high blood pressure. Imagine the excitement Carlos felt on Jan. 15 when she texted him while was at work saying the doctors wanted to deliver the babies.
“The doctor said she was having too many contractions so it was time to deliver the babies,” Carlos says. “We took pictures before she went into the delivery room, made some videos, and she was surrounded by family and friends. I said to her, ‘Let’s get these babies out.’ ”
The couple also discussed names. They settled on Carlos Jr. for the boy and Tracey and Paisley for the two girls. Erica couldn’t decide on the other girl’s name. They thought they had plenty of time to figure it out.
“‘We can decide after she’s born,’ ” Carlos recalls Erica telling him.
Some 24 people – doctors, nurses, family and friends – were in the delivery room when the babies were born. Each weighed from two to three lbs. For Carlos, it was the moment of a lifetime.
“I forgot about how expensive it was going to be to raise four kids or how hard it might be,” he says. “Seeing Erica and the babies healthy is all I could think about. I was just so excited for our future.”
Erica, who was coming out of an anesthesia-induced sleep, squeezed her husband’s hand. She couldn’t yet speak. Carlos sat by her bedside, with their newborn babies in the nursery one floor away.
Suddenly, around 1 a.m Carlos heard equipment alarms going off and saw nurses rushing into the room. The medical team asked him to leave while they worked on Erica.
An hour later, they told him she was gone. He heard their words but couldn’t understand.
“How could this have happened?” he asked, something that still haunts him today. “She was fine, and then she wasn’t. She was alive and then she was just gone.”
He still asks himself every day if there is