughter going to die?'" the father remembered. "The doctor's exact words were, 'It's very likely.'"
Lauren had a leopard costume all set for Halloween, but as the other kids were out trick-or-treating she was fighting for breath through a tube. A machine connected directly to an artery was taking over from her failing kidneys. Her hands and feet turned blue.
"My poor baby looked as if someone beat her up with a baseball bat," her mother, Marybeth Leeber, later wrote.
Lauren's face became so swollen her eyes were forced shut.
"They couldn't even peel the eyes open to look at them," the father recalled.
Lauren somehow held on.
"Then they said with what she had there would probably be severe amputation," the father recalled.
The sludged blood had been unable to reach her extremities. Her left hand revived, but the right hand and both feet blackened. She almost literally had two feet in the grave.
The surgery was performed the day after Thanksgiving, and the parents decided not to tell her until afterward. She awoke experiencing the phantom pain that is common to people who undergo amputations.
"Daddy, my feet hurt," she said.
The father spoke the most difficult words he ever had to utter.
"I told her, 'Honey, you know how your hand and your feet weren't working any more? Well, the only way to get you home with us was to take away the parts that weren't working any more,'" the father remembered.
The skin was slow in closing over her incisions and she spent weeks with two vacuum bandages on her legs affixed to oxygenating pumps. Firefighters from the Harlem Hilton placed her and the pumps on a little wagon and wheeled her about, playing hide-and-seek in the pediatric intensive care unit. One firefighter managed to squeeze himself into a cabinet.
At Christmas, a firefighter dressed as Santa and came with presents for all the kids on the ward. A firefighter dressed as SpongeBob appeared for Lauren's fifth birthday.
And, in the long days in between, the off-duty firefighters were there as those of any firehouse would be, making her laugh, driving her mommy and daddy to and from the hospital, even putting a new roof on their house.
"She would say, 'Call the firemen, Daddy. Call them up. Are they coming? Tell them I want buttered noodles,'" the father recalled. "And sure enough they brought buttered noodles."
The father knew just what to say on days when Lauren balked at taking blood-pressure medicine. "I'd say, 'Lauren, if you don't take this medicine, I'm going to call the firemen up and tell them not to come,'" the father recalled. "She opened her mouth."
Lauren's kidneys seemed to revive, but faltered, and she finally returned home with a kidney donated by her mother. Lauren's incisions had healed and she scooted about the living room carpet, laughing and smiling with her 8-year-old brother, Victor, as if coming so close to death had made her all the more in love with life.
In September, Lauren arrived for her first day of kindergarten on a motorized wheelchair, her left hand on the joystick. She was a big hit with the other kids and shrugged off any questions. "I got sick," she explained.
Everyone from the firefighters to the Maxim Group investment firm are pitching in for the future needs of the little girl who was in her living room yesterday morning, doing pushups and crunches. She has her costume ready for this year's Halloween.
"I have a princess dress!" she said.
Then came that smile.
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