'Liz, you have to come to the hospital now," my husband, David, said in the office voicemail message that late April morning. "We're in an ambulance. ... Something happened to Georgia. She had some kind of seizure. I don't know. Just come."
My 3-year-old daughter -- who just days earlier was hosting a tea party for me and her dolls -- was in trouble. That's how this mystery begins.
I rushed from the office and grabbed a taxi to our local hospital in Brooklyn. "She's unresponsive to pain, to everything," David told me when I called him from the taxi.
Georgia's breathing had slowed to nearly a full stop, he said. The EMTs had jabbed her heel with a needle to gauge her responsiveness, he said. Nothing. They had then given her a shot of seizure medication. Still nothing.
I arrived through the swinging emergency-room doors to see my daughter's tiny feet on a gurney through a gap in the white curtains. At least a dozen doctors and nurses huddled around her, working to push a tube down her throat and get her started on a mechanical ventilator.
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