Mercy Hospital consigns relatives of ICU patients to waiting in a greenhouse built on a rooftop. Beautiful as it is, this place truly functions as a hothouse, a sunbathed space where the intensity of the unknown induces beads of sweat and streams of tears. There, on the afternoon of Jan. 27, Mercy Hospital's spokeswoman, Linda Ross, confronted me with questions relatives don't want to hear but reporters so cavalierly ask.

		Barbara White Stack is on leave as a Post-Gazette staff writer (wstack@nauticom.net).

"May I release your daughter's name and condition?" she requested. Two TV stations had already called. "I'd like to get back to them," she said.

I thought about my 17-year-old in the ICU, unconscious, unresponsive, hair matted with dried blood. What was her condition, I wondered? I thought about times when I was the reporter, waiting for that call back from Ms. Ross.

I wondered how I could conceal my daughter's name when I'd spent years campaigning for public hearings in juvenile court -- which meant I'd have access to the names of other people's injured children for publication. Could I be such a hypocrite?

Maybe. This was my kid.

I wondered if my daughter would be angry at me for exposing her in this way.

Probably not, I thought.

	Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

My daughter, Whitney, was driving herself to North Allegheny High School that morning and, losing control on a patch of black ice along Mingo Road, smashed into a tree. Word of her 7:20 a.m. crash had whipped across her school that morning at the speed of text messaging. That's because a girl who'd graduated the year before was the first on the scene of the accident. She was the first to see my daughter slumped on the passenger seat, appearing dead except for the blood pulsing from her forehead.

That girl had texted her friends; they had texted theirs. Before my daughter was wheeled out of the emergency room and into the ICU, the boy who'd been tutoring her in math got the message and called the hospital. By 11 a.m. the high school principal had phoned my home, leaving a message asking how my daughter was and inquiring what he could announce to the students.

By midafternoon, a half dozen of her friends had called, seeking accurate information. What they'd gotten from text messages, school announcements and noon newscasts conflicted as reports of her condition circulated before doctors determined what it was.

The principal had announced she was going to be OK -- based on information I'd given him. Early in the day, the emergency room physician had told my husband and me that he thought my daughter had suffered only facial lacerations. The CAT scan didn't show any broken bones or brain injury, he said. A little later we learned the orbit under her left eye was fractured but didn't require surgery. Early in the afternoon, I called the principal back and told him everything should be fine; it was just some cuts and an insignificant broken bone.

That's about when my sister-in-law called my cell phone. She asked where I was. I hesitated. She demanded, "Are you at the hospital?" I said yes. I hadn't called her earlier because we weren't sure how bad things were and didn't want to unnecessarily upset people.

She said she'd heard on the news that an unnamed 17-year-old North Allegheny girl had been life-flighted to a Pittsburgh hospital in critical condition following a crash on Mingo Road, a mile from our house, and feared the worst.

"How is Whitney?" she asked when she finally got me.

"She's going to be fine," I said, "She just has cuts on her face and a broken orbit, and that's not too serious."

With images of the mangled car and echoes of the newscaster's pronouncement of "critical condition" foremost in her mind, my sister-in-law thought I was soft-pedaling the situation.

"You're so brave," she said, her voice cracking with tears. I didn't know what she was talking about. I assured her, "No, really, she's going to be OK." But I knew she didn't believe me.

So, later, when the hospital spokesperson stood in front of me, I thought releasing Whitney's name and condition would help get the information straight for everyone. Yes, she was in the ICU, but she wasn't going to die or anything. Her friends should know that, I thought. And I couldn't possibly call -- or text -- them all. So I told Ms. Ross she could release Whitney's name and condition.

Not long afterward the red phone rang in that greenhouse waiting room, and an ICU nurse said they'd allow my husband and me to see Whitney. When we got there, we were perplexed to discover her still unconscious.

A resident explained why. When experts examined the CAT scan, they'd found a hemorrhage deep in her brain. Later scans would reveal more. My husband and I sat beside Whitney and held her hands, pleading with her to open her blackened eyes. She did not respond.

Nurses evicted us at 8:30 p.m. when visiting hours ended. I drove home like a zombie. I wondered what had come of my consent for release of Whitney's name and condition.

I turned on the news. Somehow the station had gotten an old high school yearbook picture of my little girl. Some kid I didn't know was talking about her to a TV reporter. There was video of the car. It didn't look like a vehicle out of which someone would emerge alive. The newscast continued: "She is in critical condition at Mercy Hospital," the reporter said.

That's not true, I thought. She's not going to die. Maybe critical but stable. But not just critical.

I wondered if I could still be a reporter, knowing how easily this minor story had gone slightly, but painfully, awry. Earlier, I'd given my sister-in-law and the principal incorrect information minimizing the situation. Now TV news seemed to be exaggerating.

I wondered if, in an age of continuous updates on Web sites and 24-hour news stations, any reporter could get a story completely right at any given moment.

Maybe readers and viewers demanding instant news would have to regard each report as one frame in a motion picture. For true understanding, they'd have to hold themselves responsible to view the whole movie over time to see how it played out.

In the story of my daughter, I'll provide a couple of more recent frames.

She emerged from the coma after two days and left the hospital after 17. She returned to school three weeks later. She is on track to graduate in June. At this instant, Whitney is doing well.