Jared's Story

I just sat up in bed and said, “I can wait no longer, I have to go look for my son.”

From a far off I could see the lights flashing and all I could say was is, “I just hope it’s not what I would thought it would be.”

By the time I got home, I called a friend and they had air cared him from Atrium to Miami Valley.  Well we knew that wouldn’t be good. My next door neighbor who’s a very close friend, Tom. And I called him and even though it was 2 am in the morning and 2:30, he got up and was dressed. He took us down there, he took us as a family.

One minute you’re talking to your son, he’s agitated. He had a little blood out of his ear, not much. I mean it was, it continued to bleed, and just a little dribble out of his nose.  But nothing broken, we found out later he had a slight, he had a skull fracture. But… “it was just cracked” and that was. It was just, he was just thrashing around like this and you thought, well, my son’s okay, he’s alive, he’s talking quasi, he’s just disoriented. And from that moment forward, I think that we went upstairs and, it went downhill fast.

So when you have a patient that’s laying there and they’re not all banged up, they don’t have their abdomen cut open. They don’t have, you know, metal frames stuck on broken extremities and they’re not all puffed up and swollen. And it’s like, it looks like their kid, but it’s not.

Your son, your only son. And I look up at my wife and what a tremendous team.  Nothing like the movies.  They just talked us like Dianna said, they’d just talked us into going down to get something to put on our stomachs. And it was toward the evening and soon as we walked, I mean we rushed back up and Lori one of the nurses there, Lori we found out later, just a, just an angel, all of them were angels.  She had started CPR on him and the doctors, then of course, then they called in this mirage of people, huge number of people. And it was like a machine, a well-oiled machine and Lori told us, “Dad, go for his feet,” because, ‘cause it was the only thing you could get to. So I immediately kneeled down and dropped to my knees, and I just hugged my son’s feet, because it was very, it was very, it was very violent it appeared to me.  It, it was thrashing about and they were, the doctors were doing their jobs and then you had Dr. Ekeh, just a wonderful doctor, just talking to Kelly, talking to the other doctors in the room. And my wife, I remember looking up and my wife was at his feet and I couldn’t fix it. I just couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t make her hurt go away ,and I couldn’t make him come back to me.

All of a sudden, complete silence in the room. Complete and then the nurses would move in and Donna, who was bagging him, pushing air in, just a wonderful respiratory therapist was right there with him the whole time, backed away and they felt for pulses here, and I believe in the groin area and on his ankle. And over and over they would say “No pulse” and begin compressions again.  And it was just surreal.

They got a pulse though.

And then about 20 to 22 minutes later, it was like all of a sudden, “I have a pulse.”  And, I could have been poured into a cup.

After he’d coded, I, that was, I just knew I’d have to handle what ever came after that. I was glad that he was alive.

There have been times when people have said, it’s like, “Where is the old Jared?” but at the same time they, they’ve said other things as well about me, me still being who I am.

He came back to us and he came back to us in a miraculous type way.

The only issues physically regarding you know, how left side of the brain controls the right side of me is, about this area of my face as well as the tips of my right fingers. After I think about a month of being out of the hospital, I started feeling numbness, they started getting tingly and I don’t feel as much as I used to be able to, just in these areas.

This team, you know, they’re just angels.  I don’t know how you would say it any different.

They were a blessing from God, they were. God used them in saving my life. So I don’t know what else I can say other than thank you.