The Day My Life Changed Forever: Part 3

On January 17th, 2022 Piper had her surgery. At the time, my expectations was that this was going to fix it all. That she would go back to the child she was. At the time I didn’t want to believe that this changed her entire life or what her life would now be. I kept thinking that this time next year she would be running again. Like I said in my last posts I was in denial and my expectations was put in the wrong place. Also, the doctors never told me any different because the important thing was to save her life at that point. I remember the day she was took back for surgery. The neurosurgeon walked with us the entire way down from the room. We got to the door to the surgery wing and he told her that he was going to take care of her from that point that we needed to get time away from the hospital and get some food. At this point I realized that I hadn’t had a shower since before her accident. We went to check in at the Ronald McDonald house and I got freshened up. We went to eat but I could barely eat. It was a very quiet breakfast. I think we all just didn’t know what to act or feel at the moment. We was still processing the shock of it all. We decided to go get some necessities and I remember that it helped me. To focus on something other than the present. Just like when I go grocery store shopping, its like my time away.

By the time we was in check out the surgeon called and said that they was bringing Piper back up to her room on the PICU and that the surgery was successful. I felt so great in that moment. Now she can get better and recover. Little did I know recovery was what she would be doing for the rest of her life. We made it back to the hospital. They had to shave the back of her head and they gave me the bag of what they had to shave. Piper had such beautiful hair and it broke my heart to see it gone.

The next few days we had multiple specialists come in to speak with us. They had mentioned that she would most likely need a tracheostomy due to her fighting her intubation. Multiple times she would become unstable and they would have to bag her due to her biting down on the tubing. We would have to talk to her to get her to calm down. She was in this body she didn’t recognize anymore. She was stuck. I was in refusal of it because I was scared. I worked in the medical field and the tracheostomy was intimidating to me. A palliative care team came to talk to me. They went over things they would do to help me for care for Piper during her hospital stay. One of those things that if I would like to take her off life support measures and let her go. I was alone at that time, my husband had went down to get food and get time away from the room. I think about that moment a lot and its a moment that would haunt me for the first year of the accident. Do I let her go? Should I have let her go? It’s thoughts they we don’t like to share with others because we are afraid of what others would think about us as mothers. How could you think of those things? But, you do. Especially when you start to see your child suffer. Would they be better off?

At the time, I was in complete shock at the statement. Like how could you say that? She is going to get better and get her mobility back. Absolutely not. I kept thinking how it she going to live without the tracheostomy. She would never have any quality of life. She would have to be sedated and then I would never get to see her beautiful face or see her smile. A doctor from her team came to talk to me and I asked him his opinion. He told me that in her case it would give her to most quality of life and that he didn’t really see anyway for her not to get one. My husband and I decided to go ahead with the surgery. The ENT surgeons came in to talk to us about it and educate us on it. It was nerve wrecking. My husband and I sat together on the hospital sofa in her room hand in hand through the entire thing. When we asked questions our voices shook. We was extremely scared for her. I felt like this was the end for her. She will never recover now. But I was wrong and just didn’t know it.

On January 21st, 2022 she got her tracheotomy placed. She came back in the room and her face was finally seen. It was as beautiful as it always has been. Its just now we could see it. They had a Ballard attached to it. Which is a suction tube. It was full of blood. She had to be put on a type of paralytic for the recovery since she couldn’t move for 48 hours. The next 48 hours would be rough though. Her stats dropped numerous of times and they would have to bag her. Also water from her ventilator could go down in it. I remember it being 4am and alarms would go off. The nurses were superhero’s to me. They saved her life numerous times in those 48 hours and they were calm so they kept me calm. They started to wean her down from the medication and she opened her eyes. She looked around the room and her eyes landed on me and her body relaxed. She had lost her voice and when she opened her mouth nothing came out. My heart shattered in a million pieces. Would I ever hear her voice again?