Support Dominik's Recovery After ICU Stay

On the evening of December 23rd Dominik suffered serious injuries during a skiing accident at Powder Ridge. Their group had been there two days prior and had a great time on the hill from open until closing and they opted for an afternoon pass on the 23rd for one last fun afternoon on the slopes. At about 8:30 pm, Bailey and her brother realized that Dominik didn't make it down to the bottom of the hill with them after they had been racing to see who could make it the fastest. It didn't take long to realize something was wrong when he didn't join them within minutes and wasn't answering their calls. Within a short period of time, they backtracked and located him badly injured in a prone position on an area of the trail that had large balls of ice that had accumulated from the groomers. It appeared that after a steep drop, he had lost control and took a hard fall into the ice chunks at a high rate of speed. They were quick to get help by the ski patrol that acted quickly to stabilize him as much as possible for transport to the St Cloud Hospital Emergency Room.

In the emergency room, they discovered that he had internal bleeding due to his spleen being lacerated, his brain scan showed three small areas of brain bleeding, broken left shoulder, three fractured ribs on the left side of his body, a fractured C7, and a fractured left wrist. The most immediate medical concern that needed to be taken care of was to stop the internal bleeding. They put in a breathing tube due to his vitals being unstable and performed a spleen embolization to stop the bleeding. After the surgery, he was transferred to the ICU. We waited for what felt like an eternity, which in reality was about 3 hours, for them to stabilize Dominik. They ended up needing to put in a central line and an arterial line to more quickly administer care to lower his heart rate, which was very high for hours, and to bring up his low blood pressure. Over the coming hours, numerous doctors reviewed his labs, his imaging and numerous CT scans were completed of the head, neck and shoulders to assess if his breathing tube was ready to come out. At about 2:20 in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, Dominik became alert and calm enough to have the breathing tube and neck brace removed to achieve a more restful and healing state. Over the following days, it was a steady flow of triaging parts of the healing process that included visits from the neurologist that believed his bleeding spots would heal up naturally without lasting impacts to his cognition (thank God he was wearing a helmet that very likely saved his life!), 5 total blood transfusions to help increase his hemoglobin levels, monitoring and treatment to prevent infections, and pain management from all of his fractured and broken bones that were understandably causing a lot of discomfort. On Friday, December 27th, we were transferred to Surgery Recovery which felt like a big step in the healing process - he no longer needed the constant 1:1 care that the ICU provided.

Numerous Cracks Inside Helmet

In Surgery Recovery, it was a lot of continued rest. He still wasn't staying awake or opening his eyes for long periods of time, but there were obvious improvements in his overall health that they were seeing. Eventually he started to walk to the restroom on his own with the support of a quad cane versus a nurse on each side. Pain management was still a top priority to get a handle on. Eating food was also a major challenge - between how the pain medications that didn't make him feel the best and all of the time that he spent sleeping around the clock - food was the last thing on his mind. That is definitely not something that he has ever experienced in his life - he normally loves to eat! We would be happy and celebrate when he had just a couple of bites of a meal while we were there. Due to these challenges, they determined that he needed to become more stable before undergoing any kind of shoulder surgery.

On New Year's Eve day, they decided that he was well enough to be discharged. We were both very excited and a little bit scared to be heading home. He seemed to need so much care yet. He couldn't walk more than a few minutes at a time without being completely exhausted. He didn't feel recovered. We had been taking steps to prepare for our recovery time at home by installing railings on our stairs going up and down, picking up supplies at the medical supply store like grippy socks, a bed rail to help him have leverage to sit up while only using one arm and to prevent him from falling out, and a quad cane for home use.

Bailey and I went into full nursing mode at home. We checked vitals, made notes, wrote out medication schedules, basically watched him breathe and helped him with every move. By the late evening of the day we were discharged, we had a sinking feeling that something wasn't right by the way he was feeling. We ended up taking him into the St Joseph's Hospital Emergency Room in Brainerd which confirmed that he had an infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Oddly enough, he had his first food craving while we sat in our room waiting for test results, he wanted Taco Bell! By the time that we got the new medication and discharged, there was just enough time to satisfy his craving as we rang in the New Year.

Over the past 10 days, we have been back to St Cloud to meet with a rehab specialist that works with people who have experienced a brain injury and/or concussion, set up a new PCP here in Baxter for local care, and went right to the top of the shoulder surgery list after meeting with a surgeon for a consult on 1/8. He called in a primary care doctor right into our appointment to do a pre-surgery physical, ordered an MRI for the following night at 8:30 pm and check in for surgery was at 5:15 am on Friday 1/10. It was a whirlwind.

Surgery took about 3.5 hours. It was a major surgery on his rotator cuff that included putting in 6 anchors, bone grafting and lots of sutures. He had a hard time coming off of the general anesthesia and nerve block with nausea and had to be medicated and wait for a couple of hours before making it out of surgery recovery. We were released from the surgery center in the late afternoon. Somewhere between Fort Ripley and the Brainerd Visitor Center the pain hit him hard, it made for a pretty miserable rest of the drive home. We spent the rest of the evening and night trying to make him comfortable as possible and staying ahead of the pain. Saturday proved to be even more challenging with awful joint pain everywhere and being unable to use his right arm. His ankles, knees, elbows, etc. were in severe pain, he cringed and yelped in pain when touched, but he needed help to even more his legs to get off or on the bed and we felt bad for gently guiding his good arm into ours when we needed to support him to get to the restroom. After just those brief moments of movement, he would break out into full body shaking / shivers when we got him back into bed from the exertion. I ended up being concerned enough to call the after hours anesthesia number to ask if that was to be expected since it wasn't mentioned anywhere in our large packet of discharge paperwork. He said it was not common, but also not unheard of. He gave us some suggestions and affirmation that it would clear up and that his body was likely just over sensitive to the nerve block and general anesthesia. That gave us the peace of mind that we all needed, including Dominik. In fact, this morning he woke up like a new person! He could walk, stay awake, his joint pain was gone and he could use his right arm again! It was like a miracle had been answered and he has had such a great day of recovery and chatting with friends that stopped by.

This week we will have follow up appointments with the surgeon who performed his spleen surgery, re-imaging done to make sure it is healing as expected and recheck labs to make sure that everything looks good.

Dominik will be continuing to receive care in St Cloud as he recovers from these major injuries and undergo a lot of physical therapy once he is out of the immobilizer in 6 weeks.

We are grateful for ANY level of support that you can show Dominik as he goes through this process. As a 20 year old (21 on 1/20!) just getting started with life, this is a significant setback. He is unable to work at this time at his job at Wabash in Little Falls. He is limited on what he can help with when it comes to caring for the farm animals that he and Bailey own and love, including his horse Okie. He has a high deductible health plan and it would be an amazing gift to help him cover any of the mounting bills that are not covered by insurance. If you've already donated by Venmo - THANK YOU! Those donations are specifically being used on medical bills as they go through the insurance billing process and come back to him.