On the morning of August 23rd 2023 it started off as any normal day. Our mother Deborah got up with our father to have their morning coffee and to get ready for work. Everything was fine that morning for the few hours our mom and dad were together and nothing was out of the ordinary.

Deborah left and went to work, she works as a Registered Nurse at WNYDDSO working with individuals with disabilities traveling to different homes to check on her patients.

Around 10am in the morning of 8/23 Deborah went to her car and notified her coworkers, they didn’t think anything of it because they all come and go from their office. Deborah was texting our brother Nicholas about making plans to go to our sister Gabrielle’s house for dinner later that evening. Gabrielle was trying to get ahold of our mother all morning and she was not picking up her phone.

Almost 1pm came around and one of our mother’s coworkers noticed Deborah was in her car still in the work parking lot. Her coworker just finished up a phone call and got out to go walk over to our mom and noticed mom tried to wave her over. She opened the car door and asked if she was okay. Deborah couldn’t respond but tried to say no. Her coworker noticed mom was having a stroke and ran to have someone call 911 and she was rushed to Mercy Hospital.

Us children and our father all got notified by my mom’s coworkers and each other and all rushed to Mercy hospital to see mom in the ER. They told us they were going to send her for an angiogram to get a stent put in to clear the blockages. The procedure went well but we weren’t out of the woods just yet and mom has to be monitored closely for the next 24-48hrs because she now has to be on 2 different blood thinners to keep that stent clear from blockages. The night went well and we all went home to get some rest and to let mom rest.

August 24th 2023- Mom was up that morning, she was walking and had some weakness on her right side but she looked amazing and was still in the ICU. All of us 6 kids (Michael, Nicole, Gabrielle, Michelle, Joseph & Nicholas) our significant others and father came up to see her and took turns to sit with her and talk with her.

430pm Mom started to get tired and once she finally got comfortable in bed we decided to leave. Not even an hour later we received a phone call from the hospital for them to tell us mom went unresponsive and started to have a seizure. They rushed her down for an emergency CT scan to find she had bleeding in the brain and they had to rush her for emergency surgery to do a craniotomy in her right side to relieve the pressure in her brain from the swelling, and couldn’t keep the right side of her skull.

Mom didn’t wake up right away after surgery and we kept that hope some miracle would happen.. as weeks went on mom started to show some small improvements such as wiggling her toes, moving her fingers which then lead to her giving us a thumbs up and more and more improvements.

September 13th- mom ended up getting a tracheotomy done as well as a peg tube and everything went well. More improvements started to show. She started to wake up more and she was noticing who we were. Pointing to who we asked her to point to, she was waving on FaceTime calls, giving us better commands all around.

Due to insurance reasons we had to get her out of the hospital and to a place that we can trust enough to care for our mother. The grueling search began!

We went to go look at Select Medical Hospital in Erie PA because they specialize in traches for speech therapy, OT and PT. Before leaving mercy hospital mom started to develop pneumonia and she was on antibiotics for it. Once she got to Select Hospital in Erie PA she started to show some improvements and then the turn of worst happened…

October 17th- mom’s temp went up to 104, and her heart rate skyrocketed in the 140s. They had to do a rapid response to get her heart back to a normal rhythm. And she started to stabilize. They changed her to a broad spectrum antibiotics.

6pm we got a phone call that moms blood pressure started to tank and we had to get here ASAP. Shes fighting an infection and doctors don’t know where the infection is and she’s starting to go septic. She wasn’t responding to the blood pressure medications like she was supposed to and her temperature is still at 104. As of right now she is fighting but if the blood pressure medications don’t work anymore there is a chance of her coding and things can start to go south and they believe the infection is centralized from the strokes. We now have her at St Vincent hospital in Erie PA back in the ICU.

We are asking for any help big or small to help with medical bills.

Thank you for reading our story and just keep the prayers coming.

The Mancuso Family

edit 10/19/23

as of last night doctors finally found the cause of the infection- mom ended up having some of her bowel die off which ended up perforating and leaking into her abdominal area… due to this she ended becoming so sick and septic surgeons didn’t think she would survive the surgery or if she did it would lead to more complications. They can’t give her anymore pain medications due to her blood pressure so we all agreed as a family that if her heart would stop we did not want to have them do CPR because of the pain it would put her through. We also agreed not to put mom through the surgery because we didn’t want her to be alone if her heart would have stopped… as of last night we have agreed to start comfort care and to be here with her to keep her as comfortable as possible.