Please give Rinat a second chance at life

My name is Marina and we’ve lived in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada for 10 years, and previously in St. Catharines for almost 2 decades with our two sons.

On March 17th of 2022, my 57-year-old husband, Rinat Safaraliyev, had a heart attack in the middle of the night, stopped breathing and died for an estimated 15 minutes. Emergency services restarted his breathing and Rinat had two stents installed at the Hamilton General Hospital. After 10 days in a coma, Rinat began to breathe on his own, and started to show signs life returning to his body. Over the weeks going forward, he began to recognize our family, move his arms, legs and speak.

The time spent not breathing had resulted in my husband obtaining a brain injury - he had extreme difficulty trying to do anything, had confusion and needed constant supervision and assistance. Rinat was in Hospital and in a brain rehabilitation facility for a combined 8 months. I was there with him every day, and for five months at the rehabilitation centre I slept by his side.

Before Rinat’s heart attack, he worked as an electrical engineering technologist and did great work for a local Hamilton based company. He really enjoyed his career and projects. Rinat also loved helping others and was always ready to lend a hand to others in need. Even in Hospital, when he just started to get better, he was offering to help repair things for the nurses.

In November, I took Rinat home and began to look after him myself, giving him constant care. Rinat has a PSW come daily and help while I am able to do my chores and take a mental break.

During the first months at home, using our savings, I paid for brain injury professionals to help with Rinat’s recovery and applied their recommendations. Rinat showed great progress in all aspects of his daily life. He began to walk more independently, communicate, remember events from his recent past, and showed great effort to try and learn things again. The treatment was working. Rinat was a calm, smiling man striving for self-improvement, full of hope for the future, and wanted to help many people with his engineering experience.

The past couple of months Rinat’s condition has noticeably deteriorated. His memory, confusion, coordination, bodily control, and physical abilities like being able to stand or even move his limbs have all begun to degrade. His temperament has worsened too, with everything from random screams, to depressive thoughts. Every day it’s as though his energy is leaving him.

Rinat needs to continue treatments with experienced brain trauma specialists, physiotherapists, osteopathic doctors, occupational therapy, speech pathology, massage therapists and more in order to restore his brain’s function, but we require far more funding than we have. Rinat’s preliminary recovery costs $25 thousand and I’m asking for support from anyone that can help. Once Rinat will be more stable, I would like to have a few highly qualified European doctors see him, but that will require flying overseas and seeing them in person – our stretch goal would be to raise $60,000 to allow for flights, living costs, transportation, and doctor’s appointments as well as further treatment at home.

Rinat has a chance to live a full life, to restore his brain’s function, memory and return to normal consciousness.

If possible, please share our story with your friends.

Our family is deeply thankful for your time and any help that you can give Rinat for a chance to heal and live a full, normal life.

We have some more photos of Rinat's progress on Google drive here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lhgn5s8cMYMRcPIjv0COv-P2iTQQuw2O

With love,

The Safaraliyev family