My Sister

Just four days after my sister was at our house visiting, on the afternoon of Friday, February 21st, I got a call from my brother-in-law Ken that Tracy had gone into cardiac arrest and was being loaded onto an ambulance and taken to the hospital.  As fast as I could throw some necessities into a bag and get in my car, I was headed down to the hospital in Atlanta where she and Ken would be.  For most of the drive I didn’t know if Tracy was dead or alive and I cried the entire way.  As I got closer to Atlanta, Jonathan called me to fill me in (my parents had called him and weren’t sure whether calling me would endanger me on my drive because it would be upsetting) that Tracy was stable, on life support, in a cath lab.  Ken met me by the elevators outside of the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) and I honestly thought for a brief moment that I needed to be strong for Ken before I nearly collapsed into a hug with him and tearfully said, “Please tell me she’s going to be okay.”  Ken, to say the least, was a lot better at being strong for the rest of us.  Ken stayed at the hospital that first night (and every night for more than a week) with Tracy’s amazing friends Kim and Rachelle.  I went to their house for a sleepless, tear-filled night but was comforted by seeing the familiar sight of the life Tracy was leading (homeschooling projects on the table, a bounty of fresh produce on the counter, photos of her beautiful family on the walls…).  I made the mistake that night of doing research on “sudden cardiac arrest”, the survival rate—even with CPR, which we knew she had received from Ken immediately—was something in the 5-7% range, in other words very low.  And, as trite as it sounds in this situation to relate to a song, Bastille’s song “Pompeii” was on the radio and in my head quite a bit this day and for the next several. “And the walls kept tumbling down|In the city that we love…But if you close your eyes, |Does it almost feel like | Nothing changed at all?…How am I gonna be an optimist about this? | How am I gonna be an optimist about this?”  On Saturday morning, a stone-faced CCU doctor put her hand on my knee as we sat next to each other and said in an apologetic tone, “We’re just not seeing the responses [gagging, eye dilation, etc.] that we should expect to see.”  In other words, they expected she had no brain function.  And it was those apologetic tones and apologetic looks from nurses over the next few days that made me wonder if I was naïve to have hope…How am I gonna’ be an optimist about this?

The full week, from February 21st until the 28th—the one I lovingly refer now to as “hell week”—, is one that has forever changed me, I’ll never forget, and for which I am grateful.  The story of that week is a long one and every single day we rode a roller coaster of emotions.  The short of it is that she was in an induced hypothermic state from Friday night through Saturday night, on Sunday they warmed her back up and took her off sedation, and then we spent the next three days trying to read into clues (she’s awake *yay!*, but now she’s awake but doesn’t respond to us  *heart.breaking*, brain scan looks hopeful but not definitive, no purposeful movement…and on and on) to assure ourselves that Tracy was still Tracy.  The last few days of the week, once we knew Tracy could respond to commands, were left to determine how many challenges she would face in her future.  Just two weeks after Tracy’s “event”, however, we knew (with the help of some speech/cognitive and cardio therapy in the months to come) that Tracy was going to fully recover.  Yes, “skip to the end” (not the last Princess Bride reference you’ll find in our story), we witnessed a miracle.  The journey to that miracle is a long and exhausting tale to tell—it honestly starts the waterworks all over again and wears me down to think about it all too much—and, fortunately, Ken did a wonderful job documenting the steps along the way through a CaringBridge website.  So, in my next few blog posts, I am going to borrow his words and put his journal entries on this blog so that we have it documented in our 2014 blog book.  As you can imagine, that first week was chaotic and stressful (I wasn’t even in a state to visit my nephews and niece until that Tuesday), but so many loving and caring friends and family wanted to know what was going on, so Tracy’s CaringBridge site (http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/tracyslatoncrosson) was set up to communicate updates to all interested parties at once.  Ken posted some beautifully (and wittily, in true Ken style) written journal entries to the site. Here’s the first one:

How We Got Here

By Ken Crosson — Feb 24, 2014 10:44am

On Friday afternoon, completely out of the blue, Tracy went into cardiac arrest. By the grace of God she was in a place where the arrest was witnessed, so CPR was started immediately, paramedics were on the scene within ten minutes, and she was quickly transported to Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, where she has been receiving world-class care in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) for the past few days.

The doctors are uniformly surprised to see a patient as young and healthy as Tracy in the condition she is in. The best explanation they can come up with is that a tiny tear in a tiny branch of a coronary artery deprived her heart of just enough oxygen to trigger an arrhythmia that led to complete cardiac arrest. They and the nursing staff have been working around the clock to prevent further damage, preserve her neurological function, and to bring her back to us.

Clearly, her condition is critical and she is on only the first step of a very long road to recovery, but we have high hopes that she will recover consciousness soon and give the many people gathered here to pray for and support her a real reason to cheer. So far good news has been hard to come by, but, by the nature of her injury and the immediate interventions it required, today is really the first day of what we know in our hearts will be her triumphant comeback. The outpouring of support from family and friends has been overwhelming.

Our kids, who would be her first, and perhaps only, concern under these circumstances, are being lovingly cared for by friends, with a list of backups a dozen strong, standing by if needed. Right now we need prayers for a recovery as swift and thorough as possible.

Thank you for lifting up your hearts in her behalf. I will keep you posted on her progress through this site.