Hi, I'm knew to the site I joined a few days ago but have not formally introduced myself yet and what I have experienced. My name is Kim, my Step-Dad, who I have always thought of as a real dad was up on our roof cleaning it back in July 12th a year and a half ago, I remember it as if it was yesterday, the day before his accident we all went to the store to buy a new back pack blower for him to use on the roof, On Saturdays he has his regular routines which was clean bath rooms then he would wait until 8 to 8:30 before going out and mowing he thought he was giving the neighbors a break, that they should be up and if they weren't they should be (my mom and I would just laugh over that theory of his) anyway this particular Saturday he needed to clean the roof before mowing so he got an early start, this is just information not really anything to do with his injury but that morning I had been taking all my clothes and putting them on the bed because the racks in my closet that I hang my clothes had broke so he was going to go to the store later and buy some supplies to fix it for me but I had to move the clothes, my mom was in the other part of the house cleaning, while like I said My step dad was on the roof, 99.99% of the time my mom is out there holding the latter for him, we have no idea why we weren't that day, and by the grace of God my mom heard the latter fall, it was a aluminum latter so when it fell she heard it, I unfortunately did not hear it or maybe fortunate I don't know any ways my mom opened the door leading out into our garage and yelled hey are you okay and didn't get a response so she walked further out to where she saw him lying on our concrete sidewalk in a fetal position unconscious, not breathing, and no heartbeat. This is another tidbit of information but I worked in Nursing for about 13 years, when you go to medical school and you are taught all the sinarieos of if you come upon a unconscious person and no one else is around then yell for help and everyone kind of giggles and we all think that this will never ever happen especially to your own family well I'll have to tell you it's totally different than what it sounds like in class I'm telling anyone and everyone if you ever take a CPR Class or Any other Medical Class that involves CPR or any other Emergency Help please Please listen carefully to the instructor and not laugh and think oh it will never happen because it does happen, when my mom found him she came in the house and yelled for me and said he fell off the roof and she was calling 911 well I didn't know what to expect when I got out there but like I said above he wasn't breathing, and didn't have a heart beat, he was on his side but he still had the blower on him so I tried with all my might to get the blower off of him to turn him over to get him breathing again but I couldn't get it off of him, and of course the whole time I'm screaming from the bottom of my lungs to the top for a Neighbor to come and help me but no one heard me except for the 911 operator and my mom was in the house at the time, she finally came out and I guess the operator wanted her to do something and it required her to put the phone down but they didn't want her to put it down so they asked if we had neighbors and that's when my mom walked over next door and she helped get the blower off and helped me roll him over, before he was even rolled over he began to breath on his own but it was not a normal breathing it was like he was snoring so I knew he had either a collapsed lung or a punctured lung once we turned him over he started to come to a little and was moving and we would tell him not to move that he fell and the ambulance was coming and he would say who's coming and I would say you fell and the ambulance is coming to help and he would ask again, I knew he had a brain injury; Right before the ambulance arrived he got very combative and confused and wanted to get up it took all we had to keep him still, after 4 or 5 hours of arriving at the hospital we were finally able to see him, they told us that he had bleeding in the brain, 5 broken ribs, a collapsed lung, they were waiting for the neurosurgeon to come in and he was called right after he was brought in after finding the bleed, about 2 hours later the Neurosurgeon finally shows up so that's 6 to 7 hours after finding his bleed in his brain that the Neurosurgeon finally showed up, we saw this man walk past the room and stair in and my mom and I thought it was just some nosy visiter or something so a few minutes later this guys walks in the room he has no white coat, no name tag identifying him as the doctor, he has a tropical shirt on and he has his hands behind his back he comes in he doesn't say a word to us and he doesn't even touch my step dad, my mom finally said umm are you the doctor and very quietly he said oh yes I'm the surgeon and he then asked if he had complained of a headache before he fell and we are like well we weren't up on the roof when he fell but when he went out he didn't complain of a headache he said that all the symptoms he had was leading to an aneurysm so he ordered a Angio CT Scan after the test the trauma doctor talked to us and said that all the arteries and vessels and all that were all normal so there was no evidence of any strokes, aneurysms or any other sorts of that nature, he said what's best about this test is you get a second CT Scan and the results of the Scan revealed that he has more bleeding then what he had when he first came in, we asked about surgery and they told us that for his type of brain injury they don't do surgery that the blood will absorb back into his body over time, but the other problem they were dealing with is that there was so much blood it was shifting his brain 4 cm, his pupils began to be no reactive, he was slipping in and out of consciousness so they put him in a medical induced coma, on Sunday they did another CT Scan the bleeding was worse and there was now a 7 cm shift in the brain, the nurses had been working on him all day so we didn't get to see him very much, after the CT Scan we were waiting on the results but the doctor had gone home and would not come back up to the hospital to do surgery on my step dad, they kept saying he didn't need surgery, we waited and waited for this doctor to give us the results even the Nurse was mad because she knew the results but of course could not give us the results but she also knew that he needed to go to the operating room, so we went home and we got a call early in the morning from the doctor stating that my step dad had had a bad night that the pressure in his brain is very high and all the medication they use to treat that is not working so we have to do emergency brain surgery immediately. The doctor told us he removed a huge blood clot that covered his whole skull and also the bleeding, they put him on a cooling blanket so that his body temperature will go down to below freezing they said it slows the brain activity so that it can give the brain time to rest and heal, and it was supposed to I think fight infection, they said every 24 hours they would up the temperature if for any reason he doesn't tolerate that degree then they would bump it back down to below freezing and start from the beginning, he then got pneumonia, and a staph infection, they had a hard time getting his lungs cleared up he kept having to have fluid drained from his lungs, after six weeks of being in coma he finally woke up, he still was not able to move his left side, we moved him to a Neurological Rehab Facility for approx. 3 to 4 months to get therapy and we brought him home, he is doing well, except he's not a hundred percent but he thinks he is and doesn't see the dangers in some of the things he does, he's very angry, and agitated, which is making me agitated and angry, I know that it's not him it's his injury, everything my mom and I say is totally wrong he has to fight with us with every single thing we say literally, my mom has learned to in some sort of way deal with it but I'm having a really hard time with it I try so hard not to bottle everything inside me and I try so hard not to sit and argue with him constantly instead of walking away and being done with it period the end, I don't know how to do that, I get so angry at him, we go somewhere like out to eat or something and its like okay the waiter/waitress forgets to bring lemon right away he says very loudly well she's not getting a tip, and he's very demanding, very rough like I said I get very angry at him for doing that but my mom tells me I shouldn't let it bother me that it's not him and I know it's not him, I know it's not I'm never this way, I'm always going out of my way to help anyone and everyone and if I don't succeed in doing that then I feel like I'm a failure, like I feel like a failure now I just don't know how to control what I'm feeling or does anyone else have a similar problem? how do you handle it? Any help will help a great deal. I'm sorry this is so long I guess it's been inside me for so long It just came out, one thing I didn't tell you is that he now has seizures, he has had four now since he's been home from rehab he never had any at rehab or at the hospital, he keeps saying over and over he's never going to have a seizure again, this is a very touchy subject for me my best friend and only friend growing up passed away 5 years ago from a seizure. Anyway that's my story any help will be greatly appreciated.
KIm