Miracle Story #17 (Part 1 of 3)

Russ:

“It was Fall Festival weekend of 2015, end of September. It was the night of the red moon.

I was painting in my garage and I got overcome by paint fumes. I had been using a different product than I normally used.

I went in the house and I went into the bathroom because I was trying to get to a breathing treatment.

But my heart stopped and I died on the bathroom floor.

Amy came in and did CPR for quite a while.

It kept me alive until the ambulance came. (crying)

They came in and put me on a gurney with some weird box that did chest compressions. A Lucas CPR device, it’s kind of neat.

I remember hearing sirens but the next thing I really knew, I was in the hospital.

When I died on the bathroom floor, or on the way to the hospital, I saw God.

She always asks me what He looked like but it’s hard to put a….like a grey image...and He told me it wasn’t my time yet and that I needed to go back. (crying)

I wasn’t much of a faith-based person. I never did go to church.

I saw my mom. She passed several years ago. I didn’t speak to her, but I saw her.

I was at peace. It was real calm.

Kind of weird. There was no noise or anything.

It’s hard to explain but it was real calm.

I was a lead painter at Carmax. I painted cars for a living for years. I mowed lawns before that.

I’ve been doing lots of speech therapy and physical therapy. I went to a rehab hospital. I still need to work on speech. I did a lot of physical therapy and occupational therapy…learning how to dress, learning how to eat…”

Amy:

“It was Sunday night and we normally had family meetings on Sunday night.

He had said, “Hey babe, I’m just gonna paint these…twenty minutes real quick.”

And so I said, “Okay.”

If he was painting we knew to just not go out into the garage.

When he came back in the house, he was already as blue as his shirt. He came in and he just looked bad.

He got the nebulizer and started a breathing treatment and he was standing at the bathroom sink. They call it tripoding. He was trying so hard to get air in.

I said, “It’s time to call the ambulance, isn’t it?”

And he said, “Yes.”

I went into the kitchen and got my phone and I went back into the bathroom, and I knew that he was going to go down.

I just knew it was bad.

So I called 9-1-1.

The operator was asking me all kinds of questions and I was like, “This is really bad, I don’t have time to answer all these questions.”

And then once he fell, he had stopped breathing. The bathroom is only four feet wide but I had to start doing CPR right then and there.

And I remember yelling at the lady on the phone saying, “Where’s my help? Where’s my help?!”

We had the three boys. I remember trying to keep them out of the bathroom because by then he was purple.

He was really dead.

I was trying to keep them out. I told them to go turn on every light in the house and open all the doors so the ambulance would know where they were going. I was trying to keep them busy while I was doing CPR.

The ambulance finally got here.

They pulled him out of the bathroom and started working on him. They were asking me all kinds of questions, what meds he was on, things like that.

And I remember walking back by the bedroom and I remember thinking, ‘Oh look, he’s pink again, that’s great…’

By that time they had started to shock him and so they kicked us all out of the house to the front porch. My youngest daughter…her boyfriend lives right down the street. She came home.

Everything went so slow. It was just so, so slow.

I remember looking at her and saying like, “Oh, I’m glad you’re home.”

It was just all so surreal. It seemed like they were here for an eternity but I have no idea how long it really was.

I think they lost him another four times here before they left.

They brought him out the front door, and on that side walk that you walked up I said, “Stop. I want to kiss him before he leaves.”

Because seriously, I didn’t think he was going to make it. (pauses)

They hauled him off. They flew to the hospital.

I guess part of my perspective is that you don’t really realize in the moment how bad it is because you’re in it.

By then, their older sister had gotten here and so she was with the boys. Grandma was on her way. I hopped in the car and met the ambulance at the hospital. My other daughter met me there.

I just remember thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe this is it.”

This was our third trip to the ICU. And I was so mad that people just weren’t listening. We’d been to the pulmonologist two weeks before that and I had told them, “This is really bad. His asthma is bad.”

And he was supposed to be going to the doctor again the next morning, because we knew it was bad.

So I got to the hospital. At first they wouldn’t let me see him but they finally let me back.

I saw the ventilator and I thought, ‘This is really bad.’

Like I said, we’d been to ICU two other times and I’d never seen a ventilator, you know? I knew from the other experiences that once an asthmatic goes on the ventilator, they don’t normally wean off.

I called his family. Couldn’t get ahold of any of them.

They had put him in the cardiac ICU because his heart had stopped. He didn’t have a heart attack, but his heart had stopped.

His CO2 level was 110 and I don’t remember what it’s supposed to be, but apparently that’s real bad.

The first day was just so touch and go.

And I was just in denial.

The second night I was finally all there, and I was by myself with him.

And I remember just laying over his body and telling God, “You know, we’re good people. This isn’t supposed to happen. What are you doing?”

Not blaming God, but there’s a part of you that just thinks…man…

I remember telling Russ that God obviously had something else for him to do because he had survived.

And he shouldn’t have.

They did his first MRI and it came back. When the neurosurgeon comes in and tells you there’s a lot of damage and says, “I’m so sorry,” as he walks out of the room, you know it’s really bad.

And I didn’t really understand at the time that the Russ’s of the world don’t usually make it.

ABI patients…they don’t make it. It’s different than a TBI. A lot of them don’t make it either but…

ABI is an anoxic brain injury, which means lack of oxygen to the brain.

The way it was described to me is that a traumatic brain injury, a TBI, is as if you put a drop of food coloring into a bowl of water. Well in that case, it goes down and it kind of disperses a little bit.

With an anoxic brain injury it’s like you took the water and you stirred it up. It’s everywhere.

His eyesight got hit. All of his physical got hit. Emotional got hit. His hypothalamus, everything.

So the first few days I researched a lot. And they still wouldn’t really tell me anything. I finally sent his MRI to my sister’s best friend, who is a doctor in McPherson.

She said, “I’m not going to lie to you, it’s really bad. But what I can tell you is that whatever you expect him to achieve, that’s where he’s going to achieve to.”

So I was like, “Okay, I can do that.”

We have a kid that is not special needs, but he can be a challenge. I had to do a lot of stuff with him when he was little, so I was very used to a challenge.

Now backing up, on the second day in ICU they had decided that they were going to try and start bringing him out of sedation. They brought him out of sedation enough to where he actually tongued the ventilator out of his mouth, to the point where he was choking.

And they said, “This is either going to go really good, or really really bad.”

He had another severe asthma attack, but they got him stabilized.

I had to do a lot of patient advocating.

They put a bipap on his machine, which is a face mask. His brother had passed away with one on. He had vomited blood in it and it just freaked me out.

So I was like, “No, let’s just see if we can do a nasal cannula.”

So they did. And it worked.

He maintained and he breathed on his own.

What I found really interesting was that when they first started giving him the medicine, he could kick his legs and he could freak out.

What they don’t tell you is that when you do the first MRI, what’s going to die in the brain hasn’t necessarily died yet.

So I had seen that he could move.

And they had him restrained for a long time so he couldn’t pull his stuff out. But it was a matter of….if his hand was laying there I would tap him on the forehead and I would say, “Russ think…finger, move.”

And I would see his finger twitch.

“Russ, move your toe. You have to think…move your toe.”

And he did.

And that’s kind of where we started.

We spent twelve days in ICU and then we went to the rehab hospital. They had him on some medicine but he doesn’t have enough dopamine receptors left so his body really freaked out.

He sweat a lot.

His muscles were super, super rigid and they just couldn’t get him to relax. So they kept putting him on muscle relaxers and more muscle relaxers.

They just kept pumping him with meds.

And finally I was like, “He’s worse than when we brought him to you. What are you doing?”

But nobody would listen.

“We know what we’re doing.”

“Okay.”

And as a patient you’re just like, ‘Alright, you know what you’re supposed to be doing…’

We were there about five days when I got a call on a Wednesday night. I stayed with him a lot but if the boys were home I stayed here with the boys to keep some normalcy.

I got a call around 11:30pm from the nurse at the rehab hospital and she said, “Hey, he was non-responsive and he’s already on his way to the hospital.”

“Why are you just now calling me?”

The rehab hospital had overdosed him. He was on so many meds.

The nurse had gone in at 9:00 the night before and he was already asleep but she was going to give him a sleeping pill. I had asked her why she was going to do that if he was already asleep and suggested she wait until he woke up to see if he was even going to need it.

She ended up giving it to him at 6:00am but something got messed up and two hours later at breakfast, he got another whole round of meds.

And so finally that day, it just got to the point where it sent him back to the ICU.

He had what’s called Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome, which is where I was saying his dopamine receptors were inadequate.

They had him on Halidon and Seroquel and he doesn’t have enough dopamine receptors to handle that. He would sweat so much that there would be a puddle at his collar bone. We wiped him down and wiped him down and changed his sheets so frequently. He was getting rashes because he was so wet all the time.

When he had first gone to rehab he wasn’t moving at all. And by the time we got back from our second ICU trip, whatever was going to die in his brain, had died.

And like I said, nobody had told me in between that more of his brain was going to die.

Do I know whether or not the overdose on meds at the rehab hospital caused more damage?

I don’t know.

But once they weaned him off those meds, he went back to rehab.

And things were looking a little better.

He started to learn some basic skills, like how to sit up in bed.

He was there from the middle of October to December 23rd.

All he wanted for Christmas was to just come home.

I think the thing that gave me the most hope was that the neurologist that we saw there, Dr. Jameson, had said, “I don’t see any reason that he shouldn’t make a full recovery.”

And I thought, ‘Okay, then that’s what we’re shooting for.’

It has taken a lot of patience. It has taken a lot of time….”

To be continued…

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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We are Russ and Amy, and we live in Valley Center, Kansas.

In the midst of recovery from an anoxic brain injury, I AM Miracle Story #17.