ABERDEEN -- Sometime this morning, the day before Mother's Day, Lynda Juchniewicz will travel south through the god-awful congestion on Bel Air Road, make a left at the Exxon station in Perry Hall, and arrive at a small office building.

There, in a luncheon ceremony at Comprehensive Nursing Services Inc., she will help donate a carousel horse in her son's memory to the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

It's a white carousel horse with blue ribbons, perky and proud, the kind that could make a sick kid smile even when he's hooked up to IV lines and frowning doctors loom over him with thick medical charts and each day brings another dose of pain and misery.

Lynda Juchniewicz, 36, knows all about sick children.

Her son, Lee "Lucky" Juchniewicz, died five years ago, and when you hear his story, you may wonder how anyone could call him lucky. But maybe he was.

He spent six years on this earth with severe physical and mental problems, and yet, from all accounts, he was loved to the fullest and gave enormous love in return.

He couldn't walk and he couldn't talk, yet he touched the lives of his family members and care-givers profoundly, and showed them how a little boy so sick could live a life of such joy and courage and dignity.

"He was a fairly devastated kid in terms of neurological defects," says Dr. Benjamin Carson, the renowned Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Hopkins Children's Center, who operated on Lucky twice. "But he was always smiling and cheerful.

"That's what I really remember about him. He seemed to be enjoying life."

That's what Lynda Juchniewicz likes to remember, too.

She thinks about him every day, and when Mother's Day rolls around, thoughts of Lucky seem to race in her mind.

When she closes her eyes, she sees his beaming face first, and the vision becomes so real she can feel his silky hair and his hot breath on her cheek, and then he is there with her, in the little house on Aberdeen Avenue, playing with her and his older brother Buddy and younger sister Stacie.

Over time, she's come to believe it is not such a bad Mother's Day present, these sweet memories of Lucky.

Lee Edward Juchniewicz Jr. came into this world on Sept. 23, 1987. He arrived in something of a hurry, three months early.

Complications developed during Lynda's labor. She was told the placenta had ripped away from the uterine wall. In a flurry of activity, of doctors barking orders and nurses dashing about and gurneys being wheeled madly, the baby was delivered via emergency Caesarean section into the white lights at Harford Memorial Hospital.

Lynda and the boy's father, Lee Edward Sr., a cab driver at the time, were relieved when it was over. But within minutes, grim-faced doctors were telling Lynda something was wrong with the baby.

Lying in a hospital bed, trembling and exhausted, Lynda couldn't hear the thwock-thwock-thwock of a MedEvac helicopter taking off with her baby for St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.

"I was ... completely distraught," Lynda recalls. "And my husband was very emotional. It was six months after we were married. I blamed myself for Lucky's problems.

"You wonder why this is happening. But the doctors said there was no explanation."

A phone call from St. Agnes officials came not long after. The news was disturbing.

Born that prematurely, the baby weighed only 2 pounds, 9 ounces. He had a host of problems. Chief among them: cerebral spinal fluid was building in his brain; a shunt would need to be inserted in his skull to relieve the pressure. And with his lungs not fully developed, he needed to be hooked to a ventilator to breathe. The chances of his surviving the next 24 hours were slim.

But somehow, he made it through that day, and the next day and the day after that. When Lynda was finally allowed to see him five days later, she nearly fainted.

Enmeshed in a shroud of IV lines and tubes, he looked like a fragile, porcelain doll. His ears were so tiny, she remembers, they didn't even look fully formed.

"He was so small," she wrote in a journal, "they had to use a face mask for a diaper."

In the weeks and months ahead, as the baby was moved from one hospital to another for treatment, the bulletins from the doctors grew increasingly gloomy.

Ben Carson inserted a life-saving shunt during three-plus hours of surgery, but the boy wasn't leaving the hospital anytime soon.

He had cerebral palsy. He had a seizure disorder. He had a swallowing disorder. He was profoundly mentally retarded. He needed a stomach tube to eat. He needed chest physiotherapy, oral suctioning to disperse saliva, a ventilator to breathe. He required care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The incredible stress on Lynda Juchniewicz and her husband took its toll. The two eventually separated. "He couldn't handle a handicapped child," is all she says about the relationship.

Money was tight. Now a supervisor at Sak's Fifth Avenue in Aberdeen, she worked as a barmaid to make ends meet, in between taking care of her older son Buddy and her endless trips back and forth to the hospital.

"I would cry every night and wonder if I could make it on my own," she wrote in her journal.

It was Lynda's father, William T. Pelton, who nicknamed the boy Lucky sometime that first year, when Lucky was forced to undergo several operations to fix his shunt.

It was an ironic nickname, to be sure. No one appreciated the irony more than Lynda.

A long time coming

It was three long years before Lucky's physical problems had stabilized enough for him to go home for any length of time.

Some of Lynda's friends and family members urged her to put the boy in a treatment center instead of bringing him back to her apartment in Aberdeen.

"People told me: 'It'll be too much stress on you,' " she recalls. "But I said no, I'd raise him until the day I died."

With the help of Comprehensive Nursing Services, which provides shift nursing for technology-dependent pediatric patients, she set about raising her youngest son.

And this is where Lucky's story brightens, where he finally seemed to catch a break or two in his short life.

Against all odds, and despite his myriad health problems, Lucky thrived in his new environment.

On the good days -- and there were many -- he played merrily with his brother Buddy, 4, and his new sister, Stacie, born after Lynda reconciled briefly with Lee Sr.

He loved to watch "The Little Mermaid" and "Ghost" videos. He loved to watch Lynda jump up and down crazily on the coffee table, when she'd pretend to hit her head on the ceiling. He loved to watch all the activity in the busy household. And almost always, there was a smile on the boy's face, a smile you wanted to press into a scrapbook.

Mark Bayne, director of pediatric services for Comprehensive Nursing, shakes his head in wonder when he recalls those days. "Lucky had all these needs," Bayne says softly. "But this child was so content and happy with his [life]. People say: 'How can you work with these kids?' But these kids have taught me so much."

The family bonded as never before. Buddy and Stacie were his constant companions. Buddy worried over Lucky. He learned how to administer chest physiotherapy and help give him baths and massages. He was his self-appointed protector in all things.

Once, when a neighborhood kid made fun of Lucky, sitting outside in the warm sunshine in his blue orthopedic chair and wearing a diaper, Buddy went after the kid and, from all reports, administered a bit of a thrashing.

On his 6th birthday, Lynda and Lee Sr. and the kids, as well as aunts, uncles and cousins, took Lucky to the park, where he fed corn to the ducks and laughed and laughed as they quacked at him.

Sometimes, when Lynda closes her eyes, she hears that wonderful ringing laughter -- and the quacking, too.

Five years later, it still makes her smile.

Months of joy

The following months were some of the happiest the family had known. They had moved to a townhouse in Edgewood. Lucky was attending a school for the developmentally disabled and doing well.

"Oh, he loved getting up, getting dressed, going to school!" Lynda's sister, Tracey Berry, recalls.

"He was doing the best he'd ever been doing," one of his nurses, Christina Martin, says. "He was doing things he'd never done, like getting control of his hands. I was putting things on his wheelchair tray, like his brother's sneakers, and he was knocking them off. You could see how hard it was for him to do it. But he was doing it."

"He really was making some good developmental progress," Ben Carson recalls.

Then something happened.

On the morning of Feb. 5, 1994, another nurse, Marty Coyle, picked up Lucky for an outing to the zoo in Cecil County. Lynda said good-bye to the two of them and lay down to rest.

A few minutes later, Coyle was back, frantic.

"She kicked my door open," Lynda recalls. "Lucky was in his blue therapy chair. He was having a gran mal seizure."

An ambulance was summoned. Lucky was taken to Fallston General Hospital. By the time he got there, his temperature was 107. He was flown by helicopter to Hopkins, but was still having seizures. That night, he was put on a ventilator. Tests showed there was no brain activity. Doctors told Lynda to prepare for the worst.

Soon, Mark Bayne arrived, and then Lucky's nurses and Lee Juchniewicz Sr. Based on the tests and what the doctors told her, Lynda made the agonizing decision to have Lucky taken off the ventilator.

He died the next morning in Lynda's arms as she sat in a rocker, rocking him back and forth, back and forth.

That afternoon, Lynda went home and took Buddy and Stacie upstairs and spoke to them quietly.

"I told them that Lucky was in heaven with his Pop-Pop," Lynda says, "running and laughing."

Stacie nodded her head and said nothing. Buddy screamed and cried long into the night.

After the funeral, Lynda didn't eat for weeks. The doctors wanted to put her on Prozac. She took one pill and threw the rest away. She needed to grieve in her own way. And she needed time to be alone with her thoughts.

Because now when she closed her eyes and summoned Lucky's smile, it was enough to break her heart.

A good day

Lucky Juchniewicz is buried in Angel Hill Cemetery in Havre de Grace, in a soft, grassy area at the bottom of a gentle hill. Lynda goes there often. She sits and thinks about Lucky, and finds the visits alternately sad and uplifting.

She says it will be uplifting today, when Lucky's family and nurses gather to remember him fondly, and Mark Bayne says a few words and the carousel horse is officially unveiled.

Tracey Berry's boyfriend, Frank Messeral, won the horse at a raffle at the American Legion hall. When the new Johns Hopkins Children's Center is built sometime in the near future, it will be moved there.

This was Tracey's idea. You see these pictures of sick children in hospitals, she says, and they're always in their cold metal beds, staring into the camera with their hot eyes.

Wouldn't it be wonderful, she thought, if there were a different setting for a picture? A happier setting? A carousel horse on which a kid could climb, maybe with his brothers and sisters, and mom and dad could point the One-Touch and everyone would smile?

"I wish there was a picture of Lucky on a carousel horse," Tracey says softly.

There isn't. But soon, some other sick kids will have their pictures taken perched high in the saddle of a smiling white horse.

And for Lynda Juchniewicz, that is not a bad Mother's Day present at all.

Pub Date: 5/08/99