Support James' Recovery Journey

On February 1st, James had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), an abnormally developed blood vessel, suddenly burst and begin bleeding in his brain. He was at soccer practice at the time and immediately went to his mom in serious pain complaining of a headache. I was already on my way to his soccer game that was going to start after the practice, and by the time that I arrived he was lying down and barely speaking, each time we would try to speak to him the only thing he would say was asking us to pray. I carried him to my car and we immediately drove to the emergency room, and for the next hour there was a medical team surrounding him getting him stable and trying to determine what had happened. They decided quite quickly that he was going to need to take a helicopter to Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago. Before leaving they took him for a CT scan, which was the point where they identified what was described to us as a significant bleed on the right side of his brain.

I rode with him in the helicopter up to Chicago, and he was moved to the PICU unit as the began prep for an emergency craniotomy, the bleeding had stopped but they needed to relieve the pressure on his brain. For easily the 3 most anxious hours of my life, we waited while he was in surgery, with no idea what kind of news we would hear when it was finished.

Once he was out of surgery, we met with the surgeon and he immediately informed us that James was doing well and that he should have a full physical and cognitive recovery. He also let us know just how precarious of a position we had been in, that two more hours later may have been fatal, that on the other side of the brain and he may have had permanent damage to his speech function.

At this point we still weren’t out of the deep end yet, James was returning to his room with a piece of his skull still removed so that there was room for his brain to swell as it healed, and additionally there was concern there may be more abnormal blood vessels at risk of eventually bursting.

Over the next two days he slowly had his intubation removed and was woken out of the medically induced coma that he had been in, and he even was able to speak with us a bit, but at this point wasn’t really able to see yet. He had an angiogram to locate any additional abnormal vessels and the neuro team identified two more that would need to be removed.

James continued to slowly make progress over the next week, beginning to even walk a bit and assemble some small lego sets, and a week and a half later he had his second surgery to remove the other two vessels, had the piece of his skull returned and set in place with titanium bars, and just 15 days after we had flown to Comer he was ready to head home.

He’s still got a lot of recovery ahead, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, but each day seems to be a marked improvement from the day before and he’s just excited to be back home again.