Monday, Jun. 21, 1993
Dispatches "Most Hearts Go Ker-thump"
By SOPHRONIA SCOTT GREGORY, with ANN BLACKMAN in Washington
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros was supposed to attend a select dinner at the White House last week, but he had a more compelling social event on his calendar: a birthday party for his six-year-old son John Paul. Cisneros, a father to remember this Sunday, went home that night laden with gifts. "In the old days I might have told Mary Alice ((his wife)) we could make the Clinton dinner," says Cisneros, "and we would make it up to John Paul the next day or over the weekend."
But for the Cisneroses, every moment with John Paul just now is precious. Suffering from asplenia syndrome, a condition in which a child is born with no spleen and a heart with two right atria, John Paul will undergo heart surgery next month, and his parents cannot be sure how many birthdays remain. The boy's heart, Cisneros reflects, does not even sound like a normal heart. "Most human hearts go ker-thump, ker-thump," he says. "His goes swish, swish, swish."
To accommodate his need to be with John Paul, Cisneros, 46, has had to reorder his life. He ended discussions of his possibly being appointed to Lloyd Bentsen's seat in the U.S. Senate because the Texas-Washington commute would have taken up too much of his time. Cisneros accepted the hud job partly because it offered the chance to stay put with his son.
On this birthday evening the puckish John Paul, waiting to gobble down take- out Chuckee Cheese pizza, is deliriously happy to be the center of attention. But his sister Mercedes, 18, has become worried. She has noticed an insect bite on the boy's lower arm, accompanied by a red streak running upward and inward toward his heart. The pediatrician is called, and the verdict is wrenching: the bite appears to be infected; John Paul must go straight to the emergency room.
Within an hour of the family's arrival at Georgetown Hospital, John Paul's grand birthday celebration has turned into a picnic in a tiny emergency-room cubicle where the boy lies with a stream of antibiotics running into his arm. Soon the Cisneroses get good news: the infection is under control, and the child can go home for the night.
Once again with a physician the next morning, Cisneros can only think of the surgery to come. Doctors must reshape John Paul's heart in time to keep up with his growth. Cisneros dreads explaining to him what lies ahead. "I couldn't bear his questions," he says. "Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. Nothing could rival the sense of total panic that comes over me when I think of this surgery."
For now, Henry Cisneros must simply cope from crisis to crisis. He will continue reading to his son, turning down Washington invitations when he has to, and hoping desperately for another birthday.