Yesterday I reached out to a woman that I have never met and probably never will but I have walked in the same shoes that she is wearing now. She has had to walk further than I in them and I am certain that she would much rather kick them off and run barefoot. I was able to ditch those terrible shoes before they took me to the place that she is in, so my heart breaks for her and I am praying for her miracle.
When our oldest daughter was in the fifth grade, we took her in for a routine tonsillectomy. Her tonsils were huge and had held infection for over a year. She had stopped gaining weight and after talking to and thoroughly checking out the surgeon, we scheduled the surgery. When I say that we thoroughly checked him out, I mean that we checked to see if he had any complaints filed against him ever. We talked to previous patients families that we knew. We found out how many surgeries he had performed and if there had been any complications. We did the leg work but her surgery was anything but routine.
When she woke up in recovery, she was in agony. All she could do was cry and tell us how much she hurt. The staff was confused and told us that it was not normal for her to hurt that badly but they thought it would pass soon. They gave her morphine and antibiotics and after a few more hours, sent us home with her. It struck me that we never saw the surgeon again once she was in recovery. He never came out to talk to us. I later found out that our child was his last surgery of the day and he was in a hurry to catch his flight to Las Vegas for a long overdue vacation.
The next morning after my husband had gone to work, I had made our daughter a bowl of warm broth. I watched her take a couple of bites and then walked back in the kitchen. That's when I heard her scream. I ran back to her and saw blood and massive clots pouring from her mouth. It was like someone had turned on a faucet! I grabbed a towel and rushed her back to the hospital. Her throat had ruptured.
She was taken back into surgery to repair the rupture. She spent the night and we took her home the next morning. That afternoon, her throat ruptured again! This time we had her transferred to a hospital in a larger city by ambulance. The E.M.T.s had given her a barf bag to bleed into. She filled it completely in the 45 minutes it took to get to the hospital.
My husband and I were five minutes behind the ambulance but when we got there, they were all ready prepping her for surgery. A surgeon brought us a form to sign giving our permission to perform a tonsillectomy. He explained that only one half of each tonsil had been removed and if they did not remove the tonsils in their entirety, as well as her adenoids, she would bleed to death in a matter of a few hours.
To say that I was terrified would be an understatement. I had seen the amount of blood that she had lost with each rupture and she was so tiny to begin with. To have a surgeon tell you that your child is bleeding to death.....I hit my knees and I stayed there, begging God to save her life, until the surgeon came back out and told us that she would live.
He said the damage from her botched surgery was so extensive that they could only save one lymph node and they had to cauterize her entire throat from the back of her tongue to the top of her collar bone to stop the bleeding. She remained in the hospital for another four days. I never left her side.
The tissue in her throat would be as delicate as tissue paper for the next two years. We had to be extremely cautious about what she ate until it healed. Sometimes I wish they had taken that last lymph node too because now when she gets sick, it holds all of the infection and causes her pain.
Nailah Winkfield is the Mother of Jahi McMath, an eight year old girl that has been in the news recently because of a botched tonsillectomy. The hospital claims that Jahi is brain dead and yet her heart still beats on its own. Her Mother won the fight to save her from having her ventilator disconnected and has had her moved to a private facility that specializes in traumatic brain injury.
This story hits too close to home for me. If we had not taken our daughter to a different hospital with a better surgeon, she would not be in college today.
I don't have to imagine the fear and desperation that Nailah must be feeling because I have felt it too. I have seen so many horribly ugly comments online about this family that it angers and disappoints me that so many are so heartless. Nailah and Jahi are in the fight of their lives over something that should have been routine. Knowing the details that I do, I can not, for the life of me, understand why they did not take Jahi back into surgery when her throat ruptured.
Like I said before, I have reached out to Nailah just to offer her my love and prayers from one Mother to another. As parents, I believe that we absolutely must support one another -especially in times of crisis. Our children are a gift and I applaud Nailah for fighting so hard for Jahi. I know for a fact that I would have done the very same thing for our daughter regardless of what all of the hateful people in the world have to say about it.
This just re-enforces that we should never judge another person's journey harshly unless we too have had to wear the same shoes. It is my fervent prayer that Nailah gets to kick off those awful shoes very soon and run barefoot with her daughter just like I have been blessed to run with mine.
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