Support Kris in His Road to Recovery

Hi,

As many of you know Kris has been through some serious medical issues over the past few months. Kris was admitted into the hospital with 24% heart function. He was days away from no longer being here. The wonderful team at Advent Health saved his life. Kris had a double bypass and was in the hospital for 9 weeks. He has finally made it home but has a very long road ahead. Kris has gone from multiple income bases to zero. In these tough times not many of us could go 12 weeks without pay. Kris is no different. He is in danger of losing his house and everything he owns. He is still in doctors' appointments and physical therapy with no end in sight. He worked installing aid and technological advances for disabled veterans as well as at Obrien's pub. Both of these jobs take both physical and mental fortitude that Kris may not have for a long time. I know money is very tight for all right now, but any little bit helps. Kris may be hard to handle at times, but he would give the shirt off his back for any one of his friends. I am hoping we can all do a little bit of the same.

I only know so much. Please read the below from Jeanette...

Kristofer had many heart attacks at home and just tried to power through with no medical care. He has an esophageal structure that prevented him from getting enough nutrients or calories. Eventually his body began to starve and began to consume his fat, then his muscles to stay alive. With nothing left to consume his body turned to his heart. The drs believe he had many small heart attacks at home and if we hadn't gone to the ER when we did he wouldn't have survived for even a few more days. After a few days to stabilize him, he had open heart surgery, a double bypass and implantation of a machine called an impella, (It helps to push the blood around the body because his heart wasn't strong enough to do it.) the Swan( it measured the blood pressure in side his heart both out of the veins in his neck and snaked into his heart. His incision was 18inches long with 4 drains. Even with tham his lungs kept filling with fluid, so he's had 8 chest tubes placed to drain the fluid. When he came out of surgery, he had all this a tracheotomy tube and 21 separate IVs the nurses were sweating trying to keep up with them all. He barely survived surgery and he definitely looked more dead then alive. Dr told me it was 50/50 and up to Kris now he had done all he could to help him. They transferred him to HCA Largo by helicopter so he could get better care by a more experienced team. Over the next few weeks his heart slowly began to heal. The drs did endoscopy and found the stricture and began to open it with a balloon. They believe he will need many of these procedures to fix it and may need surgery to fix it. Slowly his heart has recovery to about 52% of what a healthy heart does. They tried to move him from ccu and he got ill and his bp was so low he almost died. The next 24 hours were touch and go, with his own nurse that managed his constant care to stabilize him. This got him a trip back to the ccu for a few weeks. In total he has been in the hospital for almost 8 weeks. He endured surgery pain, so many chest tubes, the impella pain, the Swan pain, the A line pain, the pick line pain, infection pain, foley pain and so many normal IVs techs couldn't place without many painful tries. He has endured loss of mobility, loss of privacy, drs having different and opposing opinions about what care he needed to survive causing unnecessary stress, cooped up in a tiny room for 2 months without seeing the sun in a hospital over an hour from our home. He's worked very hard to be well enough to come home but he is far from healthy. He has a long recovery and lots of physical therapy to help him regain some strength and help his heart get stronger. He now has 7 drs that are trying to keep him headed in the right direction but at the moment his energy level isn't much and he's fatigued easily. He had chest x-ray Monday and he's got fluid building up in his right lung and he goes for another chest tube placement to remove it in a couple of days, to help him breathe better. We are blessed that he's alive and recovering and thankful for all the care he has received during this extremely stressful time. After 8 weeks of not working at the bar or installing Home Smart Systems for Vets, our finances are in shambles, only the most important things got paid, so we are 2 months behind on many bills, we are trying to get a forbearance for the mortgage but there are so many forms, information needed that it feels like jumping through flaming hoops backwards with a grass skirt on but without it we could loose our home. We are scared and stressed, we are both financially responsible with our home and utilities so this instability isn't something we are used to. Because I'm disabled, I'm not allowed to have more then 2k in my account at any time. I can't have retirement accounts or the ability to have emergency savings like I did while working. I can't even have enough money to pay for all our bills in a month the disability system is set up to keep the ill poor and in financial stress. We have no cushion so we didn't have the ability to stay afloat with the mortgage, utilities, insurance and credit cards, car payment, etc. This is extremely stressful and we really have no idea how to climb out of the hole this has buried us in. We are so appreciative of Kris's second chance. He's incredibly lucky to be alive and he's fighting to regain his life. It just seems so unfair that with all his health stress, we now have all this financial stress on top of that. It seems like just one thing after another leading to constant extreme stress. I so thankful for all the support from our friends and we thank you for your help. If you know Kris then you know that he would only ask for help if it was an emergency and even then reluctantly. Thank you for all the love and support, it means the world to us!

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