(no subject)
Monday, July 13th, my Dad called my Mom from work and said he needed backup. He'd thought he had the flu or something.. She went to help, and he was very sick and stopped breathing for a while. She passed out from the shock, and an ambulance got there, gave her oxygen, and took my dad to the hospital.. She rode to the hospital with the police, and I called a friend of the family todrive me to meet her there. (My mom took my car to my dad's patient's house..) Once at the hospital, they did many tests, and they all seemed normal. He was having seizures...and with no history of seizures, it's not a good thing, to just start having them. They had to transport him to Marquette General because they didn't have a full time neurologist, and they thought he'd need to be seen by neurologists. We drove to Marquette and got there around 7:15 or 7:30p.m. Monday, he'd just gotten there before us... (His ambulance passed us, on the road..) Apparently he "became agitated" in the ambulance so they gave him more of a sedative and his blood pressure dropped real low. (We're assuming that means he had another seizure or something..) They finally regulated his blood pressure enough to do an MRI, which was the one test they needed, to know what was wrong... They did the MRI around noon on Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon we had a consult with the Doctor and they told us that he had a massive stroke in the brain stem, and that he was brain dead. They did some EEG's, and there was brain activity, but it was the top of his brain, and the stem is what passes all the info to the rest of the body. He hadn't breathed on his own since Monday afternoon... We decided to keep his body breathing and on life support til my brother Matt could get here from Alaska so that he could "say goodbye," but they'd already declared him dead as of 4:25 p.m. on Tuesday, July 14th. The time we spent in the hospital seemed to last forever. Wednesday around 7:15 a.m. my brother made it to the hospital, but we had to wait until 8p.m. to say our final goodbye, when the organ procurement team had arrived from Madison, WI. They found a perfect match for a kidney, a close match for the other kidney and a good match for his liver. We stayed with him until they were ready for him, sang songs to him, prayed, mostly for us, cause we knew he was already in heaven.. It was the most horrible experience I've ever had... it was all so sudden, but then it DRAGGED on.. He had some great nurses and doctors and we are all sure that he'd be bragging about how well they treated him, were he still here. Anyway... it's not easy to adjust back to life... It's so hard to do normal every day things, or to even think. If you could pray for our family, that'd be nice. We are so thankful to have a wonderful family and great group of friends, and appreciate everyone's prayers...
zanna
zanna