This is the story of 15 people who were shipwrecked on an island. Or maybe we were stuck in high school detention like Breakfast Club for adults. Actually, we were selected as a jury in a four-week civil trial. We were an artist, a schoolteacher, a marketing executive, a cub scout leader, a school nurse, a retiree, a physical therapist, a salesperson and other brightly assorted personalities. Together we sat in a tiny, beige, windowless room for four solid weeks. 

I reported for jury duty on February 10th at 8:30 am at the Daley Center in Chicago. I was feeling good about doing my civic duty, patiently complying with the security screening and still arriving 10 minutes early. I smugly expected to be released by the end of the day. I had a good job at a marketing company and needed to get back to it. I had a life, a sweetheart of a husband, son just out of college. One dog. One cat. Just a busy, active, regular life. 

What happened next was a head-spinner. I had barely set up shop in the jury waiting room with my laptop tuned into Wi-Fi, letting my cup of scalding vending-machine coffee cool. “Group 5,” interrupted a no-nonsense voice. Wait, what? From there we were lined up and marched into a courtroom. It’s exactly like the courtrooms on TV, I marveled aloud to no one. 

The judge, a wry-witted woman with a stylish silver bob, told us the basics of the case. It  involved a baby who sustained a devastating brain injury while in a medical clinic. The defendants were doctors and a hospital. The trial, she disclosed, could last weeks. We stared at her politely, faces blank as sliced cheese, mentally plotting our escape routes. One by one, we were called into the interrogation room. Twelve lawyers sat at a conference table with one empty hot seat for a potential juror. I would come to know these faces very well and to despise a few of them. 

It was easy to tell from their questions that they wanted to know if I could be fair — or if I held a grudge against doctors. Several thoughts ran through my mind concurrently. What would I do about work? What about the importance of justice and a fair trial? A baby, huh. There are about a thousand things I could say to get out of this. A baby. A baby. A baby. I went with honesty. And that’s how I became juror #13. (There were 15 of us.)

We were hearing opening arguments faster than you can say, “I object.” That’s when I saw the mother for the first time. She wore all black and sat perfectly composed. I wondered if her counsel told her to wear black because she wore it every day. She had thick, dark, curly hair and a natural beauty that was unlikely to fade with age. We watched her as the details of her shattered life came out in excruciating, mind-numbing, repetitive detail. We were instructed not to show our emotions while hearing testimony. Despite that, there were times over the next few weeks, I wanted to send her messages with my eyes. With the steadiness of my gaze I wanted her to know my heart was with her. Without making an expression of any kind, I wanted to send her secret beams of hope. By the last of the four weeks, I saw something flash across her eyes in a millisecond. The corners of her mouth turned up a nearly imperceptible degree. Then gone.

When it was the defense team’s turn to give their opening statement, they made a big show of putting charts on easels and conveniently placing one gigantic timeline right in front of the mother to block our view. They said they wanted to make sure everyone could read it. Eye roll. Don’t they know we’ve seen Law & Order one million times?

Both sides tried to trick the other into saying the mother somehow wasn’t doing her job or wasn’t vigilant enough. Clearly this must have been Game Over for either side as the lawyers dodged that like a nugget of hot lava. “Oh no, I’d never say she wasn’t doing a good job.” Or asking an expert witness if he thought the mom was “hyper vigilant.” He responded, “I’d say she was a normal amount of vigilant, just the right amount.”

A bright light for Jury Club was the favorite-uncle-type who served as Deputy of the Court. They used to call this the Bailiff. His name was Bob and he took care of us. He had us sign in every morning so we could each collect our $17.20 checks. He brought us lunch and delighted in telling us when it was pizza day. If we needed anything, a bathroom break, some tissue, water, we’d turn to Bob. He always gave me a wink as we shuffled back into the jury room. We adored Bob.

Our judge was a bad ass and we all agreed she should have her own Judge TV show. She allowed the jury to submit questions after every witness, which was my favorite part, and I think hers, too. We happened to be in session on Mardi Gras, so I brought in a New Orleans king cake and beads. When we all came out to the jury box wearing beads, I feared we’d get a reprimand. Instead the judge thanked us for our good nature and said how much she too loved New Orleans. We had Bob take her some king cake and beads during a break. She came back after the break with one tasteful strand of Mardi Gras beads over her black robe. That’s one cool judge—she was tough but kind.

Everyone in this predicament was so thoughtful, even though we were all crammed in this tiny room where we could barely squeeze around each other. One Friday a jury mate brought in scratch-off lottery cards for everyone. Another hung a poster of a window with a seaside view. Others brought in community snacks. Someone baked cookies. It was a feel-good fest. The kindness and camaraderie were a necessary part of surviving this thing. It was emotionally exhausting and affected us all in different ways. 

For me, the case pressed on some tender spots and left me feeling run over. 

With every fiber of my being I can relate to feeling invisible and unheard. It’s like a recurring dream where you are screaming in desperation but no sound comes out. 

The mother in this case reached out 12 times over two months with a sick baby who wasn’t getting better. Time and again she was sent home with instructions to give the baby Tylenol. Mercy on us all who know how it feels to be dismissed with a passing glance. I remember how deeply lonely it could be to raise a baby alone. The subtle resentment and even hostility. How people assume things about you. How they decide that’s who you are, nothing more. How you say something, but they assume you really mean something else, or that you’re simply trying to get attention.

In addition to numerous clinic visits, Mom called a helpline referred to as the “mommy pager.” The slick defense attorney would mock the words “mommy pager” like he was the bully on the playground calling you a crybaby. That was the nickname the hospital staff used for the parent helpline. New parents could call any time, like the middle of the night with a feverish infant. The defense attorney sought to make light of the mommy pager, to trivialize it so that the lackluster response to this mom didn’t seem so off base. Oh, it’s just the mommy pager. How could anyone think that was important? I cringed every time he said, “mommy pager.”

Here’s the deal. This 7-month-old baby, we’ll call her Amelia, had a cold that wouldn’t go away, worsening symptoms and a fever off and on for a month. They checked for an ear infection and for pneumonia but found neither. Somehow, tragically, whatever infection was in this baby went into her blood, then traveled to her brain causing bacterial meningitis and severe brain damage. This happened over four years before we set foot into the courtroom. At this point in time, Amelia was 5-years old, partially deaf, blind, feeding through a tube, breathing through another tube, unable to walk. Her mother and a team of nurses care for her at home with her loving, close-knit family. They rent a small apartment, so they couldn’t modify the entrance for a wheelchair ramp. The plaintiff showed a video of Amelia rocking her head back and forth to the Frozensoundtrack at her birthday party when the Make-A-Wish Foundation sent her princesses to sing and dance. Her reaction was a major breakthrough, they told us. We got to meet Amelia in person one day when they wheeled her into the court room. Her mom dresses her to the nines every day. Our hearts disintegrated.

If that was the high point, the lawyer shenanigans were the low. We saw lots of lawyer shenanigans.

There were parades of charts, visual aids, timelines and awkward presentation fails. There was the daycare barrage of questioning. “If your daughter was sick, why was she at daycare on this day?” the attorney grilled the mother and grandmother who barely spoke English.  “Have you read the daycare policy of Little Angels Daycare? Let’s blow it up on a giant screen so we can all see the rules. Would you agree this was the policy? You knew this was the policy, right? Then are you saying you broke the rules? The daycare lied? Or Amelia wasn’t sick that day?” In this family, the mom worked first shift and the grandmother started later in the afternoon, working for an airline. And still they got Amelia to six doctor appointments in two weeks. 

When I looked up from taking notes in my court-provided blue binder, I stared laser beams of disgust at the lawyers and rays of light to a mother who I felt for deeply.

At one point, we met a woman who gave up her kidney to save Amelia’s life. This hero was a casual friend of the mother who heard their story and empathized. She was willing to have an organ removed from her body to save this precious baby from suffering through dialysis nine hours a day in her crib.   

Then one day, the defense dropped a few bombshells. Previously, the plaintiff’s expert witnesses had us convinced that the doctors missed an infection like a sinus infection. At any point in this tragedy, a course of antibiotics would have killed the infection that devastated Amelia’s brain. That part is true. But then we learned that babies don’t get sinus infections, because their sinuses aren’t fully formed. Bombshell number two: A blood infection like Amelia’s could have made its way to her brain within 12 hours. If true, the doctors may not have missed it at her visit. Oh god, what if no one was at fault and this family walks away with nothing?

It was our role as jurors to decide if these doctors exercised a reasonable standard of care. Not if they made a mistake. Just a reasonable standard of care. It crossed my mind, if I had a heart attack at that moment, I would trust the doctors in this courtroom to save me.

The anxiety in our jury room was building. What would become of our bond? All the fun spent mocking the lawyers? The judge reminded us daily we weren’t allowed to talk about the case to each other or to anyone. Aside from a few snide comments, it was hard to tell where everyone was leaning. We were all on the verge of cracking. Our jumbled personal lives were leaking in. The night before we were supposed to deliberate, I had crazy dreams. I walked into our jury room and all the white boards on the wall were too high for me to reach. All the markers were weighted down with lead. Everything else, including the furniture, was gone. We all came in that day frazzled, describing our nightmares.

They told us to be ready for a long day of closing arguments and deliberation and that they’d need to take away our phones. It was the only day in four weeks I didn’t bring my work laptop. Most days I tapped that keyboard madly, trying to keep up so I wasn’t burdening my wonderful colleagues. The guilt was a giant boulder. I worked before, during and after court and on the weekend to keep up. Now it was almost over. We needed a unanimous decision.

That’s when the biggest bombshell hit. For the very first time, the mom was nowhere in sight. The judge told us that the mediators had settled in the wee hours of the night before. The judge couldn’t tell us the amount they settled for, but she said it was enough for Amelia to be taken care of for the rest of her life. Another jury mate and I cried tears of relief. I never saw the mother again. 

We met the attorneys from both sides and they all genuinely thanked us. The earnest young lawyers and doctors, were suddenly human beings.  We were smiling and commiserating. The lawyer I despised most was gone to catch a plane to another trial.

The judge told us, this sort of thing never affects a doctor’s career or livelihood; it would take a criminal case to do that kind of damage. Not to say it doesn’t affect them in other emotional ways. And no matter what, the lawyers on both sides are enriched.

Then she shared the last bombshell. I would have been dismissed before deliberation started. Remember, there were 15 of us in the beginning? One dropped out early on, leaving two of us as mystery alternates. I would have been asked to leave directly after closing arguments.

Back in the jury room gathering my belongings for the last time, I watched Bob tear up all the note pages in our blue binders. I’d had a 2-inch stack of notes that I took like it was my job–like someone’s life depended on it. 

At that moment, I knew with certainty. Even though I never got a chance to deliberate, my vote would have been with the mom–a beautiful stranger I know so well and so little. So much for being impartial.