Here is where the story gets a bit tricky, and I will try to be as clear as possible… I “slept” through the majority of the worst of my ICU ordeal, so this part is mainly stuff I was told by my family and medical staff, or has been pieced together based on the notes from my medical file.
Friday, September 23rd, I got up for work, and as I had started doing around this time, turned on Facebook videos to listen to sermons from a pastor I follow. The one this particular day was from Isaiah 41, and while I don’t remember all the specifics, I remember the overall message was about making God audition to handle your burdens. He talked about how a lot of times we act like we’re having faith in God, but we only give Him our little burdens and act like it’s a test – if God handles this the way I want, then I’ll give Him the big stuff.
This hit me hard.
I’m so guilty of this – of saying I’ve given things over to God that then still continue to take up space in my life because I never fully put my trust in Him.
This hit me so much that day, that by the end of the day when the stress of work had taken its toll, when I was fighting with Jason and all of the issues in our relationship, when I believe I’d pissed off Trysha, and had even snapped at Xander too – I found myself talking with my work best friend and telling her I was officially giving up and giving it to God. It was the first time I’d really fully talked about the weight of stuff on my shoulders at the time, and how depressed I was (even if I still downplayed, I’d opened up to her more than I had to almost anyone else). I remember telling her near the end of that conversation that something had to give or I was going to end up dead like my mother and I couldn’t live like this anymore. I told her that I was officially throwing in the towel because my way of handling things wasn’t working. I remember clearly telling her, “God is going to have to handle it in a way that takes it COMPLETELY out of my hands or I’ll keep trying to control things.” (Remember this, because it’s important that I was stupid enough to utter these words aloud and not expect something to happen hahaha)
We both laughed – told each other to have a good weekend – and that was the end of it. Saturday was a non-day, I felt poor, but that wasn’t anything new.
I woke up Sunday morning, feeling far worse than I had. I couldn’t hardly walk the short distance from the bedroom to my office without feeling like I needed to curl up and rest. I just wanted to sleep – that was all I felt. Complete exhaustion, like even the exertion of breathing was tiring – that level of exhaustion. Jason and Trysha were at work, Xander was out with his brother and grandparents I think, it was just me and the dogs at home and I couldn’t hardly make the walk to let them outside without wanting to cry. It wasn’t pain, it was just exhaustion.
I sat down at my desk and pulled out the pulse oximeter. 74% was the reading. I’d promised at anything less than 85, I’d go to the hospital, so I waited a bit – tried to wake up and take some deep breaths, and I tested again. 71%.
I knew with how I currently felt, there was no way I should be driving, but I still didn’t feel like it was an emergency – I just knew that I was done fighting it. If pneumonia was making me this tired, I’d suck it up and deal with 2-3 days in the hospital to get some energy back. I started messaging Trysha, to find out when she would be home, and still I downplayed the severity, didn’t want to scare her, or burden anyone… just wanted to sleep – that was all.
Trysha got off work, came home and we headed to the hospital – the one closer to Dr. Bankston’s office because I refuse to step back in the one closer to my house ever again after what they’d done about the chest x-ray.
ER does another chest x-ray, another Covid test, more blood work, and they agree, yes it’s pneumonia, not heart. They put me on oxygen, and start the process of admitting me, for what is going to be 2-3 days best guess, for IV meds and whatnot. I email my boss and tell him that I’ll be online throughout my hospital stay, but not attending meetings, and my workaholic nature convinces me this is a great thing because I can finally catch up on everything I need to in email and documentation which will be great! Remember the thing I told my work best friend – about taking things completely out of my hands? Yea… that was about to completely bite me in the ass.
Trysha had wanted to stay the night but I pushed her to go home, told her I’d need a list of stuff when she came back the next day so to call me before she headed into town so we could go over the list. I’d talked to Jason, fought with him and hung up on him, and sent Trysha home so I could finally go to sleep – completely missing that the floor they’d admitted me to was the critical care unit on one side (where I was) and ICU on the other side. They put high risk and critical patients here that way if they need ICU support, it’s all right there.
Trysha left and the poor night nurse, Sarah, tried to make me as comfortable as possible, but I was the absolute worst patient that night. I didn’t like the idea of not being able to use the restroom because of all the IVs, wires and monitors, and the state I was in, I’m sure I was completely belligerent with her. Finally, I shut off the lights and went to sleep, but it didn’t take long before Sarah was back in with pulmonology telling me that they were going to put a CPAP on me because my oxygen stats kept dropping.
If you’ve never been on a CPAP machine before, it can be VERY hard to first use it. I was blissfully unaware that I had been breathing so shallow for so long that it’d become a habit – because of how bad my lungs were – that when the force of air flow from the CPAP was trying to keep me breathing at what’s considered normal – it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. Not to mention, any sinus pressure (because of the head injury I mentioned) kicks me into migraines, so the tightness and pressure of the mask wasn’t fun either.
They’d get it on and leave the room, and in no time I’d be unhooking the mask to where it’s just blowing the oxygen in my face, but not helping the issue they were trying to fix. I was so unaware of time at this point because in my mind, I fought them on this mask for several hours, but it was only closer to about 90 minutes. I was aware enough to watch Sarah head back to the nurse’s desk from re-securing the CPAP on me, and wait for her to get a call light she had to go into another room for… And then I unhooked the machine and turned onto my side and went to sleep. This is the absolute last thing I remember clearly from this whole ordeal before waking up almost two weeks later.
To put things into a timeframe perspective for you – Trysha left the hospital at 11:30pm to head home and the hospital called her shortly after 1am to tell her that the family was needed at the hospital because I’d taken a turn for the worse.
What they didn’t tell her over the phone, and what I would learn much later from Trysha and from the notes in my medical chart, is that when I’d unhooked the CPAP that last time, Sarah hadn’t been able to immediately come back in, which allowed me enough time to fall into a deep enough sleep that I started to have apneas, and because of how bad my lungs were at this point, my oxygen saturation dropped below 55%. When you aren’t getting oxygen, you lose a lot of your cognitive function, so even though they tried to wake me, and to put the CPAP back in place, I became completely belligerent and was talking incoherently. From talking with the nurses who were there that night, it wasn’t incoherent to me or anyone who really knew me – it is all rooted in traumas from my childhood, but I fought them hard. They had no choice but to sedate me.
The problem being, any medical sedation relaxes you to the point of slowing your heart rate which can slow your breathing, and that will make your saturation levels drop too – since they were already having that issue with me, they were left with no choice but to intubate me.
So for those of you that have never had a family member be intubated for anything more than a minor surgery, or just have no clue about this type of thing outside of what’s shown on TV, I’m going to fill you in because I had absolutely no idea what goes into intubating someone.
Your body and mind will try to fight anything foreign in your system – and what’s more foreign than a plastic tube being forced down your throat into your lungs? In order to make your body not fight against intubation so that it can do its job, you’re typically given a paralytic drug that makes you incapable of fighting/moving/pulling at the tube with normal force. While it doesn’t completely paralyze you, it stops your gag reflex, and makes every movemnt require huge amounts of effort.
You’re then given a high-dose sedative so you “sleep” through the experience – but because even though you’re asleep, your brain is still fully aware, they also give you a drug that basically wipes your short term memory of the event. I get it because if you are medically stuck inside yourself and unable to communicate or tell people you’re in pain, or pull away, etc., the damage to your psyche could be severe. However, I was in no way aware of this going into it.
Your brain then goes into damage control and tries to fill in gaps in your memory that the medicine has made – thus why people talk about “coma dreams”. My experience was no different. It makes perfect sense the coma dreams I had, and how interactions with people played out when the medication tried to keep me from retaining memories, so my mind filled in gaps with its own insecurities.
There are a lot of things about my life I don’t share – a lot of the anxiety I deal with daily, I bottle. I do this because I was taught from a young age that any anxieties or fears would be exploited by my father for the sake of keeping me compliant to him. It is no secret that when it comes to blind anger – Jason’s temper bears some striking resemblances to my father. Now, Jason is not cruel the way my Dad was, he doesn’t ever attack my worth the way my Dad did, but he (like most men) can get very loud when he’s angry which immediately triggers me into fight mode like I am a child fighting with Dad again. Jason will be the first person to tell you how much I’ve doted on him in our relationship – and I will be the first to admit that I KNOW it’s partially a trauma response I have – that I dote and fuss on those around me to keep them calm and happy and that way there is nothing they can be mad at me for. When my dreams started, what I remember of them, they were all from a terrifyingly panicked place of trying to keep people around me calm. They were also all situations that I had absolutely ZERO control over how my actions were being perceived so it was hopeless to fight against them.
For example – One I remember vividly was that I was drugged on a bed, and felt exposed and vulnerable fighting against a guy that was taking pictures of me while he’s on the bed with me. I vividly remember fighting and struggling trying to get away from him because I felt like I was being blackmailed in a compromised position for the sake of threatening my marriage. I remember clearly hearing the guy say he’d finally gotten the last photo saved, and that it was all over now and I remember giving up because there was no way I could ever convince Jason I had not been unfaithful to him.
This isn’t because Jason or I have ever had any infidelity in our relationship – but that’s because we keep our interactions with people outside of our marriage above reproach. We do not put ourselves in situations away from the other where someone would ever be able to skew the facts to raise doubts about the other in our marriage because we both know it’s a cancer to a relationship.
I know now, with the coma dream I had, that this was an event where my IV line kept getting blocked, so they had to do a central line in my arm. In order to do this, they use an ultrasound machine to get a clearer look at the veins deeper in your body to make sure they’re getting the line in correctly. You have to hold still for this, and since I am (and was) so combative about being touched by the medical staff, this was not easy for them to do. However, in my coma-state, I didn’t understand this was what was going on and my brain filled in the gap with a fear that anyone would ever be able to skew my actions and threaten my marriage.
For days even with a central line, I didn’t show improvement. My family was told this, and told that intubation wasn’t likely to work, especially the longer it went on, my lungs simply were not healing. What I hadn’t realized when I went in, and what I only discovered later was that poor diet, immobility, and terrible posture led to a lot of edema. What I took as just weight gain, and what I terribly put my body through by working the way I did and training myself not to take 5 minutes between meetings to walk or use the restroom, led to fluid building up and having absolutely nowhere left to go so it started filling my lungs. Since I was a smoker and overweight, and had always had asthma-like issues, I never looked past that to see that I was basically drowning. When I got admitted, one of my lungs was almost 100% full of fluid, my other was about 70% full. The other abnormality was that I never had a fever, I never really had out-of-the-norm body aches or anything else that typically presents with pneumonia.
So even though they’d loaded me up with antibiotics, I didn’t seem to improve. Intubation helped keep my oxygen saturation up, but I still had spells where I’d drop again, and when they’d try to wean me off the vent and pull me out of sedation, I’d decline again. This went on for days, to the point that my family was told that they were going to have to do a tracheostomy if I didn’t start recovering.
They explained to the family that intubation in cases like mine is typically only needed for a few days, but the longer it lasted without improvement presented risks that would only add to my poor prognosis. They gave them a timeline of two weeks – if after 14 days of being intubated, I was unable to be weaned off of sedation and breathe on my own without declining, they would be forced to do a tracheostomy. The responsibility for making this decision fell mostly on Trysha, as she was the one who stayed in the hospital with me (something I’ll discuss later), and given that none of us really knew anything about tracheostomies other than what we’d seen on TV, Trysha was adamant that it wasn’t something I’d ever want. She wasn’t wrong. If I had been able to advocate for myself I would have fought that to the death.
There were some improvements by the end of week one, but then I “stagnated” according to the doctors, got a high fever, and just kind of hovered in a no worse but no better phase for a few days.
So here is where I tell you what faith can do…and about the amazing grace of God.
In reading through my medical chart, and the daily notes from the medical staff, I know that the family wasn’t being told everything. I understand the psychology behind this because if my brain is fully aware while in the coma, and the family around me is told I do not have a good chance of walking away from this, the patient can then pick up on that energy and can just give up. They tempered everything with optimism, but their medical notes said otherwise.
I was intubated by 1AM on September 26, and by October 5th, they had classed me as still being in “critically grave distress”. I only had about a 15% probability of surviving at this point because I wasn’t improving despite all their best efforts. They’d started talking amongst themselves (not sharing with the family of course) that it was likely if I didn’t decline further, but just stayed in this grave condition, that long-term care would be needed or that I could be transferred to another facility like a hospice center until I succumbed to everything.
They had a meeting scheduled for October 8th, day 13 of my coma, with the medical staff and the family. They were going to try to pull me out of sedation and test my oxygen levels and how I responded. Following this test, they were going to meet with the family and let them know the recommendation. What they didn’t tell my family was that they’d already noted in my file that they were going to have to do a tracheostomy, and didn’t believe I’d handle the weaning off sedation well. They’d already put in the soft order for the trach to be done, scheduling it for a few hours after the meeting with the family was scheduled. Now, from all the research I’ve done since, I likely would have rebounded a lot faster if they would have done the tracheostomy around day 5, but again, it’s not something I would have ever wanted done, and I thank the Lord daily that Trysha specifically had the wherewithal to fight for me.
The medical notes all say the same leading up to October 5th – they were being guarded with the family, but they’d already determined I wasn’t going to get better. I was going to be basically sedated until however long it took my otherwise healthy heart to finally give out. The tracheostomy wasn’t even going to be a fix per their notes at this point, it was solely so they could transfer me off to a long-term care facility.
What they hadn’t counted on was the fact that God’s grace alone is sufficient…
Here’s where I sidebar a bit and tell you that my Uncle Jim’s wife, Aunt Cindy, is by far one of my favorite people in this world. She grew up with my Mom, and then they married brothers. She is the gatekeeper to all the things about my Mom I have forgotten, or missed out on knowing because I lost her so young. They have been the rocks in my life when nothing else makes sense, and when I question my faith the most, or have questions about God that no one else can seem to answer for me – Aunt Cindy is who I go to. However, given the childhood I had, I am of the firm belief – I am no one. I know I am loved, but at the end of the day I feel a lot of times that I could disappear and no one would really notice, because I feel I am the one that no one shows up for – nor should they. This is what childhood trauma has left in me – a genuine feeling of worthlessness that no amount of love and support from those around me can resolve. I know logically – which is to say my brain knows at some level – this is all fabricated BS that trauma has created and are lies that my depression tells me – doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
Aunt Cindy lives in Texas, it’s about a 12 hour drive to get to where I live, and aside from Uncle Jim’s funeral, I hadn’t physically seen her in many, many years. When things didn’t seem to get any better with me, even though my girls were keeping everyone updated and for the most part, were remaining fairly optimistic, I’m not exactly sure what it was – but Aunt Cindy made the decision to drive up here. She told me the story after I woke up that the drive up she spent in prayer and basically after losing her dad, and then Uncle Jim a year later, she told me she basically told God that He couldn’t have me too.
She arrived at the hospital on October 6th, and began to sit with me and pray over me, and it is surreal to read the notes on my medical chart that lines up with this because without any medical reason – I started to improve. Now, the doctors still thought it was minor enough, I was likely to stagnate again quickly, and they were not as optimistic. They were still planning for long-term hospice type care, and the tracheostomy.
I was seen an hour before the test to pull me out of sedation, and the doctor’s notes clearly state it was likely to be a wasted test. Much to their surprise, I came out of sedation without issue. My oxygen stats stayed normal, even if I was extremely pissed about being intubated, and being given no word on when I could be extubated – I still maintained it well.
But now is when the hard part of the story started for me – being awake and intubated isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy. And when you’ve been sedated for two weeks, your concept of time is severely altered as the meds used to sedate you work their way out of your system. It felt like a week that I was awake and intubated, but it was only about 36 hours. Although, knowing what I know now, I would’ve much rather been sedated the whole time, because the real work didn’t start until then.
Mustard Seed Mama 