March 29, 2024 • 41 mins
In this episode, Maurice continues to recount his tragic odyssey of love, pain, regret, and resilience. A crucial slip-up at a medical facility sets off a chain of events that tosses their world into disarray. From not being able to feed Cindy properly to witnessing her cough up blood, the unending nightmare prompts a deep dive into a horrifying past laced with negligence.
Reliving the past, Maurice scrutinizes his actions, the medical negligence, and the potential alternatives that might have altered the tragic outcome. Amidst heartbreaking reminiscences and life-altering regrets, he also unearths his profound love for Cindy and an inconceivable strength to endure misfortune, making this episode a compelling listen for anyone grappling with comparable hardships.
In this episode he outlines his transformation from a joyous father to a pseudo single parent and the primary caretaker for his ailing wife.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
One of the most careless act
that i've witnessed lapse of care was i was only gone for one or two hours i
had to be i had to go because i had to meet with how to talk to lawyers i had
to look at the next facility tour the next facility find the best you know gather
(00:25):
a lot of stuff and so i I had to leave for two hours.
I did not have coverage, even as much as hard as I tried.
And I was going to talk about how I recruited a team. I built a team called Cindy's Recovery Team.
There was a medical team and there was a recovery team with schedules that can
advocate for her when I couldn't be there.
And I left for only two hours. And what an NG tube is, is a nasal gastric tube,
(00:48):
a plastic tube that goes from a gravity bag to your nasal cavity,
through your throat, to your esophagus, down to your stomach,
as an alternative way to feed you.
And when I was gone for only one or two hours, I can return to that tube being basically exposed.
(01:09):
It was just dangling from the gravity bag. It was out of her nose,
her whole body. It was just dangling on the floor.
You know, unsanitary. It was just sitting there. And I was like,
that really made me very angry because I was only gone for...
What is the protocol for that?
(01:30):
Are they supposed to come in and check it every 10 minutes, 20 minutes?
Well, you know, here's the thing. I described you all the, how the tube passes
through your body, right?
For that to come out, it doesn't come out. It's going through your nasal cavity
all the way down to your stomach.
(01:51):
So what I, what as a post-op discussion, a post-mortem discussion,
if you will, it sounds like.
When you're bed obviously when you're bed bound you have to be turned right and
that means moving you to one side of your
body to the other side on a routine matter routine basis like you know every
(02:15):
one hour every two hours and as you continue to do that maybe you're not careful
enough and it catches parts of the rails of the bed and she turned and then
it comes out and so So that,
you know, came back to that.
The fact that I brought it up, the fact that I alerted the team,
(02:36):
the doctor says, what had happened here?
Tell me, why did not anybody else find it? Why did not secure it?
Why did they not re-implant it?
And, you know, that, you know, I had a meeting with the director of the LTAC
facility and everything like that.
That really, you know, that really frustrated me, angered me,
(03:02):
and also destroyed me at the same moment because I had to leave for two hours.
I have, I'm hardly away from her more than that.
I left for only two hours thinking that, okay, she'll be okay.
Just got to go get my stuff done.
I'm doing stuff for her and come back. and for only two hours,
(03:23):
just that two-hour lapse, then something happened.
It's like, how could I ever leave her side after that?
How could I ever leave her like that? That was only six weeks into after her
insult, which is her injury.
And so that's, you know, I... That is crazy.
That could get anybody angry, just even listening to that story.
(03:44):
That is malpractice and...
It's almost as if no one holds, okay, we're not naming any names,
not naming any hospitals, doctors, whatever, okay?
It's a situation that happened and we'll just leave it at that.
And if nobody's holding anybody accountable, they just don't do their job, you know?
(04:06):
And this is somebody that somebody loves and it's, yeah, it hurts my brain and really does.
The inhumanity in a practice about humanity is as hypocritical as they go.
So I don't know what it was, right?
I mean, do you have any ideas of what happened within those two hours?
(04:29):
Basically, nobody came by.
No, I think what happened was maybe the staff had turned her and continued to
turn her and then maybe it got caught in a rail or maybe it slowly.
And they did not notice? And they did not notice. They were just routinely doing whatever they could.
Or if they did notice, they didn't care.
(04:51):
Well, this was the LTAC facility, which is post-ER.
It's a long-term acute care, which is a hospital as well.
Well but you know and i
can tell you that because of
that and the things that had to transpire after
(05:13):
that because now we've lost the only way to feed her so we had so they were
blindly trying to reinsert the the tube the nurse one nurse tried another nurse
tried and it kept hitting roadblocks in her nasal cavity or her esophagus,
where it may be, and she was coughing up blood.
(05:34):
She was just agitated, coughing up blood.
And that was painful to see. I was there, you know, just watching her...
Endure all of this you know she and her
pipe was just bleeding because she was coughing because they were trying to push this pipe
all the way down and it's kind of like a
(05:55):
you know depending on your anatomy it's some it's sometimes it's an art to carefully
negotiate your anatomy to put it down especially when you're a small person
or you have you know small passages and,
you know, quickly turned into, well, we have to engage with another team,
(06:20):
a specialty team that does this type of stuff.
And, you know, it was also difficult.
They couldn't do it. And, you know, there's a whole challenge behind that.
And I was like, why did we even have to go through this?
Why are you making her suffer more than she is? And it's just many little things
(06:41):
that just ate me up, constantly driving me crazy,
constantly beating at my door all the time.
And I was nervous anytime I was away with her.
I was nervous when I was with her.
(07:03):
But that's one of the moments that I will remember for my lifetime,
because stuff like that shouldn't happen, and it happened. So she was suffering
more than she needed to suffer.
So I want to step back a moment to that very first night and give a little bit
(07:27):
more detail about what happened.
So the first ER that we went to through...
Let me start that again. Hmm. All right.
So, and talk about some of the frustrations or the struggles I had from the
(07:52):
get-go through this journey.
You know, when Cindy was admitted to the ER, she was in a very sort of disoriented state, painful state.
She was really in pain. And I remember when I drove up to the ER,
which is the fastest way to get there, versus ambulance, if you can believe
(08:15):
that or not, get in the car and go.
And that's what I did. I drove her to the ER, got to the front of the facility,
carried her all the way in.
Because at that point she was unable to really function and time was of the essence.
(08:37):
You carried her? Carried her. Like literally like in two arms? In two arms.
Into the hospital, wow. So the sliding doors open and I carried her and it wasn't far, far, right?
It was in the darkness of the night. I don't recall the exact time,
(09:00):
but we'll just say it is maybe 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., right? And so I got there.
I called while I was in the car saying, expect us coming.
Is anybody there? Are you going to be ready for this?
And, you know, the front desk person basically said, yeah,
(09:21):
you're going to be the probably probably
the only person being admitted right now and
which you know isn't great
but isn't bad right first rate care
first response care so we got
there quickly carried in they had a wheelchair ready so i plopped her in the
(09:42):
wheelchair and then they asked for paperwork it's just kind of standard procedures
because they don't know what it is i don't know what it is so having all that that work done,
then her getting willed and ferried into one of the rooms,
(10:02):
working her up, which basically means giving her IV or drawing blood and whatnot.
There was a struggle to really find a vein for her. She's a small person.
But what frustrated me was the urgency from which, or the lack of urgency.
(10:26):
We were the only one there, and I expressed to them the history of the day, what had happened.
And I also mentioned that she has a pre-existing condition.
She's on anticoagulants, which is really blood thinners.
Right. for I think when you hear that when you have a headache and you are on
(10:53):
blood thinners as a trained professional I think,
that should raise some red flags in any case I also.
Told them that I would like to have a CT scan and please do it soon because
I don't know what is going on and she has this severe headache,
(11:14):
and all the while when they're trying to work her up trying to find vein
trying to you know needle didn't take she can't get
a vein they go back and sterilize and so three or
four round trips going to outside of the room coming back
10 minutes elapsed 15 minutes elapsed 30 minutes elapsed and i see sydney deteriorating
right before my eyes it was heartbreaking and i'm telling you that she sat on
(11:40):
the bed from kind of tossing and turning, has a bad stomach ache,
her legs moving to a person that seems to be possessed by a demon because she
was hitting her head with her hands and her fist because it hurt so bad.
She's like, please make it go away. She was hitting herself as if someone else had possessed her.
(12:03):
It was heartbreaking. I could not...
I freaked out. I panicked. I walked. I paced. I said, where's the doctor?
Please, please give her a painkiller. And, you know, 30 minutes to an hour.
Finally got a CT scan. You know, they were trying to get her onto a wheelchair.
(12:27):
But like I told you, her state is not composed.
It's, you know, they're trying to say, can you get up, whatever.
And I was so, I don't know, I lost patience because I, needless to say,
I said, move aside, I will grab her. And I did.
And I didn't feel the weight of her.
(12:49):
I didn't feel the struggle of her. I had adrenaline. I had the strength and power to move her.
I lifted her up, jolted her, picked her up from the chair, picked her from the
bed in the room, put her in the wheelchair,
and moved her to the CT scan room.
Room and as the radiologist was
(13:12):
performing her scan there was
an erupt and a start i
mean it was kind of started started she started to scan and just kind of like
speak under her breath and then all of a sudden she said oh my gosh and i'm
not in the room for because you know you're behind the the room in the window looking at her.
(13:38):
And she said, she's bleeding from the brain.
Like again, almost had to strap her down because she could not sit still for a scan.
But again, while scanning her, they quickly discovered that she was bleeding
in the brain and said, we have to get you out of here.
(13:58):
And at that point, oh shit.
It's going from clinically observing her deteriorating to now confirming that
something seriously is wrong is the next level.
You've just kind of leveled down or up, if you will.
(14:21):
At that point, it was all hands on deck.
The ER that we were at was not equipped to perform surgery. They didn't have a neurosurgeon.
So they had to make calls for transport by ambulance.
And I tell you that, like I said earlier, it was far quicker for me to drive
(14:45):
her to the ER than it was to call for an ambulance.
It took them probably another 30 minutes before a team came.
And there's a number of logistical stuff and I don't really know all the details, but I can tell you that.
(15:10):
Between the doctor describing what condition Cindy was in, what is needed,
and for him, he wanted to intubate her, but yet he spent five to 15 minutes
telling the team, I want to intubate her, but yet he didn't do it.
And the team said, we've got to go.
There's a hospital right over here.
(15:31):
I think it was a trauma two or trauma one level hospital, which has a neurosurgeon on call.
We can get her there and we'll just, you know...
Kind of sustain her vitals while on
the way there but he went to intubator he was prepping her but he took you know
what seemed forever going back and forth in discussion and i all the while i'm
(15:56):
kind of a fly on the wall not trying to interrupt the process because i may cause it to to,
you know, be further disruptive.
All the while I'm saying, you know, you guys need to get on this.
(16:18):
So they got her into the ambulance when the team came from the ER and we're
going to transfer to the other ER.
I said, she has shallow breathing, but she's alive.
That gave me a glimmer of hope. So I tailed the car to the next ER facility
and was met by a team there,
(16:40):
far more prepared for our situation.
The call, hospitalist talked to me, the neurosurgeon on call was ready.
They did a quick scan immediately and told me the situation.
She was obviously bleeding from the brain, and what we know now was brain hemorrhage,
(17:06):
so the endocrinal brain hemorrhage.
And they needed to perform an emergent operation in order to save her life.
And so I touched on this a little bit on the first episode, previous episode,
that I needed to make an immediate decision. And it was a clear decision, although it was very...
(17:31):
Very real in decision about, and the reality that from the operation,
she may not come out of this.
The details like that, that happened that night, as I think back today,
makes me feel the, what might've been different.
(17:53):
What, you know, time is of essence when we're talking about,
you know, your brain is a sensitive organ organ and
it's trapped in a vessel which is your you know
your skull when and when you're hemorrhaging you're bleeding there's
no place for it to go and so
as it continues to swell up it causes
damage and for the
(18:17):
the brain the longer you press on it the more damage you do the longer you know
you're in that state and so today i think about maybe she could have been far better,
if we if maybe i had done something different maybe the care that was given
(18:39):
to her was done something different but i know that a headache is can present
itself as just a headache like Like any one of us that have chronic headaches from time to time,
it's well documented that you can have chronic migraines, a headache,
and think nothing of it until something much more serious happens.
(19:04):
I'll just say that for anybody listening, and this goes to the character of Cindy.
She really hates to bother people.
She's selfless is the perfect word for a person like Cindy.
And for her to even acknowledge a headache, it has to be the worst headache ever, right?
(19:29):
So, yeah, there's really nothing that you could have done.
And I'm thinking you've come to grips with that or do you still struggle with that?
I've come to grips. You did pretty much everything you could have done.
Yeah, I'm the biggest critic of myself. As you know, you know me for a while,
(19:49):
I'm highly critical of myself.
I always try to serve to protect and serve for perfection.
And I have come to terms, to a certain degree, that there's a lot out of my control here.
And that's the hard part about it as well.
(20:12):
I mentioned before that I did not understand how others could feel so down,
depressed, that they would not find any way out other than sacrificing their lives.
(20:36):
I will tell you that having gone through this traumatic event here that I know
what it feels like to be trapped.
What it means when you have no
control of anything and you have no escape and you just have to move on.
I can understand that. I still do not feel that that is anywhere within my realm
(21:03):
of thinking, but now I understand what it feels like to be trapped.
Being trapped is basically being cornered and there's no escape.
So you're just lost.
Now I've been to hell and back. I know Cindy has. and she is still struggling as we speak, you know?
(21:28):
So I don't know, you know, how truly she feels.
And one day I think we'll get more clarity out of that.
But yeah.
There's a lot of hindsight thinking that I have done of people,
(21:51):
how i move forward in life and not to
make the same perhaps mistakes or
or how to become a better human being yeah and so you becoming a better human
being is is the path for hudson right as as of now you know i mean i have hope
you have hope that cindy may one day become,
(22:16):
a hundred percent okay and and then she could be the figure for hudson too but as of now.
You are it right and i'm glad to hear you talk that way you know it shows you've
come out of the the the dark place you know you're still in there maybe you
(22:39):
set a foot out and you know there was a time,
you know, in our communications, probably during the darkest time,
you know, that I wondered about Hudson,
the care he's getting,
you know, how you're handling it.
It was hard to say because like I said before, I really did not want to pry
(23:00):
into your life more than anything that you'd want want to share, you know?
So I'm glad to hear it. You know, it's, it's, it's you being very strong and that's admirable.
A lot of men probably would have broken down and become useless.
But you, you pull through and hey man, that's, that's all love for you, you know?
(23:26):
So. You know, I think a lot of the character or the person I've become,
as I mentioned before, is due to the fact that Cindy inspired me to be a better person.
You know, you mentioned earlier that she sometimes would,
you know, she doesn't really express her feelings or the pain that she's going
(23:48):
through herself and for her to say something and mean something.
Thing so for people don't know you know cindy has had a congenital heart disease.
And she was born with a short stick
and it keeps getting shorter but that
(24:09):
never defined her that never broke her it made her stronger but yet she never
used that as a crutch she never when we dated she never you know threw that
in my face or put in the background and you know say that you know because of
this is why I can't do this or this,
she would rather,
(24:32):
help me fulfill my dreams than.
Fulfilling her dreams by preventing me doing something that that she couldn't
do you know she was yeah she was suffering she was never the victim right,
great she was you know we there's a
(24:55):
there's a story in our dating
days where we would
dance we go to a wedding we dance and
you know probably 10 minutes
in or 15 minutes in she said her
feet was hurting her heels you
know her heels were bothering her so she just just need to sit down and
(25:17):
she'd say yeah why don't you kind
of like dance with you know one of those other
girls right there i let me just give a rest couldn't
she had some you know
health issues that she was battling since she
was a child and she didn't
use that as an excuse she didn't allow me
(25:40):
to really you know save
her from anything she you know that's an example of her being a very generous
and bigger person and excusing herself so that I can have a good time so that's that is the person.
(26:05):
Inspires me. So as an advocate,
I've been by her side through this whole process and it pains me and it hurts
me and it frustrates me when things don't go as expected or as planned or she's
(26:27):
not not getting the quality of care,
the level of care that I would want for somebody, for a loved one.
So that night was a situation where I felt helpless.
I felt helpless, rather.
I let her down. i
(26:49):
i you know i wish i could pick her
up raise her up tell what's wrong get her you
know get her all better but i couldn't and
then i have to trust other
people to take care of her and when they fail her
(27:10):
they fail me and i don't know how to really handle that i just get there's a
part Part of me that you mentioned where I eventually flipped the switch and
said, I have to execute on my responsibilities.
I have no time to grieve. I have no time to think about what the future is holding.
(27:32):
I have to execute on my survival instincts.
We have to keep moving forward. I have to do what is required to keep my family
going, And that is to stabilize Sydney medically,
keep my son thriving.
(27:54):
Provide for the family. Have you given yourself the time to grieve, to cry?
I mean, to just sit down and just let it out, the pressure?
Have you given yourself that time? I think in some ways I have,
but I'm very resistant to because there's a part of me that is very analytical,
(28:20):
calculating, and like, what is this going to do for me?
But there's a part of me that understands that this is part of the healing process,
part of the coming to terms with, the part of me that allows me to stabilize
and get sanity again is to allow myself to feel the pain.
(28:43):
I was trying to hide the pain and I was not doing it very well.
Well, clearly this is a traumatic event that has never, ever happened to me.
It's the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, I imagine, in my lifetime.
Even though this is a past event, this is probably the worst thing that would ever happen to me.
(29:05):
And I was very resistant to feeling the pain, but at the same time,
I could not hide it. But yeah, I am, I broke down a few times.
You know, I, it's taken me a long time to really compose and find a point in
(29:28):
time where I can talk about this again.
And it's, like I said, this podcast is supposed to be meant to be cathartic.
And so by me speaking about this, I am realizing that.
Okay, I'll be all right. I'm healing. Our family's healing.
(29:50):
And actually, it's not even a point of time. It is kind of like more or less
the situation now where I have become the active single parent,
and an active caretaker for my partner,
for my wife, who are supposed to share the load with me, to share the burden
(30:13):
of the stress in life to help me when I'm down.
And so when Cindy fell ill through this, in a worse state.
She couldn't talk. She was trached.
(30:36):
She had a feeding tube, she couldn't eat, a catheter, she couldn't dispose on her own free will,
she was immobile, yet that flicker that she had in her eyes gave me hope.
(30:57):
So we were purely communicating through blinks, a series of blinks.
I built a language around blinking.
My brother, who I mentioned, he started devising, started quickly thinking and
would start brainstorming about ways to communicate with her in this current state.
(31:18):
And that's to say that Cindy was, and I, I mean, we were completely helpless in each other's arms.
Trying to talk to her was difficult because she couldn't talk.
And the thoughts in my head, me thoughts were, how do you want me to raise Hudson?
(31:45):
What do you want him to wear today? What do you want me to eat today?
Because that eight months leading up to that moment, she was the director of the ensemble.
Humble she planned and
you know yeah her lives more
or less and now i was left to question myself question her and you know it's
(32:13):
moments like that that you realize how much an impact a person makes in your life.
You know, I would, every day, every night that she was at the hospital,
when I would be with her all day long and then I had to go take care of my son,
I would come home to now an empty house that was filled mostly because of her.
(32:41):
The bathroom and there'd be his or her sink and is it was left exactly it was and,
and in the days that i
had to make a decision i was really
struggling because every night i come home to his
or her closet to his or her bed
(33:02):
his or her bathroom i would
get my son ready where where cindy always
flanked him the other side and now i saw an empty void and
i'm telling mom is getting better i don't
i know you don't know who mom is you haven't fully
been aware that she has been by your bedside far before i came to the rescue
(33:25):
but and that it's moments like those that nearly broke me to pieces because
i did not only lose potentially lost a mother i mean a wife but but also a mother,
you know, it was just another grieving point for me.
(33:46):
So I, I didn't have to allow myself to really feel the pain.
I just felt it all the time.
And so it just became, I just became numb. I became a shell of myself.
I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know if I could live.
Myself again. In fact, I don't even know what the new normal is.
(34:10):
It's not even settled in yet. So every day is a new day.
Yeah. You know, this would be a good reminder to the listeners that Maurice
is still going through this.
This is not the, you know, there's no, there's no end that we know of just yet.
And he still deals with the, you know, the, the hardship of pretty much being
(34:34):
a single father and also taking care of your wife who has a disability.
And the things that Maurice goes through and he says,
what you guys just heard right now, just understand also that when I asked him
about Cindy and his hardship and her hardships,
(34:57):
he definitely knows that that he would never, you know, wish upon anybody.
And he knows that he would not rather be Cindy.
Because, and I thought that was very impactful when you told me that,
because it's, Cindy's a mother.
(35:18):
When this happened, she was a new mother.
And if you've ever been around a new mother, they love that child to death.
Death they want to be there for that child she was the
one that if he cried she ran you know
she might have spoiled him a bit but that's because of
how much mothers love him i know my wife
(35:39):
is like that too you know and i love her for that you know like there's nothing
like a mother's nurture as much as us fathers do so i feel like there's just
something special between a child and their mother and to deprive a child of that is really unfair.
And I say all that to say this.
(36:02):
That and Cindy being trapped in her own body is, I wouldn't even call it a nightmare.
That there has to be something, a word worse than a nightmare because she's trapped.
She wants to be there for Maurice. She wants to be there for her son.
She's the person that's never wanted to burden anybody. And here she is trapped in her own mind.
(36:27):
Like that, I can't even imagine anything worse than that. And it's still going on.
And it's been a year, a year and a half, right?
When you say unfair, that word isn't even enough.
Even, sorry, I went off a little bit, but I just had to say that.
(36:49):
I uh you know I there's moment of times where I would because she when she couldn't talk,
for days weeks months I really missed her voice I would call her phone so I
could hear the answering machine because it was so perky she would just say
(37:10):
hi sorry you know you've reached so and so so So I can't get to the call,
but I would call it because I needed her beside me.
But you get to choose who you marry.
So I really needed her, and now she wasn't there.
(37:34):
And every night I saw Hudson, he couldn't give me feedback.
Back he didn't say anything but he resembled cindy and that just made it worse
i know some would say that would make it better but it made it worse for me
(37:54):
because it reminded me that you.
Us may not have the same person here so you know how your phone always shows
you memories and and photos and stuff like that.
You know, I occasionally will crop up and pop up and, you know,
(38:16):
I see photos of us, you know, taking a hike in the park or something like that.
And I really want that again. But times are different right now.
We're in a new phase.
But I also realize it's all in the wake. what Hudson was, you know,
(38:38):
quote unquote, while she was sleeping.
And so this is also sort of an awakening for her.
Because she can, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm speaking to her when I
tell her that when I'm with you.
(39:00):
I am with you. When I'm not with you, I'm doing stuff for you.
I'm always with you in person or in spirit, but I will always be with you every time.
You know, he was at eight months old.
He was still, I mean, kids are learning at a very rapid rate.
(39:21):
They're changing diaper sizes. They're changing clothes.
Their eating habits are changing. They're evolving very, very quickly.
And all these experiences these milestones
cindy was missing out and i
felt terrible about it but i would weeks go
by and then sometimes i just sit by her bed and tell her
(39:43):
oh hudson you know has been saying
this now or he's been doing this or he seemed like
this hoping that hoping that
that in and of itself
would provide that extra boost of
motivation for her to fight longer fight
(40:04):
harder to please come back you have so
much more to live for than to give up and i
feel like this is the perfect stopping point okay trying to keep it to maybe
about an hour or so if if longer needed that's fine but i feel like this is
the perfect stopping point because the way you ended the story,
(40:28):
I think it would be good for the next episode if we talk about little milestones along the way.
I know the journey is still going, but there were little milestones and giant
milestones in her progress, and I think that would be great for Podcast 3.
So thanks for anybody who's listening, and I guess we'll see you episode.
(40:56):
Music.
One of the most careless act
that i've witnessed lapse of care was i was only gone for one or two hours i
had to be i had to go because i had to meet with how to talk to lawyers i had
to look at the next facility tour the next facility find the best you know gather
(00:25):
a lot of stuff and so i I had to leave for two hours.
I did not have coverage, even as much as hard as I tried.
And I was going to talk about how I recruited a team. I built a team called Cindy's Recovery Team.
There was a medical team and there was a recovery team with schedules that can
advocate for her when I couldn't be there.
And I left for only two hours. And what an NG tube is, is a nasal gastric tube,
(00:48):
a plastic tube that goes from a gravity bag to your nasal cavity,
through your throat, to your esophagus, down to your stomach,
as an alternative way to feed you.
And when I was gone for only one or two hours, I can return to that tube being basically exposed.
(01:09):
It was just dangling from the gravity bag. It was out of her nose,
her whole body. It was just dangling on the floor.
You know, unsanitary. It was just sitting there. And I was like,
that really made me very angry because I was only gone for...
What is the protocol for that?
(01:30):
Are they supposed to come in and check it every 10 minutes, 20 minutes?
Well, you know, here's the thing. I described you all the, how the tube passes
through your body, right?
For that to come out, it doesn't come out. It's going through your nasal cavity
all the way down to your stomach.
(01:51):
So what I, what as a post-op discussion, a post-mortem discussion,
if you will, it sounds like.
When you're bed obviously when you're bed bound you have to be turned right and
that means moving you to one side of your
body to the other side on a routine matter routine basis like you know every
(02:15):
one hour every two hours and as you continue to do that maybe you're not careful
enough and it catches parts of the rails of the bed and she turned and then
it comes out and so So that,
you know, came back to that.
The fact that I brought it up, the fact that I alerted the team,
(02:36):
the doctor says, what had happened here?
Tell me, why did not anybody else find it? Why did not secure it?
Why did they not re-implant it?
And, you know, that, you know, I had a meeting with the director of the LTAC
facility and everything like that.
That really, you know, that really frustrated me, angered me,
(03:02):
and also destroyed me at the same moment because I had to leave for two hours.
I have, I'm hardly away from her more than that.
I left for only two hours thinking that, okay, she'll be okay.
Just got to go get my stuff done.
I'm doing stuff for her and come back. and for only two hours,
(03:23):
just that two-hour lapse, then something happened.
It's like, how could I ever leave her side after that?
How could I ever leave her like that? That was only six weeks into after her
insult, which is her injury.
And so that's, you know, I... That is crazy.
That could get anybody angry, just even listening to that story.
(03:44):
That is malpractice and...
It's almost as if no one holds, okay, we're not naming any names,
not naming any hospitals, doctors, whatever, okay?
It's a situation that happened and we'll just leave it at that.
And if nobody's holding anybody accountable, they just don't do their job, you know?
(04:06):
And this is somebody that somebody loves and it's, yeah, it hurts my brain and really does.
The inhumanity in a practice about humanity is as hypocritical as they go.
So I don't know what it was, right?
I mean, do you have any ideas of what happened within those two hours?
(04:29):
Basically, nobody came by.
No, I think what happened was maybe the staff had turned her and continued to
turn her and then maybe it got caught in a rail or maybe it slowly.
And they did not notice? And they did not notice. They were just routinely doing whatever they could.
Or if they did notice, they didn't care.
(04:51):
Well, this was the LTAC facility, which is post-ER.
It's a long-term acute care, which is a hospital as well.
Well but you know and i
can tell you that because of
that and the things that had to transpire after
(05:13):
that because now we've lost the only way to feed her so we had so they were
blindly trying to reinsert the the tube the nurse one nurse tried another nurse
tried and it kept hitting roadblocks in her nasal cavity or her esophagus,
where it may be, and she was coughing up blood.
(05:34):
She was just agitated, coughing up blood.
And that was painful to see. I was there, you know, just watching her...
Endure all of this you know she and her
pipe was just bleeding because she was coughing because they were trying to push this pipe
all the way down and it's kind of like a
(05:55):
you know depending on your anatomy it's some it's sometimes it's an art to carefully
negotiate your anatomy to put it down especially when you're a small person
or you have you know small passages and,
you know, quickly turned into, well, we have to engage with another team,
(06:20):
a specialty team that does this type of stuff.
And, you know, it was also difficult.
They couldn't do it. And, you know, there's a whole challenge behind that.
And I was like, why did we even have to go through this?
Why are you making her suffer more than she is? And it's just many little things
(06:41):
that just ate me up, constantly driving me crazy,
constantly beating at my door all the time.
And I was nervous anytime I was away with her.
I was nervous when I was with her.
(07:03):
But that's one of the moments that I will remember for my lifetime,
because stuff like that shouldn't happen, and it happened. So she was suffering
more than she needed to suffer.
So I want to step back a moment to that very first night and give a little bit
(07:27):
more detail about what happened.
So the first ER that we went to through...
Let me start that again. Hmm. All right.
So, and talk about some of the frustrations or the struggles I had from the
(07:52):
get-go through this journey.
You know, when Cindy was admitted to the ER, she was in a very sort of disoriented state, painful state.
She was really in pain. And I remember when I drove up to the ER,
which is the fastest way to get there, versus ambulance, if you can believe
(08:15):
that or not, get in the car and go.
And that's what I did. I drove her to the ER, got to the front of the facility,
carried her all the way in.
Because at that point she was unable to really function and time was of the essence.
(08:37):
You carried her? Carried her. Like literally like in two arms? In two arms.
Into the hospital, wow. So the sliding doors open and I carried her and it wasn't far, far, right?
It was in the darkness of the night. I don't recall the exact time,
(09:00):
but we'll just say it is maybe 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., right? And so I got there.
I called while I was in the car saying, expect us coming.
Is anybody there? Are you going to be ready for this?
And, you know, the front desk person basically said, yeah,
(09:21):
you're going to be the probably probably
the only person being admitted right now and
which you know isn't great
but isn't bad right first rate care
first response care so we got
there quickly carried in they had a wheelchair ready so i plopped her in the
(09:42):
wheelchair and then they asked for paperwork it's just kind of standard procedures
because they don't know what it is i don't know what it is so having all that that work done,
then her getting willed and ferried into one of the rooms,
(10:02):
working her up, which basically means giving her IV or drawing blood and whatnot.
There was a struggle to really find a vein for her. She's a small person.
But what frustrated me was the urgency from which, or the lack of urgency.
(10:26):
We were the only one there, and I expressed to them the history of the day, what had happened.
And I also mentioned that she has a pre-existing condition.
She's on anticoagulants, which is really blood thinners.
Right. for I think when you hear that when you have a headache and you are on
(10:53):
blood thinners as a trained professional I think,
that should raise some red flags in any case I also.
Told them that I would like to have a CT scan and please do it soon because
I don't know what is going on and she has this severe headache,
(11:14):
and all the while when they're trying to work her up trying to find vein
trying to you know needle didn't take she can't get
a vein they go back and sterilize and so three or
four round trips going to outside of the room coming back
10 minutes elapsed 15 minutes elapsed 30 minutes elapsed and i see sydney deteriorating
right before my eyes it was heartbreaking and i'm telling you that she sat on
(11:40):
the bed from kind of tossing and turning, has a bad stomach ache,
her legs moving to a person that seems to be possessed by a demon because she
was hitting her head with her hands and her fist because it hurt so bad.
She's like, please make it go away. She was hitting herself as if someone else had possessed her.
(12:03):
It was heartbreaking. I could not...
I freaked out. I panicked. I walked. I paced. I said, where's the doctor?
Please, please give her a painkiller. And, you know, 30 minutes to an hour.
Finally got a CT scan. You know, they were trying to get her onto a wheelchair.
(12:27):
But like I told you, her state is not composed.
It's, you know, they're trying to say, can you get up, whatever.
And I was so, I don't know, I lost patience because I, needless to say,
I said, move aside, I will grab her. And I did.
And I didn't feel the weight of her.
(12:49):
I didn't feel the struggle of her. I had adrenaline. I had the strength and power to move her.
I lifted her up, jolted her, picked her up from the chair, picked her from the
bed in the room, put her in the wheelchair,
and moved her to the CT scan room.
Room and as the radiologist was
(13:12):
performing her scan there was
an erupt and a start i
mean it was kind of started started she started to scan and just kind of like
speak under her breath and then all of a sudden she said oh my gosh and i'm
not in the room for because you know you're behind the the room in the window looking at her.
(13:38):
And she said, she's bleeding from the brain.
Like again, almost had to strap her down because she could not sit still for a scan.
But again, while scanning her, they quickly discovered that she was bleeding
in the brain and said, we have to get you out of here.
(13:58):
And at that point, oh shit.
It's going from clinically observing her deteriorating to now confirming that
something seriously is wrong is the next level.
You've just kind of leveled down or up, if you will.
(14:21):
At that point, it was all hands on deck.
The ER that we were at was not equipped to perform surgery. They didn't have a neurosurgeon.
So they had to make calls for transport by ambulance.
And I tell you that, like I said earlier, it was far quicker for me to drive
(14:45):
her to the ER than it was to call for an ambulance.
It took them probably another 30 minutes before a team came.
And there's a number of logistical stuff and I don't really know all the details, but I can tell you that.
(15:10):
Between the doctor describing what condition Cindy was in, what is needed,
and for him, he wanted to intubate her, but yet he spent five to 15 minutes
telling the team, I want to intubate her, but yet he didn't do it.
And the team said, we've got to go.
There's a hospital right over here.
(15:31):
I think it was a trauma two or trauma one level hospital, which has a neurosurgeon on call.
We can get her there and we'll just, you know...
Kind of sustain her vitals while on
the way there but he went to intubator he was prepping her but he took you know
what seemed forever going back and forth in discussion and i all the while i'm
(15:56):
kind of a fly on the wall not trying to interrupt the process because i may cause it to to,
you know, be further disruptive.
All the while I'm saying, you know, you guys need to get on this.
(16:18):
So they got her into the ambulance when the team came from the ER and we're
going to transfer to the other ER.
I said, she has shallow breathing, but she's alive.
That gave me a glimmer of hope. So I tailed the car to the next ER facility
and was met by a team there,
(16:40):
far more prepared for our situation.
The call, hospitalist talked to me, the neurosurgeon on call was ready.
They did a quick scan immediately and told me the situation.
She was obviously bleeding from the brain, and what we know now was brain hemorrhage,
(17:06):
so the endocrinal brain hemorrhage.
And they needed to perform an emergent operation in order to save her life.
And so I touched on this a little bit on the first episode, previous episode,
that I needed to make an immediate decision. And it was a clear decision, although it was very...
(17:31):
Very real in decision about, and the reality that from the operation,
she may not come out of this.
The details like that, that happened that night, as I think back today,
makes me feel the, what might've been different.
(17:53):
What, you know, time is of essence when we're talking about,
you know, your brain is a sensitive organ organ and
it's trapped in a vessel which is your you know
your skull when and when you're hemorrhaging you're bleeding there's
no place for it to go and so
as it continues to swell up it causes
damage and for the
(18:17):
the brain the longer you press on it the more damage you do the longer you know
you're in that state and so today i think about maybe she could have been far better,
if we if maybe i had done something different maybe the care that was given
(18:39):
to her was done something different but i know that a headache is can present
itself as just a headache like Like any one of us that have chronic headaches from time to time,
it's well documented that you can have chronic migraines, a headache,
and think nothing of it until something much more serious happens.
(19:04):
I'll just say that for anybody listening, and this goes to the character of Cindy.
She really hates to bother people.
She's selfless is the perfect word for a person like Cindy.
And for her to even acknowledge a headache, it has to be the worst headache ever, right?
(19:29):
So, yeah, there's really nothing that you could have done.
And I'm thinking you've come to grips with that or do you still struggle with that?
I've come to grips. You did pretty much everything you could have done.
Yeah, I'm the biggest critic of myself. As you know, you know me for a while,
(19:49):
I'm highly critical of myself.
I always try to serve to protect and serve for perfection.
And I have come to terms, to a certain degree, that there's a lot out of my control here.
And that's the hard part about it as well.
(20:12):
I mentioned before that I did not understand how others could feel so down,
depressed, that they would not find any way out other than sacrificing their lives.
(20:36):
I will tell you that having gone through this traumatic event here that I know
what it feels like to be trapped.
What it means when you have no
control of anything and you have no escape and you just have to move on.
I can understand that. I still do not feel that that is anywhere within my realm
(21:03):
of thinking, but now I understand what it feels like to be trapped.
Being trapped is basically being cornered and there's no escape.
So you're just lost.
Now I've been to hell and back. I know Cindy has. and she is still struggling as we speak, you know?
(21:28):
So I don't know, you know, how truly she feels.
And one day I think we'll get more clarity out of that.
But yeah.
There's a lot of hindsight thinking that I have done of people,
(21:51):
how i move forward in life and not to
make the same perhaps mistakes or
or how to become a better human being yeah and so you becoming a better human
being is is the path for hudson right as as of now you know i mean i have hope
you have hope that cindy may one day become,
(22:16):
a hundred percent okay and and then she could be the figure for hudson too but as of now.
You are it right and i'm glad to hear you talk that way you know it shows you've
come out of the the the dark place you know you're still in there maybe you
(22:39):
set a foot out and you know there was a time,
you know, in our communications, probably during the darkest time,
you know, that I wondered about Hudson,
the care he's getting,
you know, how you're handling it.
It was hard to say because like I said before, I really did not want to pry
(23:00):
into your life more than anything that you'd want want to share, you know?
So I'm glad to hear it. You know, it's, it's, it's you being very strong and that's admirable.
A lot of men probably would have broken down and become useless.
But you, you pull through and hey man, that's, that's all love for you, you know?
(23:26):
So. You know, I think a lot of the character or the person I've become,
as I mentioned before, is due to the fact that Cindy inspired me to be a better person.
You know, you mentioned earlier that she sometimes would,
you know, she doesn't really express her feelings or the pain that she's going
(23:48):
through herself and for her to say something and mean something.
Thing so for people don't know you know cindy has had a congenital heart disease.
And she was born with a short stick
and it keeps getting shorter but that
(24:09):
never defined her that never broke her it made her stronger but yet she never
used that as a crutch she never when we dated she never you know threw that
in my face or put in the background and you know say that you know because of
this is why I can't do this or this,
she would rather,
(24:32):
help me fulfill my dreams than.
Fulfilling her dreams by preventing me doing something that that she couldn't
do you know she was yeah she was suffering she was never the victim right,
great she was you know we there's a
(24:55):
there's a story in our dating
days where we would
dance we go to a wedding we dance and
you know probably 10 minutes
in or 15 minutes in she said her
feet was hurting her heels you
know her heels were bothering her so she just just need to sit down and
(25:17):
she'd say yeah why don't you kind
of like dance with you know one of those other
girls right there i let me just give a rest couldn't
she had some you know
health issues that she was battling since she
was a child and she didn't
use that as an excuse she didn't allow me
(25:40):
to really you know save
her from anything she you know that's an example of her being a very generous
and bigger person and excusing herself so that I can have a good time so that's that is the person.
(26:05):
Inspires me. So as an advocate,
I've been by her side through this whole process and it pains me and it hurts
me and it frustrates me when things don't go as expected or as planned or she's
(26:27):
not not getting the quality of care,
the level of care that I would want for somebody, for a loved one.
So that night was a situation where I felt helpless.
I felt helpless, rather.
I let her down. i
(26:49):
i you know i wish i could pick her
up raise her up tell what's wrong get her you
know get her all better but i couldn't and
then i have to trust other
people to take care of her and when they fail her
(27:10):
they fail me and i don't know how to really handle that i just get there's a
part Part of me that you mentioned where I eventually flipped the switch and
said, I have to execute on my responsibilities.
I have no time to grieve. I have no time to think about what the future is holding.
(27:32):
I have to execute on my survival instincts.
We have to keep moving forward. I have to do what is required to keep my family
going, And that is to stabilize Sydney medically,
keep my son thriving.
(27:54):
Provide for the family. Have you given yourself the time to grieve, to cry?
I mean, to just sit down and just let it out, the pressure?
Have you given yourself that time? I think in some ways I have,
but I'm very resistant to because there's a part of me that is very analytical,
(28:20):
calculating, and like, what is this going to do for me?
But there's a part of me that understands that this is part of the healing process,
part of the coming to terms with, the part of me that allows me to stabilize
and get sanity again is to allow myself to feel the pain.
(28:43):
I was trying to hide the pain and I was not doing it very well.
Well, clearly this is a traumatic event that has never, ever happened to me.
It's the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, I imagine, in my lifetime.
Even though this is a past event, this is probably the worst thing that would ever happen to me.
(29:05):
And I was very resistant to feeling the pain, but at the same time,
I could not hide it. But yeah, I am, I broke down a few times.
You know, I, it's taken me a long time to really compose and find a point in
(29:28):
time where I can talk about this again.
And it's, like I said, this podcast is supposed to be meant to be cathartic.
And so by me speaking about this, I am realizing that.
Okay, I'll be all right. I'm healing. Our family's healing.
(29:50):
And actually, it's not even a point of time. It is kind of like more or less
the situation now where I have become the active single parent,
and an active caretaker for my partner,
for my wife, who are supposed to share the load with me, to share the burden
(30:13):
of the stress in life to help me when I'm down.
And so when Cindy fell ill through this, in a worse state.
She couldn't talk. She was trached.
(30:36):
She had a feeding tube, she couldn't eat, a catheter, she couldn't dispose on her own free will,
she was immobile, yet that flicker that she had in her eyes gave me hope.
(30:57):
So we were purely communicating through blinks, a series of blinks.
I built a language around blinking.
My brother, who I mentioned, he started devising, started quickly thinking and
would start brainstorming about ways to communicate with her in this current state.
(31:18):
And that's to say that Cindy was, and I, I mean, we were completely helpless in each other's arms.
Trying to talk to her was difficult because she couldn't talk.
And the thoughts in my head, me thoughts were, how do you want me to raise Hudson?
(31:45):
What do you want him to wear today? What do you want me to eat today?
Because that eight months leading up to that moment, she was the director of the ensemble.
Humble she planned and
you know yeah her lives more
or less and now i was left to question myself question her and you know it's
(32:13):
moments like that that you realize how much an impact a person makes in your life.
You know, I would, every day, every night that she was at the hospital,
when I would be with her all day long and then I had to go take care of my son,
I would come home to now an empty house that was filled mostly because of her.
(32:41):
The bathroom and there'd be his or her sink and is it was left exactly it was and,
and in the days that i
had to make a decision i was really
struggling because every night i come home to his
or her closet to his or her bed
(33:02):
his or her bathroom i would
get my son ready where where cindy always
flanked him the other side and now i saw an empty void and
i'm telling mom is getting better i don't
i know you don't know who mom is you haven't fully
been aware that she has been by your bedside far before i came to the rescue
(33:25):
but and that it's moments like those that nearly broke me to pieces because
i did not only lose potentially lost a mother i mean a wife but but also a mother,
you know, it was just another grieving point for me.
(33:46):
So I, I didn't have to allow myself to really feel the pain.
I just felt it all the time.
And so it just became, I just became numb. I became a shell of myself.
I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know if I could live.
Myself again. In fact, I don't even know what the new normal is.
(34:10):
It's not even settled in yet. So every day is a new day.
Yeah. You know, this would be a good reminder to the listeners that Maurice
is still going through this.
This is not the, you know, there's no, there's no end that we know of just yet.
And he still deals with the, you know, the, the hardship of pretty much being
(34:34):
a single father and also taking care of your wife who has a disability.
And the things that Maurice goes through and he says,
what you guys just heard right now, just understand also that when I asked him
about Cindy and his hardship and her hardships,
(34:57):
he definitely knows that that he would never, you know, wish upon anybody.
And he knows that he would not rather be Cindy.
Because, and I thought that was very impactful when you told me that,
because it's, Cindy's a mother.
(35:18):
When this happened, she was a new mother.
And if you've ever been around a new mother, they love that child to death.
Death they want to be there for that child she was the
one that if he cried she ran you know
she might have spoiled him a bit but that's because of
how much mothers love him i know my wife
(35:39):
is like that too you know and i love her for that you know like there's nothing
like a mother's nurture as much as us fathers do so i feel like there's just
something special between a child and their mother and to deprive a child of that is really unfair.
And I say all that to say this.
(36:02):
That and Cindy being trapped in her own body is, I wouldn't even call it a nightmare.
That there has to be something, a word worse than a nightmare because she's trapped.
She wants to be there for Maurice. She wants to be there for her son.
She's the person that's never wanted to burden anybody. And here she is trapped in her own mind.
(36:27):
Like that, I can't even imagine anything worse than that. And it's still going on.
And it's been a year, a year and a half, right?
When you say unfair, that word isn't even enough.
Even, sorry, I went off a little bit, but I just had to say that.
(36:49):
I uh you know I there's moment of times where I would because she when she couldn't talk,
for days weeks months I really missed her voice I would call her phone so I
could hear the answering machine because it was so perky she would just say
(37:10):
hi sorry you know you've reached so and so so So I can't get to the call,
but I would call it because I needed her beside me.
But you get to choose who you marry.
So I really needed her, and now she wasn't there.
(37:34):
And every night I saw Hudson, he couldn't give me feedback.
Back he didn't say anything but he resembled cindy and that just made it worse
i know some would say that would make it better but it made it worse for me
(37:54):
because it reminded me that you.
Us may not have the same person here so you know how your phone always shows
you memories and and photos and stuff like that.
You know, I occasionally will crop up and pop up and, you know,
(38:16):
I see photos of us, you know, taking a hike in the park or something like that.
And I really want that again. But times are different right now.
We're in a new phase.
But I also realize it's all in the wake. what Hudson was, you know,
(38:38):
quote unquote, while she was sleeping.
And so this is also sort of an awakening for her.
Because she can, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm speaking to her when I
tell her that when I'm with you.
(39:00):
I am with you. When I'm not with you, I'm doing stuff for you.
I'm always with you in person or in spirit, but I will always be with you every time.
You know, he was at eight months old.
He was still, I mean, kids are learning at a very rapid rate.
(39:21):
They're changing diaper sizes. They're changing clothes.
Their eating habits are changing. They're evolving very, very quickly.
And all these experiences these milestones
cindy was missing out and i
felt terrible about it but i would weeks go
by and then sometimes i just sit by her bed and tell her
(39:43):
oh hudson you know has been saying
this now or he's been doing this or he seemed like
this hoping that hoping that
that in and of itself
would provide that extra boost of
motivation for her to fight longer fight
(40:04):
harder to please come back you have so
much more to live for than to give up and i
feel like this is the perfect stopping point okay trying to keep it to maybe
about an hour or so if if longer needed that's fine but i feel like this is
the perfect stopping point because the way you ended the story,
(40:28):
I think it would be good for the next episode if we talk about little milestones along the way.
I know the journey is still going, but there were little milestones and giant
milestones in her progress, and I think that would be great for Podcast 3.
So thanks for anybody who's listening, and I guess we'll see you episode.
(40:56):
Music.
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