Ray Knight Medical & Household Expenses

Hi! My name is Shannon McBane and I am trying to raise money for Ray Knight to help with his medical bills and household bills while he is in the hospital recovering. I have permission from his family to raise these funds and am honored that they trust me to tell his story. Ray Knight is part of my Orange County Speedway race track family. He has been a dedicated employee there and also at Ace Speedway for many years. On Tuesday afternoon Ray was in a horrific accident. While he is in the hospital and also once he is home recovering he will need assistance to pay his climbing medical bills and also his household bills. His fiancé Kathie Whitley has provided me with a statement from the family written by his niece. If you can not donate then please share. Ray is an amazing person so please continue to pray for his recovery. The following is the statement from the family released yesterday (Friday). I will update as information becomes available to me..........

As promised when the family was ready we would give more details about what happen with uncle Ray and his conditions. Although we are still not ready to share all the details here is what we are ready to share.

On Tuesday afternoon uncle Ray was working on a rollback when the safety latch broke and the bed of the truck came down forcing his head to his feet. He was awake and alert on the scene. He was transported to Duke who have been exceptional from the start. They immediately rushed him into surgery due to internal bleeding. This surgery was estimated to last 3-4 hours. The surgeons finished around 2 hours. As family we thought great the surgery was done early everything must have went great. The reality was the trauma surgeons had done all they could do to stop the bleeding and needed to move him into radiology to for a CT but he was not ready to tolerate that. The internal bleeding had been stopped!

At this point Duke had started his blood transfusion to help increase his blood pressure and obviously try to recover all the blood that had been lost internally. Later on that night the doctors came to talk to the family to let us know that Uncle Ray was stable but on full life support. The next step for uncle Ray was to keep him stable and to continue to keep his bleeding undercontrol and get his blood pressure up.

Tuesday night was a very rough night for uncle Ray, but everything that the doctors wanted to get undercontrol Tuesday night they did.

Wednesday they noticed that his kidneys were not functioning properly so they decided to add dialysis to his treatment and he has responded so well to that. We don’t know if this a life long treatment for his kidneys or just a temporary thing, but given how well he is doing on dialysis hopefully it’s just temporary. On this day the goal was to try to lower his ventilator enough to be able to get CT of the brain and to try to wake him up just a little just to see if he could respond to us. Guess what?! Uncle Ray tolerated his ventilator being lowered to 60%. He didn’t love it but he tolerated it. The CT was CLEAR!! No brain bleed no swelling on the brain! He was able to squeeze Kathie Whitley hand using his right and left hand. He tried opening his eyes and was able to signal to the nurses that he was in pain. The family finally felt like we could breath.

Thursday morning he went in for his second big surgery. He was in surgery for 6.5 hours they fixed his hips, removed the sponges from his stomach added a wound vac and a few other things. He tolerated everything sooo well!

The nurses came in every hour I believe it was to flip him, his blood pressure is almost perfect, and he opened his eyes a little today, squeezed kathies hands again this morning and wiggled his toes!! They did another surgery this morning removed his vac from his stomach and finished fixing up some other things.

He is still sedated and still on a ventilator, but over all considering everything he is doing extremely well. He is a fighter no doubt from being born premature, to being a Marine he’s always had a fight in him. We appreciate all the support and prayers! They are working! Uncle Ray still has a very long road ahead of him but he has already come so far. Once the family is ready to release more details I will let everyone know. Thanks again everyone. #neveradullmoment

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to read Rays story and for the donations, shares , and prayers.