Friday 13th

Friday the 13^th

When you are ventilated, they highly sedate you and mix in amnesia medications as well. For those that don’t know what ventilation is, it’s when they shove a big breathing tube down your throat and hook up to a machine thar forces enriched air into your lungs that breathes for you.

I must not have liked it because I kept trying to wake up, so they kept giving me more medication.

Now they say because of all the medication you won’t remember anything. That was not totally true for me. I have some vague memories from that time that I will discuss later. The next eight days are mostly hearsay, but it sounds like it was a rollercoaster ride from hell. A lot happened. I have a lot to say about this, but it can be told best by my wife, who was not highly medicated, so she is going to write this next part.

Friday, the 13^th AM. The first phone call from the hospital came between 7 and 7:30 am. It was a nurse saying that they were going ventilate Casey. I argued with her. I told her that I still had not actually talked with a doctor since his admission on Wednesday afternoon. I told her that I had wanted to try other options. My arguments went nowhere. She simply said that she was sorry, but they had tried multiple different breathing treatments and none of them were working. They were afraid he was just going to continue getting weaker. They said he had agreed to be ventilated. I said okay; she said they would call when they were done; I hung up the phone and started crying. I made the phone calls and texts to let people know what was happening, then called my mom and cried some more. The next hour or so was a blur, much like the previous couple of weeks. I don’t know if it was the covid brain fog, still recovering from covid, or just being exhausted and stressed, but there is so much of the time that seemed to pass in a blur. The hospital called again, sometime before  9 am and said that Casey had successfully been ventilated and was stable. Again, I asked to speak with a doctor. I understood how overwhelmed medical facilities were during this time period, but I was beyond upset that he had been admitted on Wednesday afternoon and here it was Friday morning, and I still had not talked with an actual doctor. I had not even attempted to go to the hospital because I knew they were not letting people in; I had simply been making routine calls every 3-4 hours asking about his status. The nurse told me she would have the doctor call. I didn’t have high hopes.

 

Later that morning, I received a call from the doctor. I told her how upset I was that I had not had a chance to talk with her earlier. She apologized and said that it had been a crazy week. I told her that we had not wanted Casey to go on the vent. She said that she understood, but that they had gotten to a point where there was no other choice. I told her that I had wanted to try other options before he got to this point, but that I had not been able to speak with a doctor. She again apologized and told me that he was beyond the time frame for remdesivir, which is one of the alternative drugs hospitals were approved to give. I was being patient, but it seemed like everything I said was met with an excuse that basically led to the conclusion that being on the vent was the best and only option. I did not agree. I am very much not a pushy person; I hate confrontation more than anything, so what I did next to this day still surprises me; I think it was instinct, or maybe more accurate, God guiding me. I told the doctor that I wanted some other treatment tried and then mentioned the taboo words ‘ivermectin’ and ‘hydroxychloroquine’.

She didn’t even respond to the hydroxy idea, but said, “Even if we could prescribe ivermectin, I do not know where we would get it.”

I responded, “What do you mean? You are a hospital; you should be able to get any drug you need.”

Her reply, “Well, even if we could find it, I do not think hospital policy would let us administer it.”

“I do not give a shit about your hospital policy. Your policies are not there to keep my husband alive. I did not want him placed on the vent, I wanted to try something else earlier on. I will not just sit around and watch him die on a ventilator without trying something else. I want him put on ivermectin or I will take him someplace where they will treat him,” I responded. Which was such a complete bluff, because he was on a ventilator, it wasn’t like I could simply load him in a car and leave.

There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. She said that she would talk with the hospital pharmacist and get back to me. Again, I hung up the phone, thinking I would probably not get another phone call. Sometime that afternoon, she called and told me that she could prescribe ivermectin as a home medication, but that I would have to come pick up the prescription, find someplace to fill it and then get the meds to the hospital so they could administer it through his feeding tube. So, our younger daughter and I headed to Derby. When we got to the hospital, we had to argue our way into the ICU, explaining that the doctor had said we could come in. The doctor met us at the nurse’s station and said there was a problem; she had no idea how to write the prescription to correctly dose the ivermectin, since it was not an “approved” medication and was not normally indicated for Covid. I asked if the pharmacist could help and she said she had already talked with the pharmacist.  The doctor turned around to go back to work, and I felt totally defeated. Sara reminded me of the article that we had read on using ivermectin. It had been shared on Facebook by one of Casey’s cousins. Sara pulled the article up on her phone, we read through until the part where it talked about the dosage suggestion for a 200 pound individual. Casey had been over 225 leading into this illness, so I figured after 17 days of being sick, 200 had to be a pretty close guess of his weight. We gave the information to a nurse who took it back to the doctor. The doctor returned a few minutes later and said, “I wrote the prescription the way the article mentioned, but I do not know where you will find it and I don’t think it will do anything.”  We thanked her, left, and headed to the Walmart a few miles across town. I was mentally preparing myself for an afternoon of going from one pharmacy to another to try to find this medication. She probably did not realize it, but I also had doubts that this would work, but it couldn’t hurt; from all the information I had heard on it, the worst side effect was a headache. Trying something was better than nothing.

When we got to Walmart, I gave the prescription to the pharmacy tech and she said she thought they had it, which really surprised me, after what the doctor had said, but it would be 10-15 minutes to get it filled. We milled about the store and then returned to the pharmacy. The tech rang the prescription up, it came to $17 or something like that, but then said the pharmacist had to come over for counsel – that made me nervous.  He came over and said, “I filled this exactly the way the doctor prescribed it, but I am telling you that I have never seen ivermectin prescribed this way. This is highly unusual for this medication???” Even though his last statement was not a question, it definitely hung in the air like a very long, drawn-out question. Something (God again) told me to just keep my mouth shut and not tell him it was for a patient with Covid. I thanked him, grabbed the bag before he could change his mind and we left.

We returned to the hospital, got buzzed back into the ICU, and took the medication to the nurse’s station. I reminded them that this was a home medication that the doctor had said was okay to give to Casey. The nurse said he would get the first dose at 7pm.  We walked out the doors of the ICU into the heat of late afternoon and I broke down bawling. Sara immediately grabbed me and said, “Mom, what’s wrong, we got him the meds, he is going to be okay.” My response was, “Sara, I just gave them medicine that I basically told the doctor how to prescribe, based off an article that was posted on Facebook. For all I know, I possibly just killed your dad.” She hugged me and said, “Mom, you did what you had to do and the medicine is going to work.” We went home and I prayed.

Friday, the 13^th. PM – I was in my bedroom and had just gotten done checking a message from my best friend asking how things were going, when my phone rang. It was a little after 8pm. It was the hospital again – this couldn’t be good. The nurse told me that the vent had been on max settings all day long and Casey’s O2 levels were continuing to drop. He was starting to wear out and then the words, “He may not make it through the night. You should call your family and have them come into the ICU, we will let you say goodbye.”  I yelled, “No,” into the phone and collapsed to the floor on the side of the bed. Sara came running in asking what was wrong. I do not even remember hanging up the phone. I was so thankful that Sara was with me and look back on it now as one of my weaker parenting moments; that had to have been so tough on her. I was crying so hard, I could not call anyone, so Sara contacted her brother, sister and grandma and told them to head to the hospital. She drove and I texted my best friend and family to tell them. We arrived at the ICU and went in and sat with Casey. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it wasn’t goodbye. It was more, you can’t leave, we are not done yet, we have so many things we still want to do, we need you, you are tough and can fight through this.  When Casey’s mom arrived at the ICU, since she had not yet had Covid, she had to sign papers and completely gown up.  They only allowed two of us in the room at a time, so for the next couple of hours, we traded places, with the third one sitting in the waiting room. One of the times when I was in the waiting room, I responded to a text from our principal’s wife who had just told me that they had prayed for us as a family. I told her that we were at the hospital and the reason why and asked her to continue praying, because we needed the prayers.  Zach had to drive 2.5 hours from near KC where he had just moved into his dorms and started football practice earlier in the week. Our oldest daughter Cassie had to drive from Springfield, MO. Cassie also, had not had Covid yet, so she had to sign papers and gown up. We stayed at the hospital, switching out so that there were always two of us in the room with him, touching him, talking, telling stories, crying, but not saying goodbye.  

By the time Zach arrived, around 11pm, Casey’s O2 number had stopped dropping. We stayed in the room until the early hours of the morning. The nurses were relieved that his oxygen saturation had stabilized. Cassie went to grandma’s house to hopefully stay unexposed to Covid, and Sara, Zach and I headed home to get a few hours sleep and a  shower before returning.   

 

Wow! the memories I have are not visual, my eyes must have been closed, but I heard and felt things, and finally someone let my family in to see me. I remember my wife’s, mom’s, and daughters’ voices being very soothing. I remember hearing crying, I remember hearing my mom, wife, and daughter’s telling me to fight. I remember hearing and feeling a lot of love. I felt my hand get squeezed a lot and the hair on my forearm getting stroked a lot. I could be wrong, but I never heard goodbye. I never got the feeling it was ok to quit.  In fact, it was just the opposite. When it was my son’s turn, he chewed me out, up one side and down the other. Something like don’t be a quitter, you wuss, I can’t remember specifics, but I do remember thinking he was out of line, and it pissed me off, and that was just the first day.