I'm guessing that most of you reading this already know the general details at least of what happened to Sonja and I this past Oct. 3rd.....for those of you who inadvertently got left off of the multiple email lists I've been compiling, I've posted the original email I sent five days ago (on Oct. 14th) down below this first installment of Sonja's new blog.
The idea behind this elementary attempt at said blog is to create a place that I could post to every other day or so in the short term, a place where folks could check online in their own time to see how The Sonj is doing. Hopefully as she continues to improve and eventually gets off the ICU, she can use this same forum as a system for describing what the experience has been like for her, from her point of view. It should also be a place for contributions from friends and family, and a place to upload some photos and stuff as well.
So that's the plan. If anyone has other ideas to enhance this little project, by all means let me know....I'd love the responses.
For now, she is improving every day, and I hope to get a general update email off to everyone by early next week. Thank you all again for your outpouring of love and support; it has meant more to Sonja and me these past few weeks than you can ever know.....
Love from us both!!
-- Paul
"Dear Friends and Family:
First of all, I hope you'll be able to forgive the need to send this kind of
information out through an email; I dearly wish I had the time and energy to
contact each of you personally and speak with you on the phone about it, but
that is simply not possible. And for some of you this will serve more as an
update to what you already know, since circumstances have allowed or demanded
that I contact you first. For the rest, again, my apologies.
Sonja is very, very sick. Happily, her condition is improving, though we are
not out of the woods yet. Here's a brief explanation of what occurred.
On Tues. the 2nd of October, Sonja was admitted to Cayuga Medical Center in
Ithaca, NY; we were both hired this past spring to teach at Cornell Univ. this
academic year as part of their resident professional teaching associate
program, and have been happily doing just that since Aug. 20th. For the last
two weeks of Sept., she had complained of occassional shortness of breath, but
never with any pain attached. We discovered on the 2nd that she ws suffering
from atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeat. She was admitted to the ICU
simply as a precaution, and held overnight for monitoring, to be given a heart
catherization the next day, Wednesday, in the afternoon some time. I was with
her throughout the day on Tuesday and Tuesday evening, and she was nervous but
otherwise fine.
At approximately 6am on Wednesday morning she suffered sudden and catasthropic
heart failure. Her blood pressure crashed through the floor, and her internal
organs suffered severe shock from this signature event. They managed to save
her (had she not already been in the ICU it is unlikely that she would have
been in a position to survive), though she continued to fail and become
increasingly unstable through that day and Wed. night. For the second time in
24 hours, the doctors feared that she might not be strong enough to survive
the shock her organs had sustained, but somehow she pulled through. the next
day, on Thursday the 4th, she was air lifted by helicopter (a story for
another time) to Strong Memorial Hospital at the Univ. of Rochester in
Rochester, NY, a teaching facility with the necessary resources and medical
sophistication needed to treat her condition. She was admitted to one of the
ICU's there, and after getting help for our animals and throwing some clothes
in the car, I followed after, doing the short one and a half hour trip in
about sixty minutes. She remains in the ICU to date, her tenth day in
Rochester. Chronologically, she remained unstable until Saturday the 6th, when
she seemed to begin to turn a corner, and her liver, lungs and blood pressure
began to slowly rebound from the crisis event.
To begin at the end then, we still don't know exactly what caused her heart to
fail on the 3rd. The doctors have ruled out other cardiac related causes, and
the good news is that her heart seems to be functioning normally under the
circumstances, aside from the continued, now-controled a. fib. When her system
went into shock, her liver, lungs and kidneys were severely impacted. Happily,
her liver seems to be rebounding, and to date shows no signs of any
original or congenital disease....and so it was not the cause of the original
crisis either. More good news; the progress that began, very slowly, on
Saturday the 6th has continued. Her lungs have begun to re-engage, and while
she is still intubated, her breathing function assisted by a ventilating
machine, she is much closer to being able to come off that apparatus and
breathe on her own. When that finally happens, they will be able to slowly
bring her out from the sedation that she has been under since Wed. the 3rd,
and she will finally be fully concious and able to communicate again,
something that has not been possible since mid-day on the 3rd. Her blood
pressure has stabilized and is now self sustaining, no longer supported only
by an extensive regimin of drugs. Her kidneys to date have not yet
returned to functioning, though I am told that that is not at all unusual;
after this kind of event, the kidneys are often the last remaining set of
organs to re-boot. She is currently undergoing successful dialysis, and that
will continue for the short term.
The best guess at this point is that she entered the hospital in Ithaca not
only with the atrial fibrillation, but also carrying some kind of ongoing
infection somewhere in her system; that infection somehow, Wed. morning at
dawn, engaged with her heart, causing it to fail, then causing her blood
pressure to plummet and causing the overall catastrophic shock to her system.
To date, they have not been able to pin down the specific kind or type of
infection, and so we are forced, despite it's likelihood, to leave the door
open to other, more episode-of-House like possibilities for what caused her
heart to fail. We may never know exactly what event or combination of things
caused the crash. Happily, she continues to slowly improve, and right now that
alone is everything.
I have been staying, thanks to the kindness of Skip Greer and Mark Cuddy and
all the good people at GEVA Theatre Center, in their actor housing, right
downtown and a short ten minutes from the hospital. Our pets have been taken
care of by a whole host of truly wonderful people in the Dept. of Theatre,
Film and Dance at Cornell (Jenny and Don Tindall, Pam Lillard, and John
Hertzler notably among them); our new family at Cornell have embraced us
throughout this terrible event, and enabled me to do what I needed to do for
Sonja, when I needed to do it. I will never be able to thank them all enough.
So..........please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions
(email is probably the best form to do it in, though I am never far away from
my cell phone). I hope this email answers some of the questions and rumours
that have been arising, and I will strive to keep you all updated on her
condition as time goes on. Thanks to you all in advance for your prayers,
meditations, best hopes and love. It has meant more to me over the past 12
days than you can ever know, and will mean much more to Sonja as she struggles
to recover. Love to you all....
-- Paul"
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