Dealing With Adversity

This past week has brought enough bad news to last for quite some time and I have no quick and easy answers on how to best deal with facing serious medical problems. Other than being both mildly diabetic and mildly hypertensive I am in excellent health and I take a few pills a day to control what ails me. One of the benefits of my job is that I get a yearly physical from a NASA medical center in addition to my regular doctor visits so any potential problems are generally caught pretty early as was the case with the type II diabetes, but all too often the challenges we face come upon us without warning.

My wife was heading home from work on January 23, 1998 and was about 1/2 mile from home when her little Toyota pickup was hit by an 18 wheeler. She was ejected through the passenger door window, which was rolled up, and she landed about 40 feet away. Luckily one of the witnesses was a nurse who helped greatly until the ambulance got to the scene.

The force of the blow and ejection tore the subclavian artery which goes from the heart to the left arm in half. When I got to the hospital the trauma surgeons as well as the heart surgeon met with me and described what needed to be done. I sincerely hope that no reader has had to sit down with doctors to discuss such a serious situation because they're not going to give you much positive hope. The heart surgeon told me that, in his experience, less than 5% of patients with an injury such as my what my wife faced lived. That is a sobering thing to hear.

The surgeons worked through the night and J. came out of surgery at around 4am. She was given a goretex arterial graft and immediately taken to the neurological intensive care unit. Amazingly there was little other damage. The cheek bones in the right cheek were broken and her jaw was broken. During one surgical session the plastic surgeon took the broken cheek bones out and put in a titanium plate and the maxillofacial surgeon wired the jaw.

J. was in a coma for exactly 5 weeks and spent a total of 8 weeks in the neurological intensive care unit. The head injury is very much like having had a stroke and she spent another 8 weeks in the local rehabilitation hospital. She basically had to relearn how to walk and her cognitive reasoning ability was severely damaged and continues to be problematic even until now. As I say, her head injury is very much like having had a stroke, but she is doing pretty well with most things now.

I am going to be adding some links over to the right to The American Red Cross and The National Bone Marrow Registry.

I give blood as often as I can and I also donate platelets although I have been derelict in this lately. Platelet donations take about 2 1/2 hours so scheduling this is, more often than not, a problem for me. I am also registered as a bone marrow donor.

A good friend, Ronnie, died of leukemia several years ago, but before he passed away his family had organized a bone marrow drive and I participated. As it turns out I was a preliminary match with the child of a U.S. soldier. A preliminary match triggers another round of blood testing which can take a couple of months. Unfortunately before the testing was complete the child had passed away. I wish I had been able to help, but I remain active on the donor list.

I urge everyone to donate to whichever charitable cause is most important to them. United Way contributions can be designated and I always make sure that hospice care gets the majority of my donation.