Don and Junelle Hopingardner

About the last week of February, Junelle fell and was taken to the hospital. She posted that she had cracked some vertebrae and then that there were some esophageal issues and they couldn't handle them at Clovis so transferred her to Lubbock. They had to transfuse her to get her platelets up (due to a previous incident at Clovis Hospital) . During the wait she had a vomiting spell and lost a lot of blood. The decision was made to put her on a ventilator and sedate her to a coma until they could perform a TIPS procedure. This is basically a liver bypass to relieve the pressure on the veins on in her esophagus. The drawback to this is that now she has almost no liver function to do what it needs to do! Her ammonia levels were extremely high (120 and up) and they need to be lower than 40. The high ammonia levels can make you appear as if you are drunk!
So they will be managing these levels by medicine and diet. She was finally taken off the ventilator March 17, I believe and, praise the Lord she is posting on her own today ! Hop has posted that his step is lighter today and the walk is shorter!
I hope I didn't leave anything out and if need be hopefully we can add to this at a later time.
Thank you and Have a blessed day!