Stacey Holder's Medical Fund

Stacey has a had a very rough road when it has come to her health these past few days and really since she was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer in 2002. During that time, she had very aggressive chemo and radiation treatments to get rid of all the cancer. It worked and she has been cancer free ever since but it came with a cost. She has had a lot of residual issues with her stomach since then and she went to a gastro specialist in 2012 where they found a small obstruction in her colon. She had a procedure done then to help flush it out and it has been fine until now. This past month or so it got bad enough for her to go to the ER 3 different times.

The first time they told her she was clogged up and she just needed to let it pass. The second time, which was Thursday night, they told her that there was an obstruction in her colon that was causing the pain but there was still a little passage so they sent her home with two bottles of magnesium citrate to drink to see if that would flush everything out. Then if that didn’t work then they wanted her to come back and they were going to do surgery to get the obstruction out. At this time this all seemed like a simple surgery, scary since it was still surgery but simple none the less.

 After consulting some friends who were doctors, she decided to go to the ER at MD Anderson on Saturday morning. She was in pain but still laughing and joking just like always. At about 2pm everything took a turn and her pain got significantly worse. Then at about 7pm things started to get serious and they called the gastro and surgeon teams. They took a lot of scans and labs and they decided that they were going to try to go in with a scope and if that didn’t work then they would do surgery.

 It was about 1am by then and it felt like we were the only ones in the hospital. They moved us to a waiting room while they took her back and it took about 30 minutes before they said it was too narrow to go in with the scope so they were going to put the scope through her mouth and try to clear as much as they could from the top then they were going to bring her to surgery. So we moved to the surgery waiting room and waited until 5am when the surgeon came out and talked to us. He said he has been doing this for 30 years and this is something he has never seen. He said they did the colostomy and they weren’t planning on it but they had to perforate the small bowel as well because there was so much stool. He said that they would have to go in again after she was stable to clean out any stool that got into her stomach cavity.

We then moved the Surgery ICU and have been here ever since. Sunday they were just waiting for her to get stable enough to go to surgery but at 1:30am Monday they told us they were going to take her back even though they didn’t want to. This was because she was getting worse so they needed to get in there to figure out why and they were being honest with us saying that there was not a good chance of a good outcome. At 4:30am we found out she made it through the surgery and the reason she was getting worse was because her bowel was dying and they had to remove a lot of her small bowel. The surgeon said they weren’t able to reconnect the bowel tissue because it was like wet tissue so they are about to go into surgery today to assess the situation to see if they can reconnect it or they might have to remove more of her bowel.

After she makes it through all the surgeries they are telling us she will need to be in here for weeks possibly more. Also, there is a possibility of her needing home healthcare after she gets home and I’m sure a lot of follow up appointments in Houston. We thank you for all your support. Keep praying, she definitely needs all the help she can get.