Terrible News
People say that you need to expect the unexpected. But, my question is this: how can you possibly expect the unexpected when you never can tell when the unexpected is going to occur? And why do you think the unexpected is called the unexpected? It’s because you’re not expecting it to occur. So, therefore, you can’t possibly expect the unexpected! And the unexpected always seems to happen at the worst or most unlikely or weirdest of times.
To make any sense of expecting the unexpected, I can say that I sure wasn’t expecting my world to fall apart and have my Aunt Ida (on my dad’s side) to be in the hospital, barely clinging to life and us being told by the doctors that she’s not going to wake up from the coma she’s in and that she has severe brain damage, and therefore, won’t wake up…ever. Although they haven’t given up hope entirely, they’ve had to be brutally realistic with us, as my immediate family is the only group of my dad’s family that seems to have a grasp of reality on the situation. I honestly think that the rest of them don’t believe it because they’re too in shock at what’s happened to really accept it. Who would have thought that two weeks ago, Ida was living a normal life, walking and talking, with her 15 year-old son, while she’s trying to cope with a medical condition that’s not unlike my own. And now, she’s lying in a hospital bed in the ICU, hooked up to a respirator, because she can’t breathe on her own, and several other machines. Her arms are punctured with about six different IV’s giving her fluids to keep her alive. No one was expecting it, so how could we possibly have known this was going to happen and been prepared for it? I really don’t think we could have.
This all started on Wednesday morning last week, when my dad received a phone call while he was at work, saying that Ida had had a heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital. So, he immediately called my mum at home, because she hadn’t left for work yet, and told her the news. Only my mum and my older sister were awake when he called, so when my mum got the call, she freaked out and told Bianca (said older sister). Obviously, my younger sister and I overheard her, because the acoustics in our house are so bad (you can hear something from the basement that’s happening in a bedroom on the top floor, even with a door closed). So, she and I were both half-asleep when we heard this. Carissa (said younger sister), screeched “WHAT!?!” and like bolted downstairs to find out exactly what was going on. Her shout woke me up from the semi-sleep I was in, so I come downstairs all disgruntled and half-awake, asking what was going on. My mum quickly repeated to us my dad’s phone call and she called her boss to let her know that a family emergency had come up and that she wouldn’t be coming into work that day. So, my dad rushed over to the hospital from work and told us that he’d call us with any news. So, we all sat around the living room, awaiting his call, not really understanding what was going on. When my dad finally called us back, he said that Ida had had another heart attack at the hospital and that things weren’t looking good at all.
So, this is the situation as we understood it: Robert, my cousin, was just getting ready to leave for school when Ida collapsed. She told him that she couldn’t feel her legs and to call 911 right away. So, after he did that, he called my other two aunts who live in-town, Mary and Linda. So, Mary came and took Robert to the hospital, since he wasn’t allowed to go with Ida in the ambulance. Before, that, however, Ida had had her heart stop two or three times before the ambulance could even move her to the hospital. The paramedics tried to revive her and it was a miracle that they were able to and get her to the hospital, where, unfortunately, she had another heart attack. And after a CAT scan, the whole god-awful truth came out.
The two fibroids she has (which is like what I have) had grown to an incredible size and had been putting pressure on her abdomen. And, the major problem was that a blood clot (and an extremely large one at that) had passed through her heart (causing the heart attacks and damage to the heart) and into her lung (which caused lack of oxygen to the brain). Where the blood clot came from, we still don’t know, although some think it was from the pressure the fibroid was putting on her body. It could have come from the fibroids or it could have originated from somewhere else. But, because she’d been without oxygen (at least her brain had been), there was talk of mild to severe brain damage, which we couldn’t know until she had further testing and saw a neurologist, which the Welland Hospital lacks, even for emergency purposes.
So, on Wednesday, we weren’t sure what to expect. Her breathing was very erratic and it seemed like she was being shocked with the defibrillators every time she took a breath, because of the way her body kept spasming. I could barely stand there and look at her because it just completely overwhelmed me to see in her in that state. I guess that my dad was right: it is different when it’s someone you know and love and seeing them like that…it can be too much to take. Like, it’s one thing seeing it on TV or in real life when it isn’t someone you know. And it’s even harder because we all had some sort of hope on Wednesday, because she was opening her eyes, but the doctors and nurses said that could have just been some kind of neurological reflex, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Thursday seemed to be a bit better. She looked more comfortable than she had the day before; her breathing had been better and she just looked better to all of us. But, that’s when things started to get a little out of hand. Of course, everyone was distraught with her condition, but that’s when legal matters started to be brought up and a million new questions were being raised. What was going to happen to Robert for as long as his mum was in the condition she was in? Who had the power of attorney to make any kind of legal decisions for her? Who was going to look after Robert? What would happen if she came out of this? What would happen if she didn’t? From what I understand, my dad, who’s pretty rational and knowledgeable in situations like that, got into some sort of heated debate with the rest of his family about what was going to happen to both Ida and Robert. Eventually, I heard that my dad had somehow convinced the doctors and his family to get Ida transferred to Hamilton, to get a second opinion about her condition. So, once my aunt was stable enough, they were going to transfer her.
So, that didn’t happen on Thursday. When we came back on Friday, things were pretty much the same. Her breathing was less laboured and she still looked better than she had on Wednesday. So, after I left, I went to my grandma’s (on my mum’s side) and later got a phone call saying that they were going to transfer my aunt to Hamilton at some point that day, because Hamilton had a bed for her and she was stable enough to be moved. We didn’t want to get her up to Hamilton just to get a second opinion, we wanted to get her up there because we knew that was what she would have wanted, and that she would get better care up there (And I bet the people at the Welland Hospital were glad to get rid of the whole family, just because there was so much commotion and concern for her condition.)
So, I didn’t get to see her again until Sunday, when we drove up to Hamilton to visit her. She looked very peaceful and comfortable and still seemed to be the same since the last time I’d seen her on Friday morning. But, while my mum and I were visiting her, the doctor who was looking after her, approached us and asked who we were. She didn’t mean it in any sort of bad way or offensive way, she’d just never seen us there before, and didn’t see us there on Friday night when Ida had been transferred. So, she wanted to update us on her condition. When my mum said that Ida looked better and seemed to be responding slightly, the doctor told us that it actually wasn’t as good as we thought it was. We must have both looked confused by this, and so, the doctor explained that things weren’t good at all. She said that my aunt wasn’t responding to anything that would stimulate her and had no reaction to any reflex tests. Any movement she was making was simply a neurological reflex, but it wasn’t a good reflex because her brain was shutting down and the lack of oxygen she’d had to her brain initially when she’d had her first heart attack, had caused severe brain damage. She also said that the clot that had passed into her lung had been the cause of Ida’s brain not receiving any oxygen and by the time any oxygen had gotten to her brain, it had been too late and the damage had been done. She explained that she could already see the extensive brain damage from the original CAT scan Ida had had done in Welland. My aunt had also been tested to see if the fibroid(s) had turned cancerous, although the doctor hadn’t gotten the results back yet, because that test could take up to six days to get results from. And, Ida had been booked for an EEG today to see how bad the brain damage had been and whether or not there was any brain activity left…if not, she was completely brain dead and would never come around.
Anyways, the doctor said that regardless of what the EEG showed, things would only go one of two ways: 1 that her brain would shift from the swelling and put pressure on the brain stem, causing paralysis, cause her to stop breathing, cause her heart to stop beating and cause all of her other organs to shut down, eventually causing her to die in a natural way (although there’s nothing really natural about it, in my opinion). And when that happened, it would be very quick. 2 the swelling in her brain would go down, but she would remain in the same state she was already in, making no progress and would be a “vegetable”, never waking up and then we would have to consider taking her off of life support. So, either way, she’s going to die and it’s not very reassuring at all to lose another family member so suddenly without any sort of warning. I mean, my Uncle Rob went quickly too, from a heart attack and he was in his forties as well.
And that’s hardly the half of it. She and I were like twins with our medical problems. She had the fibroids like I did (family history of that on my dad’s side), only hers were worse than mine, at least in size. She also had the high platelets like I did (which is something to do with the way the blood clots in the body) and had the low hemoglobin as well. And, she was my guide through all of this. Like, we were going through it together. She obviously had her problem for longer than I did, but for the two years that I had this, she was telling me how to make it better and recommending me to the right doctors to get it dealt with. After all, had she not told me to go and see Dr. Vilos in London, I would probably be in the same state I was in before the embolization surgery, or in an even worse state. I mean, of course my family’s been there through this whole thing, Ida has been too, and she’s been my guide, telling me what I should do to make things better and make the fibroids go away. Now, I feel like if anything further happens with these fibroids, I have no one to turn to about it, because my mum and I were lost when we first discovered I had this problem and Ida won’t be here anymore. And, like my mum said, she probably saved my life, telling me to get the fibroids dealt with as soon as I could, because every doctor or specialist I’ve seen about it have all said that fibroids aren’t something to be taken lightly and they need to be dealt with immediately. And now that this has happened to Ida, it made me realize what could have happened if I continued to ignore the problem or that something like that could happen to me at any time. I’m not saying that she ignored the problem, because she saw over a dozen doctors to see how she could cope with it. And because her fibroids were so big, the only way that she could get rid of them was through some kind of major surgery and I know that the thought of that scared her. I mean, hell, I was scared when I heard that surgery was the only way that I could deal with mine. And she had hers for longer than I did and hers were at least three times bigger than mine. And I know that she was worried that if anything happened to her, Robert would be left without a mother. He already lost his father almost 10 years ago and now to heave to deal with losing his mother?!? It really is a horrible situation, I mean, I feel so bad for Robert, and because there isn’t anything we can do to help Ida, because she can’t get better. I mean, although my family’s accepted the reality of the situation, we still keep hoping that something will change and that she can get better, but it’s very doubtful. Like, the doctors haven’t entirely given up hope, because they’ve seen miracles happen before, but they’ve had to accept reality like we have.
So, either way, I’m going to lose a friend, a family member and my guide. She’s a truly gifted person that I’ll never be able to speak to again. I mean, it doesn’t help that I had a dream last night that she woke up and was as normal as she’d ever been. And it’s sad because that’s never going to happen, as much as we want it to.
To make any sense of expecting the unexpected, I can say that I sure wasn’t expecting my world to fall apart and have my Aunt Ida (on my dad’s side) to be in the hospital, barely clinging to life and us being told by the doctors that she’s not going to wake up from the coma she’s in and that she has severe brain damage, and therefore, won’t wake up…ever. Although they haven’t given up hope entirely, they’ve had to be brutally realistic with us, as my immediate family is the only group of my dad’s family that seems to have a grasp of reality on the situation. I honestly think that the rest of them don’t believe it because they’re too in shock at what’s happened to really accept it. Who would have thought that two weeks ago, Ida was living a normal life, walking and talking, with her 15 year-old son, while she’s trying to cope with a medical condition that’s not unlike my own. And now, she’s lying in a hospital bed in the ICU, hooked up to a respirator, because she can’t breathe on her own, and several other machines. Her arms are punctured with about six different IV’s giving her fluids to keep her alive. No one was expecting it, so how could we possibly have known this was going to happen and been prepared for it? I really don’t think we could have.
This all started on Wednesday morning last week, when my dad received a phone call while he was at work, saying that Ida had had a heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital. So, he immediately called my mum at home, because she hadn’t left for work yet, and told her the news. Only my mum and my older sister were awake when he called, so when my mum got the call, she freaked out and told Bianca (said older sister). Obviously, my younger sister and I overheard her, because the acoustics in our house are so bad (you can hear something from the basement that’s happening in a bedroom on the top floor, even with a door closed). So, she and I were both half-asleep when we heard this. Carissa (said younger sister), screeched “WHAT!?!” and like bolted downstairs to find out exactly what was going on. Her shout woke me up from the semi-sleep I was in, so I come downstairs all disgruntled and half-awake, asking what was going on. My mum quickly repeated to us my dad’s phone call and she called her boss to let her know that a family emergency had come up and that she wouldn’t be coming into work that day. So, my dad rushed over to the hospital from work and told us that he’d call us with any news. So, we all sat around the living room, awaiting his call, not really understanding what was going on. When my dad finally called us back, he said that Ida had had another heart attack at the hospital and that things weren’t looking good at all.
So, this is the situation as we understood it: Robert, my cousin, was just getting ready to leave for school when Ida collapsed. She told him that she couldn’t feel her legs and to call 911 right away. So, after he did that, he called my other two aunts who live in-town, Mary and Linda. So, Mary came and took Robert to the hospital, since he wasn’t allowed to go with Ida in the ambulance. Before, that, however, Ida had had her heart stop two or three times before the ambulance could even move her to the hospital. The paramedics tried to revive her and it was a miracle that they were able to and get her to the hospital, where, unfortunately, she had another heart attack. And after a CAT scan, the whole god-awful truth came out.
The two fibroids she has (which is like what I have) had grown to an incredible size and had been putting pressure on her abdomen. And, the major problem was that a blood clot (and an extremely large one at that) had passed through her heart (causing the heart attacks and damage to the heart) and into her lung (which caused lack of oxygen to the brain). Where the blood clot came from, we still don’t know, although some think it was from the pressure the fibroid was putting on her body. It could have come from the fibroids or it could have originated from somewhere else. But, because she’d been without oxygen (at least her brain had been), there was talk of mild to severe brain damage, which we couldn’t know until she had further testing and saw a neurologist, which the Welland Hospital lacks, even for emergency purposes.
So, on Wednesday, we weren’t sure what to expect. Her breathing was very erratic and it seemed like she was being shocked with the defibrillators every time she took a breath, because of the way her body kept spasming. I could barely stand there and look at her because it just completely overwhelmed me to see in her in that state. I guess that my dad was right: it is different when it’s someone you know and love and seeing them like that…it can be too much to take. Like, it’s one thing seeing it on TV or in real life when it isn’t someone you know. And it’s even harder because we all had some sort of hope on Wednesday, because she was opening her eyes, but the doctors and nurses said that could have just been some kind of neurological reflex, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Thursday seemed to be a bit better. She looked more comfortable than she had the day before; her breathing had been better and she just looked better to all of us. But, that’s when things started to get a little out of hand. Of course, everyone was distraught with her condition, but that’s when legal matters started to be brought up and a million new questions were being raised. What was going to happen to Robert for as long as his mum was in the condition she was in? Who had the power of attorney to make any kind of legal decisions for her? Who was going to look after Robert? What would happen if she came out of this? What would happen if she didn’t? From what I understand, my dad, who’s pretty rational and knowledgeable in situations like that, got into some sort of heated debate with the rest of his family about what was going to happen to both Ida and Robert. Eventually, I heard that my dad had somehow convinced the doctors and his family to get Ida transferred to Hamilton, to get a second opinion about her condition. So, once my aunt was stable enough, they were going to transfer her.
So, that didn’t happen on Thursday. When we came back on Friday, things were pretty much the same. Her breathing was less laboured and she still looked better than she had on Wednesday. So, after I left, I went to my grandma’s (on my mum’s side) and later got a phone call saying that they were going to transfer my aunt to Hamilton at some point that day, because Hamilton had a bed for her and she was stable enough to be moved. We didn’t want to get her up to Hamilton just to get a second opinion, we wanted to get her up there because we knew that was what she would have wanted, and that she would get better care up there (And I bet the people at the Welland Hospital were glad to get rid of the whole family, just because there was so much commotion and concern for her condition.)
So, I didn’t get to see her again until Sunday, when we drove up to Hamilton to visit her. She looked very peaceful and comfortable and still seemed to be the same since the last time I’d seen her on Friday morning. But, while my mum and I were visiting her, the doctor who was looking after her, approached us and asked who we were. She didn’t mean it in any sort of bad way or offensive way, she’d just never seen us there before, and didn’t see us there on Friday night when Ida had been transferred. So, she wanted to update us on her condition. When my mum said that Ida looked better and seemed to be responding slightly, the doctor told us that it actually wasn’t as good as we thought it was. We must have both looked confused by this, and so, the doctor explained that things weren’t good at all. She said that my aunt wasn’t responding to anything that would stimulate her and had no reaction to any reflex tests. Any movement she was making was simply a neurological reflex, but it wasn’t a good reflex because her brain was shutting down and the lack of oxygen she’d had to her brain initially when she’d had her first heart attack, had caused severe brain damage. She also said that the clot that had passed into her lung had been the cause of Ida’s brain not receiving any oxygen and by the time any oxygen had gotten to her brain, it had been too late and the damage had been done. She explained that she could already see the extensive brain damage from the original CAT scan Ida had had done in Welland. My aunt had also been tested to see if the fibroid(s) had turned cancerous, although the doctor hadn’t gotten the results back yet, because that test could take up to six days to get results from. And, Ida had been booked for an EEG today to see how bad the brain damage had been and whether or not there was any brain activity left…if not, she was completely brain dead and would never come around.
Anyways, the doctor said that regardless of what the EEG showed, things would only go one of two ways: 1 that her brain would shift from the swelling and put pressure on the brain stem, causing paralysis, cause her to stop breathing, cause her heart to stop beating and cause all of her other organs to shut down, eventually causing her to die in a natural way (although there’s nothing really natural about it, in my opinion). And when that happened, it would be very quick. 2 the swelling in her brain would go down, but she would remain in the same state she was already in, making no progress and would be a “vegetable”, never waking up and then we would have to consider taking her off of life support. So, either way, she’s going to die and it’s not very reassuring at all to lose another family member so suddenly without any sort of warning. I mean, my Uncle Rob went quickly too, from a heart attack and he was in his forties as well.
And that’s hardly the half of it. She and I were like twins with our medical problems. She had the fibroids like I did (family history of that on my dad’s side), only hers were worse than mine, at least in size. She also had the high platelets like I did (which is something to do with the way the blood clots in the body) and had the low hemoglobin as well. And, she was my guide through all of this. Like, we were going through it together. She obviously had her problem for longer than I did, but for the two years that I had this, she was telling me how to make it better and recommending me to the right doctors to get it dealt with. After all, had she not told me to go and see Dr. Vilos in London, I would probably be in the same state I was in before the embolization surgery, or in an even worse state. I mean, of course my family’s been there through this whole thing, Ida has been too, and she’s been my guide, telling me what I should do to make things better and make the fibroids go away. Now, I feel like if anything further happens with these fibroids, I have no one to turn to about it, because my mum and I were lost when we first discovered I had this problem and Ida won’t be here anymore. And, like my mum said, she probably saved my life, telling me to get the fibroids dealt with as soon as I could, because every doctor or specialist I’ve seen about it have all said that fibroids aren’t something to be taken lightly and they need to be dealt with immediately. And now that this has happened to Ida, it made me realize what could have happened if I continued to ignore the problem or that something like that could happen to me at any time. I’m not saying that she ignored the problem, because she saw over a dozen doctors to see how she could cope with it. And because her fibroids were so big, the only way that she could get rid of them was through some kind of major surgery and I know that the thought of that scared her. I mean, hell, I was scared when I heard that surgery was the only way that I could deal with mine. And she had hers for longer than I did and hers were at least three times bigger than mine. And I know that she was worried that if anything happened to her, Robert would be left without a mother. He already lost his father almost 10 years ago and now to heave to deal with losing his mother?!? It really is a horrible situation, I mean, I feel so bad for Robert, and because there isn’t anything we can do to help Ida, because she can’t get better. I mean, although my family’s accepted the reality of the situation, we still keep hoping that something will change and that she can get better, but it’s very doubtful. Like, the doctors haven’t entirely given up hope, because they’ve seen miracles happen before, but they’ve had to accept reality like we have.
So, either way, I’m going to lose a friend, a family member and my guide. She’s a truly gifted person that I’ll never be able to speak to again. I mean, it doesn’t help that I had a dream last night that she woke up and was as normal as she’d ever been. And it’s sad because that’s never going to happen, as much as we want it to.