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I'm sharing the story of my friend Nicole and her son Elliott. Their long journey is heart wrenching but speaks volumes to the love and dedication of a mother and son. I’m praying for financial help for them. Not only would this eliminate the obvious burdens but would also provide some peace of mind while they focus on the most important thing - Elliott's recovery. These efforts seem small in comparison to all they’ve faced. Would you please consider helping?
Their story in Nicole’s words. I couldn’t have told it better!
So here I go with this very long crazy story. The 13th of June 2014 was the first day of summer vacation, Elliott and a couple of friends had planned a picnic at the park, they were going to spend the afternoon hanging out there in our old neighborhood in Walkersville. A couple hours later I received a call from one of Elliott's friends - he had fallen and it sounded like Elliott had broke his leg. His friend was absolutely right. I got to the park a few minutes later and the bones were just shy of popping out of his leg. I took him directly to FMH and they said it looked like he had a small break and told us to go to MMI the next morning to get an orthopedist to look at it. That evening Elliott's leg blew up in size - almost 3 times its normal size. We went to MMI the next morning- first thing they did was another X-ray and said that we needed to RUSH to Children's hospital in DC because he had THIRTEEN breaks in his tibia, fibula and ankle. We arrived at Children's and they rushed him into a procedure room to try to reduce the bone as the called it, they put him in a twilight sleep - he had an allergic reaction to the medicine and flat lined, in turn, leaving him unable to have the surgery for two more days until they figured out the anesthesia problem. During that time his leg had started getting black spots on it, which isn't that uncommon when you have bone breaks because your body is trying to heal itself. When they were finally able to do the surgery they ended up putting plates, screws and pins to rebuild all of that so that he could begin to heal. That should have been the end of the story, he was in the hospital 7 days for that surgery and recovery after at home - a check up in two weeks and he should have been healing with no problem, but because FMH did not get him into surgery ASAP, it caused a wealth of problems. We were at Children's two weeks later and when they opened the cast they discovered the fracture blisters had turned into a horrible gross black infection in several spots in his leg and foot. They rushed him back to surgery to irrigate the infection and they thought that would resolve the problem inside. They would treat him similar to how someone with severe burns would be treated. We were going back and forth to DC once a week so they could open the cast and make sure all was going as planned. Unfortunately it wasn't. Throughout this entire time he could not place any weight on his leg and was confined to a hospital bed at home so they could assure that the bones were setting. He continued to get worse with the infection throughout the summer and as a result he had three more surgeries which resulted in him being placed on a wound vac to work on the infection while he was in the hospital bed. The final surgery that summer was done September 19th - a full three months after this began. A skin graft was done to try and close the wounds that had resulted from the infections, that was not working and there was one spot where he had a ligament coming out of the skin on the front of his leg. At this point they were starting to feel like they may have to amputate his foot to allow this wound at the ankle finally heal, Thank God for a miracle - over the next few weeks it started to close and they were able to finally get it to shut. He missed his first 7 weeks of freshman year of high school but was finally allowed to start physical therapy in January of 2015. Because he had been non weight baring all that time so he then developed another problem that led to his heal bone deteriorating because of non use - much like a form of osteoporosis. He continued with physical therapy until August of 2015. At the point we thought this nightmare was finally over! His medical bills that year were over $500,000 but again thank God for good insurance. The next two years were good, it seemed that nightmare was a distant memory. Until Elliott came home from the pool in June last year and said he couldn't feel his toes. So we started back with Children's immediately. They thought he was suffering from nerve damage and started him back on physical therapy, the more he went to therapy the worse it seemed to get. His foot was cold constantly and he was experiencing shooting pains and cramps. They wanted him to take a few weeks off from therapy and see if just normal activity bothered him. Now this is where the financial problems come into play because Elliott's health insurance was reduced to the bare minimum, which leaves me with huge co-pays to take care of. Every time we go to Children's it is out of network but I am not going to start with a new doctor - they have been treating him and know his history. Last October it was determined that there is possibly an infection in the metal that was in his leg, that seemed to be the only reasonable answer at that point so Elliott underwent surgery number seven. It was a long surgery that removed all the metal. It was sent it to pathology assuming it would come back that it was causing all the pain and problems because it was infected. We were hopeful that was the answer to all of this. So he went back to non weight baring again and of course he had PT after that again with the same routine of back and forth to DC to be monitored once a week. Sadly the report came back and determined that it wasn't infected so now we were back at square one yet again. He has spent the last six months having cat scans, X-rays, and finally with the metal being out of his leg, he was able to have an MRI. He has spent many nights in the hospital in the past six months for pain management, he was a captain on the swim team this year but wasn't able to finish the season because the leg was giving him so much trouble. We were in and out of the hospital so much, they were at a loss trying to figure what the problem was. Our surgeon was adamant she saw an infection on the MRI but the radiologist said it wasn't, Our surgeon went to the Chair of the department and finally the other doctor agreed he had a massive infection in his leg. If it had been left untreated much longer he would eventually have had to have from his leg amputated from the knee down. It was decided he needed to have the surgery and that it needed to be coordinated with infectious disease so that they could treat it together. When they did the surgery on the 16th the surgeon was astonished at how massive the infection was in his leg. He spent 10 days in the hospital because he was in so much pain and they couldn't get it under control. They also needed to do the procedure to put the picc line in so that infectious disease can treat it with antibiotics. He is not allowed to put weight on his leg again and he can't go to school with the picc line in because he is at too big of a risk for other infections with in his body. Now we will have home health care coming to care for him, We have to go back to DC at least two times a week because they need to watch the incisions in his legs to make sure topical infection does not grow and infectious disease needs to monitor him while all of this is going on. Between gas, parking, medicine and co-pays I’ll be lucky to keep my head above water. The infection was so bad that they had to remove part of the bone, which means he will need to have another significant surgery sometime within the next 8-12 weeks. The cadaver bone will be put in where the bone is now missing in his leg. At this point we don’t know if he will be able to go to his high school graduation which is heart breaking and he has to defer going away to college because all of his medical procedures will continue into the fall and he has to stay local for all of this. All I know is Elliott Cessna is the strongest person I know, he wakes up everyday with a positive attitude no matter what he, finds the good in every day even when there isn't much that is good. He gets upset but he doesn't live there, He has missed so much of his school. No prom this year for him, he missed homecoming because he was in the hospital. There’s a list if what he has missed over an over again. I just want him to get better so he can enjoy the things a teenager is supposed to enjoy. I pray that we can go to graduation, I don’t want him to miss it. He has worked so hard to get there, I don’t want to add more to his pile of things missed. Im sorry this is so long but i could go on for hours with all the medical procedures he has been through.
Their story in Nicole’s words. I couldn’t have told it better!
So here I go with this very long crazy story. The 13th of June 2014 was the first day of summer vacation, Elliott and a couple of friends had planned a picnic at the park, they were going to spend the afternoon hanging out there in our old neighborhood in Walkersville. A couple hours later I received a call from one of Elliott's friends - he had fallen and it sounded like Elliott had broke his leg. His friend was absolutely right. I got to the park a few minutes later and the bones were just shy of popping out of his leg. I took him directly to FMH and they said it looked like he had a small break and told us to go to MMI the next morning to get an orthopedist to look at it. That evening Elliott's leg blew up in size - almost 3 times its normal size. We went to MMI the next morning- first thing they did was another X-ray and said that we needed to RUSH to Children's hospital in DC because he had THIRTEEN breaks in his tibia, fibula and ankle. We arrived at Children's and they rushed him into a procedure room to try to reduce the bone as the called it, they put him in a twilight sleep - he had an allergic reaction to the medicine and flat lined, in turn, leaving him unable to have the surgery for two more days until they figured out the anesthesia problem. During that time his leg had started getting black spots on it, which isn't that uncommon when you have bone breaks because your body is trying to heal itself. When they were finally able to do the surgery they ended up putting plates, screws and pins to rebuild all of that so that he could begin to heal. That should have been the end of the story, he was in the hospital 7 days for that surgery and recovery after at home - a check up in two weeks and he should have been healing with no problem, but because FMH did not get him into surgery ASAP, it caused a wealth of problems. We were at Children's two weeks later and when they opened the cast they discovered the fracture blisters had turned into a horrible gross black infection in several spots in his leg and foot. They rushed him back to surgery to irrigate the infection and they thought that would resolve the problem inside. They would treat him similar to how someone with severe burns would be treated. We were going back and forth to DC once a week so they could open the cast and make sure all was going as planned. Unfortunately it wasn't. Throughout this entire time he could not place any weight on his leg and was confined to a hospital bed at home so they could assure that the bones were setting. He continued to get worse with the infection throughout the summer and as a result he had three more surgeries which resulted in him being placed on a wound vac to work on the infection while he was in the hospital bed. The final surgery that summer was done September 19th - a full three months after this began. A skin graft was done to try and close the wounds that had resulted from the infections, that was not working and there was one spot where he had a ligament coming out of the skin on the front of his leg. At this point they were starting to feel like they may have to amputate his foot to allow this wound at the ankle finally heal, Thank God for a miracle - over the next few weeks it started to close and they were able to finally get it to shut. He missed his first 7 weeks of freshman year of high school but was finally allowed to start physical therapy in January of 2015. Because he had been non weight baring all that time so he then developed another problem that led to his heal bone deteriorating because of non use - much like a form of osteoporosis. He continued with physical therapy until August of 2015. At the point we thought this nightmare was finally over! His medical bills that year were over $500,000 but again thank God for good insurance. The next two years were good, it seemed that nightmare was a distant memory. Until Elliott came home from the pool in June last year and said he couldn't feel his toes. So we started back with Children's immediately. They thought he was suffering from nerve damage and started him back on physical therapy, the more he went to therapy the worse it seemed to get. His foot was cold constantly and he was experiencing shooting pains and cramps. They wanted him to take a few weeks off from therapy and see if just normal activity bothered him. Now this is where the financial problems come into play because Elliott's health insurance was reduced to the bare minimum, which leaves me with huge co-pays to take care of. Every time we go to Children's it is out of network but I am not going to start with a new doctor - they have been treating him and know his history. Last October it was determined that there is possibly an infection in the metal that was in his leg, that seemed to be the only reasonable answer at that point so Elliott underwent surgery number seven. It was a long surgery that removed all the metal. It was sent it to pathology assuming it would come back that it was causing all the pain and problems because it was infected. We were hopeful that was the answer to all of this. So he went back to non weight baring again and of course he had PT after that again with the same routine of back and forth to DC to be monitored once a week. Sadly the report came back and determined that it wasn't infected so now we were back at square one yet again. He has spent the last six months having cat scans, X-rays, and finally with the metal being out of his leg, he was able to have an MRI. He has spent many nights in the hospital in the past six months for pain management, he was a captain on the swim team this year but wasn't able to finish the season because the leg was giving him so much trouble. We were in and out of the hospital so much, they were at a loss trying to figure what the problem was. Our surgeon was adamant she saw an infection on the MRI but the radiologist said it wasn't, Our surgeon went to the Chair of the department and finally the other doctor agreed he had a massive infection in his leg. If it had been left untreated much longer he would eventually have had to have from his leg amputated from the knee down. It was decided he needed to have the surgery and that it needed to be coordinated with infectious disease so that they could treat it together. When they did the surgery on the 16th the surgeon was astonished at how massive the infection was in his leg. He spent 10 days in the hospital because he was in so much pain and they couldn't get it under control. They also needed to do the procedure to put the picc line in so that infectious disease can treat it with antibiotics. He is not allowed to put weight on his leg again and he can't go to school with the picc line in because he is at too big of a risk for other infections with in his body. Now we will have home health care coming to care for him, We have to go back to DC at least two times a week because they need to watch the incisions in his legs to make sure topical infection does not grow and infectious disease needs to monitor him while all of this is going on. Between gas, parking, medicine and co-pays I’ll be lucky to keep my head above water. The infection was so bad that they had to remove part of the bone, which means he will need to have another significant surgery sometime within the next 8-12 weeks. The cadaver bone will be put in where the bone is now missing in his leg. At this point we don’t know if he will be able to go to his high school graduation which is heart breaking and he has to defer going away to college because all of his medical procedures will continue into the fall and he has to stay local for all of this. All I know is Elliott Cessna is the strongest person I know, he wakes up everyday with a positive attitude no matter what he, finds the good in every day even when there isn't much that is good. He gets upset but he doesn't live there, He has missed so much of his school. No prom this year for him, he missed homecoming because he was in the hospital. There’s a list if what he has missed over an over again. I just want him to get better so he can enjoy the things a teenager is supposed to enjoy. I pray that we can go to graduation, I don’t want him to miss it. He has worked so hard to get there, I don’t want to add more to his pile of things missed. Im sorry this is so long but i could go on for hours with all the medical procedures he has been through.