Shannon Sansom

On Thursday March 24th our sister and friend, Shannon Sansom, 40 years old suffered a major heart attack. Fortunately her husband Brian was home to call the paramedics. After what felt like countless hours of CPR and shocking her heart they found a blockage and performed a cardiac procedure to put in two stents. During the repair of the heart they discovered that she was bleeding in the belly and determined it would be best to put her on ECMO (a heart and lung bypass machine) while they perform invasive surgery to find the bleed and hopefully repair it.  The doctors warned us that they were unsure how well Shannon would tolerate the surgery but felt it was necessary to save her at that time. She came out of the surgery but they had little luck in stopping the bleeding.  Shannon continues to need several units of blood everyday, to date she has had over 200 units of blood, thank to those that take the time to donate blood because you really do save lives.  She is begining to show a few small improvements and we hope that tomorrow morning she will be able to have surgery again so the doctors can attempt to stop the internal bleeding.   Once the bleeding is stable, she should then be able to have a catscan to evaluate the brain. 

UPDATE- 3-27-16 Shannon did have surgery this morning and took a positive step in the right direction as she is becoming more stable. Our biggest concern now is to determine brain activity. This will happen sometime tomorrow when they move her down to catscan.  She is still on dialysis and life support but the bleeding is more controlled.  We are keeping our faith and staying as strong as possible. 


Shannon has two beautiful children, Michael and Tori. Michael is a senior at Mogadore High School and Tori is in 8th grade. She has been married to Brian for over 16 years now.   Due to the uncertainty of her condition we are expecting her to have high medical bills as well as her husband and son will be taking an extended leave of absence from work. We are hoping to take some of the financial burden off of them as we know they are already overwhelmed with other things. We would like to keep things as normal as possible for all of them.  Anything you can contribute towards these expenses would be greatly appreciated.