My name is Taylor Rydel and I have decided to create this on behalf of my mother Angela Rydel. Making something like this calls for a level of vulnerability I ordinarily wouldn’t have, however, the last 35 days have taught me more than I’ve learned in all of my 21 years of life. My father and I have shared so many conversations with neurologists, speech therapists, infectious disease doctors – and there have been many days where I thought I would be losing my mother. So I am going to try my absolute best to keep my mother’s story short and concise.

On Friday, June 28th, my mom, who turns 56 this month on August 13th, suffered a stroke and two brain aneurysms. Her right-hand aneurysm ruptured causing a rare brain bleed known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Since this moment, she was driven from my grandparent’s home, where she would take care of my grandfather with dementia and help my grandmother in any way she could, to the Wilmington hospital via ambulance. My dad and I rushed there to be told she would be flown to Christiana.

We were told by the doctor that performed her surgery to secure her ruptured aneurysm, that due to the time duration of her bleed-out, she had a 50-50 chance in survival before she even made it to the hospital.

She survived it.

Since then my mom has been in the ICU for 32 days, the hospital for 35, and has undergone an extensive list of procedures to keep her alive and moving towards a linear trajectory in her recovery. One of the bigger ones was her transition from breathing ventilation and feeding tubes to a tracheostomy surgery and feeding peg. This has been the hardest on her and us all as just recently she has started to gain consciousness and this trach surgery leaves her without a voice. I miss my mom’s voice.

With the help of the doctors and therapists around her we are actively working towards a voice attachment and so many other things to get her discharged from the hospital into rehabilitation. To move again. To use her hands again. To talk again. To sit up again. To remember again.

I am just so happy she is alive. However this road is long. And hard. I have dedicated my strength to her and I will not give up on her recovery. I love my mother and she deserves a successful second chance. Angela deserves a happy, upward recovery and it is in my hands to make sure she gets that as her daughter. I know she would do that for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for any degree of support you can offer her and my family at this time.