Bob Woodruff's Children on His Recovery
Feb. 27, 2007 — -- He wrote a small prayer in a book five months ago: "Please God, don't let anything happen to my children. Let me absorb all the pain for them."
It was a plea that any father might make, but for ABC News' Bob Woodruff, recovering from a traumatic brain injury received while covering the war in Iraq, it was the desperate plea from a father who didn't know whether he could care for his children.
Woodruff's four children -- Mack, 15; Cathryn, 13; and 6-year-old twins Claire and Nora -- have been their father's source of strength and joy, and some of his best teachers in the long months since he was injured by an attack from a roadside IED, improvised explosive device, in Iraq.
Woodruff's wife, Lee, took the children in one by one, to see their father in a coma, filled with tubes. The kids wrote that when the twins walked into the room, they said, "Daddy's not so handsome anymore."
"Well, he had a white tape kind of that covered over it, and he had a little bump in his head like that," Claire and Nora said, remembering the moment.
"He was lying in bed, and he had rocks in his face," Nora said.
The children saw Woodruff every weekend, after a full week at school wondering whether he was getting better.
"It was hard to see him like that," said Cathryn, his oldest daughter.
Thirty-six days later, March 6, Woodruff's son, Mack, got a call that he will never forget.
"My baby sitter walked into my room while I was sleeping and she woke me up and said my dad was on the other phone and wanted to talk to me," Mack said.
He couldn't believe it. His Dad was awake. He asked his baby sitter whether she was serious.
"I picked up the phone and like a lot of it was gibberish, but it was him on the other line and that's all that really mattered to me, was that he was alive and talking," Mack said.
Sooner than the kids knew it, Woodruff was back at home.
"Hello little Clairey." It was one of Woodruff's first greetings as he walked into his home, a helmet affixed to his head and his faculties still struggling to come back.
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