Against all odds, he is getting better!

This is a picture of Daniel Dothsuk, my Dad.

He was hospitalized on Dec 5, 2021 with Covid 19.

With in 12 hours he was Intubated and placed on a ventilator and moved to the Covid intensive care floor at Sparrow hospital in Lansing.

His three plus month stay has been a horrible rollercoaster ride of hope and despair.

The nurses said that he is not the critical Covid patient they typically see. He’s 58 and has no co-morbidities.

He soon developed pneumonia which made oxygenating extremely challenging. He received a tracheostomy and they removed the ventilator from his mouth to the tracheostomy in his neck. He ran low grade fevers on and off, broke out with a rash all over his body, had a collapsed lung then around day 33 he was running a temp of 102, his heart rate was high, his blood pressure low, blood tests showed that he had septic shock. All of his numbers for blood gases and stats were going in the wrong direction. He developed a yeast infection in his blood, and was on the highest pressure setting possible on the ventilator.

on Jan 8 our family had “the meeting” with the doctors. They were out of things to try. We had to make a decision to discontinue treatment. They said the things like, he’ll never be better than this, he will be in a nursing home on a ventilator for life, would he want to live like this? We certainly felt the pressure, but I knew he could do this. We met on a Saturday and decided to give him until the following Friday to see if he would improve.

 

Friday mornings his levels of Ph , CO2, oxygen saturation, heart rate, and blood pressure showed slight improvements.

over the next 30 days he continued to make baby steps toward improvement. The progression first started after him being able to tolerate lower support on the ventilator step by step, then once his respiratory showed improvement other things began to take steps in the right direction to finally responding when told to wiggle his toes!

 

Intubation, tracheostomy, on ventilator, dialysis, bronchoscopies, MRI, XR, CAT scans, arterial line, pick line, peg tube, chest tube, catheters, and IV medications.

Dan will be finally discharging on march 19th after such a long road. Making this a 4 month hospital stay with months of PT and OT so he can feed and dress himself, and learn to walk again.

My family and I have launched this go fund me for him to pay medical and hospital bills, bills that he will need to catch up on because of being so sick, so we expected hefty bills from hospital and Doctors.

He will not be able to work for a very long time, if ever, and will need financial assistance for daily living.

 

Challenging history

He was supposed to get back surgery right before he became ill for chronic back problems since he was in an auto accident in 1990. Since the accident, he has had approximately 30 surgeries all stemming from the original injury. All of the surgeries and pain make it extremely difficult to work steadily so he would lose jobs due to missed time.

 

In Dan’s younger years he was extremely active. He played football in high school, and was a body builder until his injuries did not allow. He is an avid drag racing, any racing fan and is still very interested in fitness.

We are asking for any size contributions so that after this stressful and long illness he will

not have to worry about paying all of the hospital bills.

 

After living through what Doctors And nurses said wasn’t possible, the stress of this debt is the last thing he needs.

 

please contribute what you can, and all thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated ❤️