Nichelle is a wonderful wife, mother, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher, and a friend to everyone she meets. 

Since 2011, Nichelle has suffered from Vasculitis and Cellulitis. She has done chemotherapy and various other medical treatments for almost a decade, since diagnosis, in an attempt to keep her body functional with a reasonable level of pain. These two diseases flair up every few months for lengths of time causing immense pain and various other medical issues. This most recent flair has taken a frightening turn.

On Thursday, February 6th, mid day Nichelle experienced an episode of confusion while at work. She was taken to the hospital and admitted with an extremely high ammonia and white blood cell blood serum levels.  The hospital worked towards eliminating possibilities of infection, kidney or liver failure, and many other things but was unable to determine the cause for such high ammonia levels. She was transferred to another hospital in town’s ICU. 

Later Thursday evening, Nichelle was placed on life support and put in a medically induced coma to alleviate stress and pain and to help her body focus solely on healing whatever’s causing the emergent medical occurrence. Friday night, February 7th, Nichelle began to express signs and symptoms of brain swelling. The attending physician alerted family this was a medical emergency and immediate family needed to gather. The on call neurosurgeon arrived shortly after being called and placed a inner cranial pressure monitor in her head to monitor the swelling of her brain. They will be able to monitor and determine if they need to do a further invasive surgery on her skull to allow her brain to swell without the pressure of her skull. 

At this point, her medical team still isn’t sure what the source of the problem is. She is on around the clock dialysis in hopes of lowering the ammonia level. Still the level has rose again. Early this morning, Nichelle’s doctors determined that a very expensive drug from Portland will most likely help get her ammonia levels down to a normal amount. It is determined that she will need 5 vials of this drug which costs $45,000 per vile. 

Nichelle's young family needs as much help as you can give during this stressful and scary time.  Anything you can give will help.


Thank you.