October 2nd
The surgery lasted about 7 hours and she was in recovery for a couple of hours. To fix the aorta they open up the rib cage, they clean up the damaged area and then they put this stuff called dacron in to repair the damaged area. After they had moved her to intensive care she started to bleed again. They took her back in around 11:30 pm to clean up the bleeding. After that the wait was just to see her wake up and then to get her off the ventilator.
The day after the surgery she could open her eyes and she would kind of squeeze hands a little bit. She was able to respond to some commands and we were feeling like things were looking good. As time progressed she seemed to go downhill and she got to the point that she didn't respond to anything at all.
She was so asleep that they applied enough pressure to her toe to turn her toenail black and it was ready to fall off and that didn't even pain her enough to get a response out of her. We went for about 2 weeks without any type of response from her. They did several MRI's and CT scans and EEG's and everything appeared to be fine. There were no signs of stroke or bleeding in the brain. The neurologist said that they did not know why she could not wake up but she did show some indication that she either had brain injury further in the brain than they can test or she had a brain stem injury. He told us that her chance of meaningful recovery was less than 5% and that it was so rare for someone to be this far gone and recover that if they had we had probably seen a movie or read a book about it. He also told us that she was rated lower than a person in a vegative state because she could not even open her eyes.