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Jason's Story

In June of this year Jason was out on a Friday night with his wife and some friends to see a movie and dinner.  Later that night, Jason could no longer remember going to dinner, the movie or anything else that had happened during that prior week.  He was taken to the Beloit Emergency Room by his wife, where they noticed something on a scan and transported him to UW Madison hospital by ambulance.  Scans at the UW showed that Jason had developed  a brain tumor near his frontal lobe.  Jason was then sent home for 3 weeks to take lots of medication such as steroids, etc... to control the swelling of the brain until the team of brain surgeons could be assembled to do the brain surgery, which was done on July 16th at UW Madison Hospital.  During the surgery, Jason experienced some difficulties with the anesthetic which caused brain swelling and some hemorrhaging.  He then had to be kept sedated with a breathing tube for a week after surgery to allow for the swelling of his brain to subside.  On July 24th his breathing tube was removed and he started to slowly progress with his recovery.  On Friday the 27th of July he was in great spirits as his recovery started to speed up and he was even using his TV remote control to hit a stress ball his mom was pitching to him.  By Sunday the 29th Jason was starting to eat solid foods on his own and talking while he was watching Cubs games from a laptop in his ICU room.  Then things took a turn for the worse on Monday morning July 30th, just as he was scheduled to be moved into his own general care room out of ICU, because he was improving so well.  That Monday morning, Jason stopped breathing and had no heart beat or pulse.  A blood clot broke away from his leg and passed through his heart and into his lung sac area.  Jason was Code Blue for almost an hour as doctors and nurses worked to get his heart and pulse going again.  Nurses were quoted as saying "The only reason the doctors didn't call it, was because his body color stayed normal."  After finally getting a heart beat and pulse on Jason again, doctors stated they either had to do emergency surgery or give up on him.  Now that's a pretty dumb question to ask.  They took him into emergency surgery, where once again Jason went into Code Blue.  They were able to revive him yet again, and perform successful surgery, removing a massive blood clot from his lung area.  The doctor was quoted as saying "That is the biggest individual blood clot we have pulled out of somebody.....ever."  Doctors were unable to take any brain scans of Jason during this time because of him being so unstable, so they were not sure how much if any oxygen was getting to the brain while they worked on him originally.  Within hours after surgery the doctor gave Jason a pinch test to check his reactions and he passed, showing that he did indeed have brain activity.  Later that night Jason actually opened his eyes and communicated with his Neurosurgeon by blinking.  This was a great  sign for all of us!  Jason has since been slowly recovering in the Cardio unit at UW Madison Hospital, until yesterday, August 8th when he was moved back to the Neurosurgery floor and once again began eating solid foods.  He is still very weak at this time and is unable to do much talking or to get up and move around or walk on his own.  We are all hopeful he will continue to progress on his slow road to what we hope is a 100% recovery.

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