HANNAH’S STORY

When our daughter was diagnosed with a auto immune disease, I never thought it would cause her to end up with an eight-month hospital stay. Yet that was what happened after she was sent to Chicago for her liver transplant. She was only in the PICU for about two days after she had her transplant. What no one expected was that while her spleen took over for her liver before she had her transplant, her spleen did exactly what it was supposed to do. Which was shrink back down to normal size.

However, when it did that, it pulled all of her blood vessels that were attached to it apart. So, she was actually bleeding internally. She had just been moved up to the liver floor of the hospital on the day that will live with me for eternity.

We were watching a show on my tablet. We were just laying on her bed together and laughing and joking around, when she looked at me and said, “Mom, I am getting tired. I think I am just going to lay down a try to get some rest. I feel really hot and uncomfortable.”

So, I got up off her bed told that was fine and went to use the restroom. When I got out, the new nurse was in her room, taking her vitals and checking her drains. Up until this point her drains were almost not needed. They were clear and practically empty.

Her nurse asked, “Have her drains looked like this all day or just started? The day nurse said that they have been clear all day, so I am a little confused by seeing them now.”

I looked at her confused. “I am not sure what they look like now. I thought that they were clear. What do they look like now?”

When she showed me her drains, I knew something was wrong. She hit a button on the wall and all of the sudden my daughter’s room filled with doctors and nurses. That was when I knew that this was serious. The doctors were all over the place trying to figure out what had happened to her. It was chaos in a tiny room. It was like the air was hot and humid and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. People where running around trying to put IV’s in her.

They kept bringing in coolers of bags of blood. As fast as they were putting in her, she was loosing it. When I finally got the courage to look closely at her, she was grey, not pale, but grey. I had never seen anyone look like that. You could see all of the nurses running around, some filling syringes with the blood, while others were putting the blood into her IV’s. She had so many IV’s it looked like she was a robot, so many tubes hanging out of her.

It took what seemed like hours for the doctors to get her stable, she was knocked out and put on a ventilator. When they got her stable they rushed her to the elevators to go to surgery. I asked the doctor if her dad would make it in time to see her and he gave me devastating news, he told me that she would be lucky to make it to the elevator. I lost it right then and there.

I was alone in that room that now looked like a war zone. Gloves all over the floor, bags of empty blood all over the counters, blood all over the floor. It was not anything that I will ever forget.

It took seconds for me to almost loose her, she almost died on me and her father. It took her almost eight months to be her again, learning how to walk all over and feed herself again. Be comfortable enough to shower, she is the only daughter that I have of my three children, and she is the strongest most bravest person that I know.

Frances Francis is a stay at home wife, that is going to school to become a writer. She is a mother of three and a wife of 24 years. She has enjoyed writing since she was in grade school and is hoping that this is the first of many publishing's.