If you are visiting this post, and it’s your first time reading about Chase’s accident, you are on PART 3 of a series of posts telling the story of Chase’s injury.
Believe it or not, everything you have read so far has happened in the span of about 8 hours.
We were admitted to the Intensive Care Unit around 3:00 A.M. and moved into a room on the I.C.U. floor. If you have ever been in the I.C.U., or been to the I.C.U. you understand how dismal, dark and mentally taxing that place can be. If it wasn’t for the wonderful nurses we met and were lucky enough to have working on Chase our entire stay, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to handle that place. It’s different than any other wing of the hospital I’ve ever visited or been in. Granted, I’ve personally only been admitted to the hospital once when I gave birth to Kennedy, so I really only have the maternity wing to compare it to personally, but I’ve visited family members and friends in the hospital the I.C.U. was nothing like it.
I like to compare it to a kind of time warp. You can’t really tell what time of day it is when you are inside, and I remember leaving the wing, walking out of the double doors with only a tiny slit window, and into the lobby FILLED with sunlight thinking, “Oh my gosh it’s already daytime again?”. The yellow, fluorescent lights are ALWAYS ON in the hallways connecting the rooms at the same brightness. They never get any brighter and they never dim at all. It is the same from hour to hour and minute to minute. I felt like, if I were stuck in one of those beds, that I would lose all sense of reality and time.
November 15th 2018
Because of Chase’s injuries, the nurses were required to wake him up every HALF HOUR, to check his vitals, his pupils for abnormal dilation or retraction, and to give him little “tests” to make sure his brain was still functioning normally. These tests would include touching his nose with his pointer fingers, lifting his arms up and holding them straight out in front of him, and what his name was and where he was currently at the time. They would also take him to get CT scans every three hours, to monitor the bleed and make sure it wasn’t expanding.
I was in constant communication with the nurses about Chase’s condition, which at this point in time had progressed and with my mom and sister who were taking care of Kennedy back at my mom’s house. Chase’s bleed seemed to have stopped getting any bigger, and may have even shrunken a tiny bit by the third cat scan which was taken around 11:00 A.M. This was good news! The nurses seemed hopeful, but really couldn’t give us any details on his injury themselves. They just kept telling us we would have to wait for the doctor to get in to get any concrete answers.
At this point, after the third CT scan, I decided I needed to go home, take a shower, get some new clothes, visit with my baby, grab my breast pump and eat some food. Chase had been in and out of sleep all night, so I figured he wouldn’t miss me much anyways if I left for an hour. I wrote him a note saying ” I love you so much. When you wake up, call me. I pushed back the wires and IV’s going from Chase’s body to the beeping machines, and put the note and his phone next to his bedside, in the hopes he would see it when he woke up.
When I got to my moms, I ran for my baby. I hadn’t been away from her for more than 20 minutes since she was born, so I was in definite need of some baby/mama snuggles. I sat on the couch, held her close and sniffed her head. I thought about this new little baby that Chase and I had literally just brought into this world. Would he get to see her soon? How long would she have to be without him? How long will this be our new normal?
I kissed her head as she drifted off to sleep and I gently laid her in her portable crib in the darkest corner of my parent’s living room. I ran to shower, got dressed, ate a snack and just like that was on my way to grab my breast pump from our condo and go back to Chase’s bedside.
It felt like I hadn’t even left the hospital when I got back. Not much had changed since I left. It was still just as bleak as it always had been. Chase’s Dad, Kerry, had arrived at the hospital a little after I left, so knowing he had been there with Chase while I was gone made me feel a little better. Chase had begun to stir, and was asking for a little food and water. He had a lot of questions about what his diagnosis was, what had happened the night before, since he really couldn’t remember much after urgent care and he asked about Kennedy; where she was and how she was doing.
Finally, the neurosurgeon stopped into Chase’s room for a visit. He explained to us that Chase’s injury wasn’t the worst he’s seen, but it wasn’t good either. The blood had pooled on the right side of his brain large enough to cause a 5 mm mid line shift of his brain. For those of you who aren’t brain experts out there, we have two halves of our brain, and there is a line going down the center of it. Both side should be equal. When the blood pooled on the right side of Chase’s head, it caused that mid line to shift 5 mm to the left, essentially squishing the rest of his brain. As I have explained before, there isn’t a lot of room in the skull for anything but the brain, tissue and a little bit of fluid. This increase of pressure on his brain could have some damaging effects.
Chase needed to work on getting that build up of blood broken up, by moving around and slowly becoming more active, as that would help things get moving. Laying in bed would only keep the blood pooled in his skull. He needed to stand upright a couple times an hour, and make sure he was always sleeping at at least a 75 degree angle. Essentially, he told Chase that he has seen this injury take people out, and he has seen this injury be nothing but a blip in someone’s life. He told us that Chase needed to find the mental drive to get better. He said that Chase was a young guy, and that the odds of his brain being able to get better by itself, without surgery, was very high, but he had to get up out of bed, and start working on it.
This is a video I took after the doctor left. This is the first time in two days Chase moved from his bed.
After the doctor gave Chase that speech he was determined to get out of bed and get moving. I apologize for the terrible lighting and quality of the video, but like I described before, its pretty dark in the I.C.U.
-Kayla
