Hello! Harold has been in the hospital for weeks. We need a little help. Anything helps.

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Today marks 50 days that Harold has been in the hospital. Every one of those has been a battle.

When he first got sick, they assumed it was pneumonia. Medicine wasn’t helping, and he was only getting more sick. It got to the point that he couldn’t even do normal things around the house without getting out of breath. It was frustrating, and he was upset that he wasn’t getting better. He went back to the doctor a week after getting the medicine for pneumonia, and was immediately sent to the E.R.

Hours later, he was admitted with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure and was in A-fib. This started a two week struggle of trying to control not only his heart rate, but his skyrocketing blood pressure and everything else that came with your heart giving up. Thirteen days later he came home. We had hope that things were starting to get better.

Harold was home for about a day and a half when he started to have neck pain and got an immediate intense headache.

When we took his blood pressure, it was 200/175 and climbing.

He was taken to the nearest hospital, which was Alex Bay. Hours later, he was life-flighted to Upstate Hospital with a bleeding in the brain.

Every single day at Upstate has been a fight. There’s been a new struggle to fight everyday.

When I (Rhonda) arrived at Upstate Hospital the next morning I found my husband on life support for a very serious hemorrhagic stroke. I was told that there was an extreme amount of bleeding. He needed to have drains put into his skull to relieve the pressure. He also developed brain seizure (epilepsy) from the swelling of his brain. He was heavily sedated for 6 days while the doctors preformed many procedures to save his life. His lungs are compromised and had to have a tracheotomy. I am told he has a very damaged right lung from something in his past. Once they stopped sedation Harold wasn’t waking up. The doctors told me they weren’t sure if he’d wake up, when he’d wake up or how he’d wake up. There was worry and concern that he’d have some sort of altered mental status from all the trauma. It took almost 2 weeks for him to come out of sedation when most people take 4-5 days. Harold is a fighter and has proven them all wrong. He hasn’t been able to speak and even though he is now awake, he is very very weak and will need weeks/ months of rehab.

Between pneumonia, his brain injury, the congestive heart failure, and A-fib, he is being treated for eighteen different things right now.

I believe that Harold can make a full recovery from the stroke but I am very concerned that he still has a fib and congestive heart failure that hasn’t been treated.

Medical bills are, to put it nicely, a troubling amount along with gas for travel to appointments and his rehab.

Through this all, I have been staying in Syracuse at his side the entire time to advocate for his care and make medical decisions that no one should have to make. I have left my daughter at home to manage all the responsibilities. She is the only one at our household working presently.

It’s an overwhelming and scary situation, but the reason we’re getting through it is because of the people we have supporting us.

So thank you, and keep fighting Harold