Sleeping Beauty

I apologize for the length of my last post. There was a lot that had happened that week and I wanted to share it with you guys. This post is about the time after my last surgery, where they removed my AVM, to the time I officially woke up.  After a long long week, I was placed in a medically induced coma to relax my brain. They placed multiple ice packs under me so that they could keep me as cold as possible. The reason for this was because I had a lot of fevers and they were going to cause unwanted pressure on the brain, so the doctors carefully monitored my brain activity. They kept me in a coma for three days and then slowly started to take me off the medicine, which it took another three days to finally come out of it. After days of waiting, I was still not responding, and my family and friends began to get very worried. Eventually after the doctors had waited long enough, all of a sudden, I performed a cough which indicated to people that there was still hope. The doctors later got a chance to monitor my brain activity. They came to a conclusion that I was brain dead and basically had little to no chance to heal. The doctors came in the room and explained the situation to my parents. At first my parents really did not comprehend what they were telling them because it didn’t match up with what they saw me do. My parents and all the doctors were placed in a meeting to really determine what the next steps would be. Then my parents really figured out what this meant and were an absolute mess to say the least. Even though they had explained that I had no brain activity, my parents knew deep down that I would heal and be okay.

With that, my parents had to make some very difficult decisions. They quickly contacted their family members and explained what was going on. The next step was for my parents to decide whether or not they wanted to give me a trach and a feeding tube. As you can see my parents went with that option. While I was asleep, a lot of my friends and family came to visit me. They didn’t know what to think when they came and visited me because my eyes were open, but I was still asleep. One of the great things that happened while I was in the ICU was when I started breathing on my own. My sister came to visit me, and she was the one who pointed out on the ventilator that the red triangle came on. This was a symbol that the ventilator showed I was breathing on my own. After being in ICU for three and a half weeks, I was finally moved to the 4thfloor, which is a regular patient floor of the hospital. This was a huge step for me, as it shows that I was headed to recovery. While I was on the fourth floor, my mom’s friend, Amanda, came to visit and started talking about Dutch Bros, which is one of my favorite places. I began to move my mouth and my eyes opened wide as she was talking about it in the room, which was one of the first times that I had showed symptoms of reaction. After I spent a week and a half on the fourth floor, I was then evaluated and moved to Providence Child Center, which is a home for medically fragile children. While I was there, I got medically more stable but was still unresponsive until August. My parents were very nervous but also knew that there was still hope for me to get better. There was a lot of waiting happening during this whole process. Eventually, I woke up in August so for some odd reason I do not remember anything from the moment I fell asleep on May 23rd,counting eleven weeks from that date. You all are probably wondering where my mind was at for those eleven weeks so I guess you will have to wait and read next week’s post to hear about it.

xoxo

Syd

This was when I got transferred from the hospital to Providence.