The Backstory

I wrote the following update on Thursday night to my co-workers at Flatirons Community Church and my family. It gives some of the backstory to Shane's current situation.

Family,

I must first start by saying Thank You. We have been so surrounded by prayer, love and hope to an almost overwhelming degree (that’s a good thing). Thank you for your continued prayer and support as we walk through this challenging time with Shane.

To say that today has been otherworldly and surreal is a gross understatement—and as you can imagine, we’re pretty drained so this will be shorter than I’d like.

Yesterday Shane had his tonsils and adenoids removed and tubes put in his ears. This morning, Shane was listless, unresponsive and near colorless when we woke up, so we called 911. They brought us to the Exempla Good Samaritan emergency room where they gave Shane oxygen and an IV, which helped bring his color back a little, but something was still very wrong. All the tests and x-rays came back normal and everyone was stumped as to why he couldn’t keep his oxygen saturation up.

Cut to about 1pm when they wheeled him to an ultrasound room to look at some swelling on his neck. During the transport and the ultrasound procedure, they accidentally hooked him up to an empty oxygen tank. Yes, empty. This error was finally discovered after about 10 minutes. At that time, he dropped pretty fast and never recovered. It was determined shortly after that they needed to get him to Children’s Hospital, but first they needed to stabilize him, sedate him and get him going with a breathing tube and ventilator. After about 30 of the worst minutes a parent can experience, they finally got him on a Flight for Life helicopter for the seven-minute ride down to Children’s. Kylee and I were not allowed to go with him in the helicopter.

We had to wait quite a while to see him here at Children’s Hospital since they had a lot of work to do getting him stable. When we finally heard from a doctor, he informed us that it looks like Shane has some sort of infection, but they’re not sure what it is, how it originated, or how far-reaching it has become. The swelling on his neck has worsened significantly and turned red (indicating one portion of the mystery infection). His lungs are also showing some signs of infection. They’ve got Shane on multiple IV’s, central lines, antibiotics, blood pressure meds, pain/sedation meds, and Tylenol to battle what is currently a 104-degree fever. He’s also still on the ventilator/breathing tube and hooked up to about 14 nautical miles of wire and surgical tubing.

When we first saw him at Children’s, he was semi-conscious and made eye contact with us. He wanted so badly to verbalize something, anything...but we could see in his eyes what he wanted to say, but couldn’t because of the breathing tube. He was able to mouth the phrase “so much” back to me after I told him how much I love him. We just continue to talk to him, stroke his hair and remind him that after all this is over we’ll go out for the biggest/best ice cream ever.

There’s no way of telling what will happen in the near future, but it looks like he’ll be on the ventilator for another couple/few days and we’ll be here at the Children’s Hospital for a solid week or so. Believe me, we’re in no hurry. Please just continue to pray and lift Shaney up to the LORD. Pray that the doctors can figure out what is hurting Shane and quickly eliminate it. This will somehow all be used for His glory.

-Chris&Ky