On August 5, 2021 my beautiful, then 30 year old daughter went to the hospital in Richmond, VA for a kidney stone surgery. An outpatient procedure that was supposed to take minutes. Well, things went wrong, and more wrong and more and more wrong and then she suffered from side effects from so many drugs and allergic to several others.
She was in a medically induced coma for 42 days.
She woke up paralyzed from the neck down.
- She had to learn to breathe so that she could come off the ventilator,
- Learn to swallow so that she could come off the feeding tube.
- Learn to speak.
- Exercise all of her muscles which have been so weakened by everything.
The good news is that all of her muscles work. They are just very, very weak. Getting stronger all the time with the help of 6 months of rehab and lots of in home therapy. She is getting stronger and able to do more now. Her fine motor skills have come back enough so that she can feed herself with help and after many months of work, she can now grasp the bed rails with both hands and even pulled her shoulders up off the mattress the last time I was there.
We are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. But it's going to be a very long haul.
Right now, she and her partner, Beth are raising funds for a van that accommodate her power chair so that she can get out of the house for appointments and to resume normal life. I'll post the links so you can see her tell her story from when she was on Channel 12 News in Richomd with Jasmine Turner and later I'll post a link to the fundraiser. I hope you will share her story.