The Longest Ride

Thank you to everyone for all your prayers and well wishes. It is so great to have such wonderful people like you in our lives! We are hoping that this ride is grinding to a stop now. They found the original bleed. It seems that she has ulcers that she did not know about. I don't know why cause she is the type to get regular physicals and check ups. Anyways, one large one was on her duodenum. They duodenum is a type of valve at the bottom of your stomach that connects the small intestine to it. It controls digested food from going back into your stomach after it has gone into the small intestine. The ulcer had opened an artery and was causing the bleeding. This bleeding had caused the streptococcal not the pnuemonia. The pnuemonia was from her not being able to move around. They repaired it and thought everything was well. She was still passing small amounts of blood but it was residual. Leftover from the bleed. My SIL went down for the weekend so my hubby came home.

By the time he got home, she was back in bleeding again. They went back in and found 4 more bleeds. Now she should be okay. This whole time she felt fine though.

Saturday morning he got the call. She was bleeding so badly that they literally had to invert her bed to keep as much blood flow to her brain. She was leaking as much and as fast as they could put it in. They wanted to transfer her to Tampa General a much larger hospital. The doctors there were ready to take her, the admin would not accept her since they did not have a bed. We were told we had two options. One was to open her up and find all the bleeds and stop them. The danger was that if they opened her up she may in her weakened state just start bleeding from everywhere. The second was to put her on the helivac and send her to Tampa and force them to take her, bed or not. Her bleeding now was sporadic but if she started bleeding in flight there would be nothing they could do and she would bleed out. The helicopter ride was 45 mins away. Both were risky but the lesser of the two was transporting her to Tampa.

She did get to Tampa safely. By the time that they got her into surgery they had gone through 17 pints of blood. Everything seems to be okay right now. Hopefully they said they are going to put her in a room out of ICU today. This is the point where things have gone bad so we are hoping that all goes well.

I do have a couple of little things that I have done to keep my mind off things. So tomorrow, get ready to regular broadcasting. One is a sneak peak of my "Make It 4 Monday" that I didn't get off my lazy but to finish for last week. I'm ready for next week though!

Again, thank you everyone for all your well wishes! They are very much appreciated!

MWAAAAAH!