AT 9 P.M. ON NOV. 8, DR. KENNETH Goodman and his wife, Barbara, had just finished their third ride on the Space Mountain roller coaster at Walt Disney World in Orlando. But the most frightening—and exhilarating—moment of their 12-day visit was just about to occur. As they approached a rest area near the coaster, a woman bolted from a bathroom screaming, "I need a doctor!" Inside, another woman was holding a baby, only minutes old and with umbilical cord and placenta still attached. Goodman, 35, a family practitioner in Beachwood, Ohio, sprang into action. "I went into emergency mode," he says. "It was kind of surreal." After listening for a heartbeat, he tied off the umbilical cord with a bystander's shoelace, then removed mucus from the baby's airway with the barrel of a ballpoint pen.
It was only after the infant, a girl, was taken to nearby Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women that Goodman learned who else had been involved in the rescue. Linda Keller, 49, a fine-jewelry saleswoman from Hansville, Wash., had been in the rest room when she saw blood on the floor of an adjoining stall and found what she feared was a dead infant propped in the toilet bowl. Then she heard crying. Keller and Kathleen McManus, 43, a Port Washington, Wis., attorney who was also on hand, managed, despite an automatic flushing device that kept pulling on the placenta, to extricate the tiny body.
After four days in the hospital, the baby was placed in a foster home while authorities search for her mother. Meanwhile, the hospital has received more than 500 calls from people asking to adopt her. McManus, who has three children, has expressed the same interest. "I was the first to hold her," she says. "You do sort of bond."
As for Goodman, he is still haunted by the image of a cold, blue newborn covered in mucus. "I hope in a month," he says, "I can see the baby warm and safe in someone's arms."
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