Tragedy struck us hard….

Tragedy stuck us hard….

Hello, my name is Alex. It has been an extremely rough two months for my family as well as myself.

It all started roughly 7 months ago, my mom Deborah she was beginning to lose her battle with COPD and was admitted into the hospital and left the hospital on hospice. My 23 year old brother(Josh) was the full time care giver to our mom(Deborah) and our father(Fran) who has Alzheimer’s.

In May my brother, Josh started to lose vision in his right eye. He went to the doctor and found out he had an almost 2 in tumor in the middle of his brain that had been compressing the optic nerves. On 6/5/23, I was forced to quit my job, leave my children and family and pets at home with my significant other while I moved 2 hours away to take on the roll of full time care giver to both of my parents. Mom being only 60 and dad being just 64 years old. So on 6/6/23 my brother went into the hospital to have his surgery done. They went through the nose for the surgery. He came out of surgery and was doing really well when all of the sudden his vision in both eyes was now almost completely gone. The doctors took him to do a scan to find out that she only removed a very small portion of the tumor and that he would have to have the surgery redone ASAP. On 6/8/23 my brother underwent surgery again, only this time there was complications, the dr had cut an atery in his brain causing him to lose over a liter of blood and causing him to have a massive stroke in the middle of his brain. Over the next three weeks it was problem after problem with very little signs of improvement. Almost the whole time he had to stay intubated. On the weekend of 6/25/23 I had gone home to take care of some things I get a call at 10am Sunday morning from my dad telling me that my Mom was dead on the floor of their bedroom at the foot of their bed. They say she had a massive heart attach and just collapsed. My dad told me just 12 hours before he found her that she had told him she was probably going to be dieing soon so that when Josh passed away he had someone there waiting for him. On 7/9/23 I took my dad up to the hospital to see my brother, it was so very hard as it was his 24th birthday that day. We brought him balloons and spent some time with him. The following day while working with physical therapy my brother began to have seizures that lasted 5-10 minutes each and they were constant continuous violent seizures. They take him to get a scan and they find out he has had a massive hemorrhage in his brain, they did immediate bed side surgery to put a drain in his brain to get the fluid off and relieve the pressure. The dr said he has NEVER seen someone’s ICP(intercranial pressure) be as high as my brothers was, it was above 50. The dr calls my father and myself and tells us we should probably get to the hospital because there is not much else he can do except make him comfortable. My dad and myself had to make a very very hard decision to have my brother taken off the ventilator as there was no chance of recovery. It was a catastrophic bleed. At which time even though he may not of been able to here us we had to tell him that Mom had passed away and that it was ok he could go be with mom again. After about 10 hours my dad and myself watched him take his very last breath on 7/11/23 at 5am, at just 24 years old. My dad had an appointment for the cancer doctor out of state on 7/20/23, during all of this my dad had been diagnosed with melanoma cancer in his right eye and was rapidly losing vision. On 7/19/20 my dad wasn’t acting right he was very confused and something was just off. I had to call an ambulance at 4 am to take him to the hospital. Once in the hospital he got admitted to the ICU the very same ICU my brother had just passed away in 8 days earlier. They diagnosed my dad with pneumonia in his right lung, fluid filled sacs in his chest cavity, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and sepsis due to the infection. He had to have a drain put into his chest to get the infection out. I’ve spent every day with him at the hospital. I leave for one night and come back on 7/23/23 to find him hooked up to the ventilator despite being a DNR. No one had called me to tell me that anything had even happened. They then proceeded to tell me that when they did an MRI of my dads brain it shows that he had a bunch of mini strokes but they don’t know when they happened. So now I’m being faced with a very difficult decision that I should of never of had to make. It’s now 7/26/23 and we are going to try taking him off of the ventilator today. Hoping and praying that things go smoothly and he’s able to handle this without much problems. This has been a very hard couple months and without an income has made it even worse. Not only have I not been able to pay my bills, my dads bills are also in need of paying and the cremation costs for both my mother and my brother. The check bounced because we thought there was enough money there but their wasn’t. So I am starting this fundraiser in hopes of being able to at least be able to pick up my brother and mother and bring them home. That’s all I really care about at this point is being able to bring them home. This has been more then one person should ever have to handle on their own. Please keep us in your prayers and thoughts as we navigate this very very difficult time. Any little bit would be a true blessing and get us one step closer to being able to bring home my mom and brother. I want to thank you for your support and for your prayers during this time. I will add more to this as things progress with my dad. Please keep him in your prayers today for a safe and complicationless extubation today. Thank you!