Jessica’s New Lungs

Jessica has sadly lost her fight and passed away. All funds will be going towards her peaceful funeral

Hi, my name is Jill and my twin sister Jessica has had a rough month. She started at Good Sam with a diagnosis of Pneumonia. Soon her lungs began to collapse. First her right and a chest tube was placed into her right lung and a continual suction was on to suck out the trapped liquid that was collapsing the lung. It seemed every time she moved or did anything really, her blood oxygen would drop as far as into the 70s to start (which ‘normal’ oxygen is close to 100).

A couple weeks later, bright in the morning, her oxygen just continued to drop. It got as low as in the 40s. The rapid response team came, she was sedated, intubated, and put in a chest tube on the left side right in her room. She was put into a medically induced coma and transferred to the ICU at Good Sam and on the ventilator. Not even within 2 hours of being there the doctor said we need to transport her to Bethesda North and get her on ECMO (an artificial lung). This was because their machine was doing 100% and she still wasn’t getting her blood oxygen to where it needed to be.

Once being rushed to the new hospital, she went straight into surgery to get the device connected to her heart, through the side of her neck, and to the machine. This device takes her blood directly from her heart, oxygenates it, and puts it back to her heart to be pumped to the rest of her body. This completely bypassed her lungs to give them time to heal.

After a day in the coma, they began to wake her up and she was so anxious and didn’t really know what was going on. It has been a battle with her anxiety finding the right medicine to help her still be able to communicate through sign language (as she cannot talk) and be awake enough to where she isn’t freaking out. As the doctors saw she needed the ventilator for an unknown amount of time, they did a tracheotomy so that they could connect and disconnect the ventilator as needed instead of going through her mouth.

The next step as of now is new lungs. She is on the transplant list at OSU and we are waiting to hear back from them as to what the next step is. Jessica remains in the ICU since July 17th.

Truly anything helps and we are so blessed that she has a chance to come home again ❤️