Steve Needs Your Help!

On Friday November 26th, just a few hours after the Thanksgiving festivities and gig Steve’s world was turned upside down. Waking up with severe chest pains he went to the hospital where Doctors quickly confirmed the worst, Steve was having what the Cardiologists were calling a very bad heart attack.

Doctors were quick to go in with angioplasty to clear the 100% blockage on the right side but soon discovered 4 near complete blockages on the left side. Coming from a family history of Heart Disease, Steve’s heart was, and had been for a quite some time, a ticking time bomb.

Upon being transferred to Grand Strand Hospital renowned cardio thoracic surgeon Heather Palomino agreed to take on Steve’s case & scheduled him for quadruple bypass CABG surgery the following Monday.

The initial surgery went well (he didn’t even require any additional blood infusions), Steve’s heart started back up as soon as they’d reconnected everything & all looked well, however complications would soon rear their ugly heads.

One of the most common immediate effects of open heart surgery is fairly intense coughing. They give you a small pillow with instructions to hug the pillow when coughing to ease the pain, and this does help. Steve’s cough was a bit more intense than normal though & quickly caused some issues - the first being a small pneumothorax which is a tear in the lung which caused partial lung collapse. After remedying this with temporary chest tubes Steve was transferred to the ICU Step Down unit, from where he was eventually released after a total of 10 days.

Upon release the cough became more intense almost immediately & by the next day had become unbearable. In one coughing spell Steve exploded his sternum as well as the steel plates that had been added for reinforcement - this caused a break in the wire used to hold the sternum together which punctured the right lung (another Pneumothorax) and lung cavity causing the sack to fill with fluid (a Pleural Effusion), the lung to collapse and part of the lung to be forced through the rib cage into the void left by the shattered sternum.

This required an emergency surgery to repair. Unfortunately another complication appeared shortly after the new chest tube had been inserted; a condition called Subcutaneous Emphysema which caused Steve to quickly swell and fill literally with air & leaving him looking not at all unlike the Star Wars character Jabba The Hut.

The solution: you guessed it - more surgery.

After this event and the subsequent plastic surgery to rebuild the Sternum the complications, thankfully, ceased and since then Steve has been recovering, at first in the PCU then later at home after release. While recovery isn’t as long and arduous a process as it was several decades ago, it will still take a fair amount of time and is a process that cannot be rushed nor accelerated.

The timing of this couldn’t have been worse as Steve’s band, Southside Saints (Steve’s sole income), had agreed earlier in the year to cease operation at the end of 2024. This crisis happened at the exact time Steve needed to be lining up and scheduling new projects and jobs for the coming year - now with some uncertainty regarding full recovery time this is all on hold indefinitely.

As such, it has also left Steve completely unable to work, to earn money to try and pay off a quickly growing mountain of debt related to his situation. Any help you can contribute is greatly appreciated! Thank you for taking the time and effort to help, God Bless!