Support Dillion's Heart Surgery Journey

To our friends and family,

Dillion goes in for open heart surgery this coming Wednesday. The sudden news of this has us scrambling a little bit on what we are going to do with our bills. His recovery time is going to be about 3 months, so we have a long road ahead of us. Trying to navigate all of this with such short notice wouldn’t be possible without all of you. If you want to help, this is how you can best help us at this time. It would sure relieve some of our stresses.

For those of you that don’t know Dillion so well,

When he was born, he was diagnosed with a bicuspid aortic valve, so that just means his aortic valve in his heart did not form properly so it had a minor leak in it. Fast forward 34 years. This last week at work started out normal for him. He does tree removals with a smaller company. Just the previous week, he worked about 70 hours. On Tuesday September 24th, he had a couple of fainting spells, so he took it easy the rest of the day but finished out his work day. The next day, he started out the morning at work like he always does by unloading the equipment that they use to do their jobs everyday. Just doing that simple task made him completely loose consciousness, so yet again another fainting spell. So I left work immediately to come and meet him and his mom at the ER. We wanted to figure out why these things were happening to him. Through various tests they found that the leak in that valve is now severe. That valve is also calcified and hard and must be replaced. And his aorta is twice the size that it is supposed to be. And if it continue to stretch, the results would be fatal to him. And in his short life of 34 years, he has never been sedated for a surgery. Now he is being sedated on Wednesday for a open-heart surgery that involves changing that bad aortic valve as well as fixing his aorta. The surgery is expected to last all day and then he will be in the ICU for two days. And then if all goes well, he move back to the heart floor that he is currently on for another 5 days. And then I will be able to take him home. This whole thing has been quite the roller coaster of emotions and stress for him and everyone close to him. You can never plan enough for this sort of thing so I’m reaching out for help. We don’t know what other bills we will have after his hospital stay so I’m trying to get ahead of it now, but that’s hard to do when neither one of us are working. So if you can help, we would be so grateful.