I am Megan, Dave's wife, and I have been asked by many people to start a page to help our family in our current time of crisis.

Dave is a 39 year old Army combat veteran who served from 2009-2021. We met at the end of his career and got married in May of 2022. We have a total of 3 children - his 8 year old son from his previous marriage and my 13 and 14 year old daughters from my previous marriage that he adopted in 2023.

Our world flipped upside down at the end of August. I took Dave to the emergency room for thigh pain and a possible kidney infection or stone. He was admitted to our local hospital on August 27 for observation and concerns that he could have sepsis. During the first night, he had difficulty breathing and a rapid response called on him, which resulted in a move to ICU. It happened again on the afternoon of the 28th and he was intubated and placed on a ventilator.

He remained sedated and on the ventilator until the sedation was removed on September 5th. His lungs were not strong enough to wean off of the ventilator and he had a tracheostomy placed on September 10th.

He was officially diagnosed with sepsis and septic shock, although the cause of the initial infection was never determined despite a multitude of tests. During his hospitalization, his kidneys failed and he required dialysis, he developed blood clots in his arm, pneumonia, UTI, 3 types of staph infections, and more. He was in the ICU until he was discharged to an long term acute care hospital on September 17th where he will remain until he can be weaned from the tracheostomy.

I am a nurse and work full time in remote role. I have utilized all of my PTO during his ICU admission so I could be with him. Now that PTO has run out, I need to return to work even though my heart wants/needs to be with him. The facility that he is in is almost 2 hours from our home. I am committed to providing him and our children the normalcy that they all deserve and making sure that we see him daily during his recovery, which will mean almost 4 hours of driving for the days that I commute. I plan to stay with him (either with the kids or alone) as much as possible and work remotely from the hospital as I can.

My goal is to bring him home after he is successfully weaned from the tracheostomy so he can complete physical, occupational, and speech therapies from our home. He is very weak due to his long hospitalization and will require quite a bit of therapy.

Funds raised will go towards the following:

- travel expenses for me and the kids to go see Dave (fuel, hotels, maintenance)

- meals

- to assist with regular expenses as I am out of PTO and am currently taking unpaid leave from work

- insurance coinsurance as his hospitalization was not at a VA facility and will be through my commercial insurance

Thank you for your help with making sure Dave and the kids have as much normalcy as possible during our difficult time.

-Megan