When I arrived at Vanderbilt, I was confronted by a truly disturbing site: A team of eleven Doctors working on my son. I don’t know if you have kids or how big they were at 22 months old, but there’s hardly enough of his body to go around for eleven people to work on. Things got worse when Jamie alerted me to the fact that he had another Grand Mal seizure on the way to the hospital. Everything was happening at 1000 miles per hour, yet time still seemed like it was standing still. At first, Jamie and I had stood in the trauma room while they worked on him. He still would not wake up. They gave him anti-anxiety medicines to stop the seizures and worked to get a handle on his body that seemed to want to shut down. We found it a little too hard to watch and there was nothing we could do, so we sat down outside the trauma room.
A few minutes after we had sat down we started making phone calls to our parents. We wanted them to be aware of what was going on and what we knew (well, what we didn’t know) at the time. Jamie’s parents were coming up from Decatur, AL and my parents were coming up from Walker County, AL. We wanted them to know as much as we could, plus at times like that you just need a family connection. We were sitting there after we had made our calls when all of a sudden the curtains closed in the trauma room and more people went in and there were more needles making their way into the room. Only later would we find out that it was at this time that Ryne quit breathing. They didn’t tell us right away, and I’m almost glad for that. But I’m still haunted by the fact that for 20 seconds out of his less-than-two years on this Earth, my son wasn’t breathing.
They finally gave us an update and told us about the breathing and how he was responding to the meds. They said he seemed to finally be getting agitated with them, which was awesome. He hadn’t responded to anything for almost 2 hours, and finally he was showing some signs of life. They let us know that they had prepared a “crash cart” and an intubation kit if it had become necessary to use those. We were blessed and they never had to pull the trigger on those things. Even though he had stopped breathing, once they got him started back, he was good enough to breathe on his own.
They took Ryne off for a CT scan and Jamie and I stayed in his room waiting for him to get back. We cried and played some games. You’ve probably played those games, too. You know, The “What-If” Game, and “The Blame Game,” and of course the “I Should’ve Done This Instead” Game. The really hard part about those games, though, is that there are only losers…and you feel those losses every time you play. The CT Scan came back and they immediately decided they wanted to get an MRI to see more conclusive pictures of his brain. We weren’t really sure of why he would need both or how they were even different. The doctors said that the MRI would give them some super-high resolution images of his brain. We were taking everything in and giving consents when the Doctor decided to blow our minds. He wasn’t cold, just matter-of-fact when he delivered the shock of our lives: Ryne had had a Stroke.
