“It was all kind of a blur for me. All I know is that I woke up in a hospital bed with a half-shaved head. The first thing I asked my nurse was, ‘Can you get me some lip balm?’ Because I need stuff on my lips at all times. I bet that lip balm cost me $100.

“I learned that because of a brain bleed, a subdural hematoma, they had to do emergency surgery to relieve the pressure. I was in the ICU for about a week. I felt fine. I got bored. Mostly, I was upset about my hair. After I got out, my kids were like, ‘You should just shave your whole head and let it all grow back together.’ I was like, ‘No way.’ I had shoulder-length hair, and now I’ve got short hair.

“My husband was scared to leave me by myself. But I was like, ‘I’m fine.’ Then I had a stroke. I was life-flighted to Tyler, and I was coherent during all that. I was just mad that I couldn’t see out the helicopter window.

“After a day or so, I started losing my speech. I would forget how to say words. Then I lost feeling in my right hand. I was in the hospital for a week. My voice started coming back. My hand was coming back. But I still had a long way to go. I would sometimes slur my words, so I sounded like I was drunk.

“I don’t know what I would have done without my husband, Tim, by my side. He did everything for me. He made me speak when I didn’t want to speak. He gave me sentences to say every day. He made me do physical exercises when I didn’t feel like it. As a chiropractor, he’s trained for it. I’ll just say he’s been my rock through everything. It’s why I’m here today.”

— Stacey Lundberg Stiff

Stacey has been a teacher for 25 years. She taught seventh grade at Gentry Junior School in Baytown, before the family moved to Jacksonville, Texas.

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“In my early 30s, I started getting sick. I had headaches and dizziness. I lost my hearing at one point, and it came back. I started getting sinus infections all the time. I had sinus surgery, but nothing helped.

“I got diagnosed with Lyme disease, and I took medications for that for 18 months. I got down to like 90 pounds. I also was diagnosed with a neuromuscular autoimmune disease called myasthenia gravis. I just could not hold my neck up. I was always trying to prop it up. I had severe pain. And I was having migraines.

“When they did an MRI, they found a tumor on my cervical spinal cord. But they said it wasn’t causing any of my pain. That was a tough pill to swallow. They told me it was the most dangerous place to have a tumor because all your nerves go there. We watched it for two years. It grew very slowly. Then they said we had to get it out. Because if it kept growing, it would take up the spinal cord, and I would be paralyzed from there on down. They were able to remove it all. It was benign, thank goodness.

“Before the surgery, they told me that I was going to be left with some damage. I had to learn how to walk again. And it left me with pain. Like my shirt or my hair, anything that touches my skin, sends off pain signals. It’s bizzare. Trying to deal with it, I can get pretty agitated toward the end of the day. It is constant pain.

“Before all of this, I don’t think I would have believed there’s a level of pain people can be in all the time and have to function. It literally never stops. It affects everything. You just have to kind of play like it’s not there. People around you can forget how hard it is to do anything, because you get really good at faking it. There’s no choice.

“People will tell me that I’m strong. I hold up pretty good unless I start talking about it and thinking about it. I break down sometimes. And then it’s just like, well, I’ve got to get up and get stuff done. You just kind of learn to do what you have to do to function.”

— Sheryl Duncan

An art teacher at Barbers Hill High School, Sheryl is back in a wheelchair after breaking her ankle about two months ago.

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“I was driving home from work when half my face went numb. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it might be a stroke. I called my dad and told him, ‘I think something’s wrong.’ He pretty much told me to walk it off. Then I called my wife, and she was like, ‘You need to go to the emergency room right now.’ When I got there, they ruled out a stroke. They did an MRI, and they found a brain tumor. It was pretty huge. They said it had probably been there since I was a teenager. It had been slowly growing, and now it was on the rise to kill me. They told me I had like a year to live unless we did surgery to cut it out. That was a pretty easy decision.

“I was in critical care for about a week before I went home. Then I had about six months of recovery time. I’m just recently getting out and doing stuff again. I’m feeling pretty good overall. But half my face is numbed up because the muscle on that side doesn’t work as well, and I’m deaf in that ear. All the steroids they gave me caused AVN (avascular necrosis) in one of my legs, where basically the blood stopped flowing and it started collapsing the bone. They did a procedure to fix it for now. But they said by 50, I’ll need a hip replacement. 

“I have to get an MRI every six months to make sure the tumor doesn’t come back. They also told me that I probably won’t have as long of a life as before. We’re looking at maybe 70 years. It’s weird to have a time limit on how long you have to live. But I’m here now, and I just try to focus on things in my daily life. It’s important for my daughter to see me well adjusted and carrying on with life. We have a rule in our house that if you can fix something, you fix it. So it’s up to me to fix my own attitude about everything and just move forward. I’m not going to let what’s happened slow me down. I know I’ve got to make the best of things before 70.”

— Kyle Perry

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“I’ve been going to church more since Owen was born. You just look for that comfort and peace. Plus, my family and our mutual friends have helped support and motivate us. We have a type of village that looks out for us. I mean, it’s been really hard on all of us. But we’ve been able to stick together and see it through.”

“Owen has been through so much this year. But he’s a little fighter. And what I see in ourselves is that there’s a strength you don’t know you have until you’re pushed to the limit. We’ve had so many obstacles, we almost don’t pay attention to them anymore. It’s like, OK, this is what we’re going to do this week. If you would have asked us last year, I probably would have told you there’s no way we’re going to make it through everything we’ve faced as a family. But then, you just do.”

— Blanca Aguilar Bobo and Blake Bobo

Their son, Owen, is facing life-saving heart surgery related to his rare genetic condition, Williams Syndrome. The family needs help with costs associated with his care that their insurance does not cover. Check their GoFundMe page to learn more about their journey and how you can help.

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The post They rely on faith, family, friends and fight appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“His cardiologist told us that he’s the sickest kid he’s ever seen who does not look sick. When you look at his scans you think, there’s no way they could belong to this kid.”

Born with a rare genetic condition known as Williams Syndrome, 9-month-old Owen’s aorta and pulmonary arteries are too small. That means his heart has to work harder. Because of this, the right side of his heart is starting to fail. He needs life-saving surgery to decrease the pressure inside his heart.

“Ten years ago, his condition would have been a death sentence for a kid. It’s such a unique procedure that as far as we can tell, there’s only one team in the country that can do it. It’s the team that’s been developing it at Stanford University, working at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. They’ve preliminarily accepted him as a patient. According to the literature, they only do about two or three a year.”

Owen will visit his cardiologist later this week for an echocardiogram and EKG, and for a discussion about the family’s planned trip to California for surgery.

“This year has been pretty hectic for all of us. While he’s working, I stay home and take care of the kids, including homeschooling Emma. I’ve always put them before me. It’s always been about them. During this rollercoaster ride, emotionally, I’ve fallen apart at times. But I don’t worry about me until the very end. I make sure he’s OK, he’s OK and she’s OK. When you’re facing something like this as a family, I think you just learn to prioritize.”

— Blanca Aguilar Bobo and Blake Bobo

The family needs help with costs associated with Owen’s care that their insurance doesn’t cover. Check their GoFundMe page to learn more about their journey and how you can help.

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The post Young boy faces life-saving heart surgery appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“My stomach was hurting really bad. But when it went away, I stopped thinking about it. Then eventually, a big knot formed on my side. The pain was incredible. My cousin finally talked me into going to the emergency room. They admitted me, and I was in the ICU for three weeks.

“I weighed 210-220 pounds most of my life, and I got down to 140 by the time I went to the ER. My appetite was gone and I was dehydrated. They put several bags of blood in me. I was anemic. I was close to death, but I didn’t even realize it.

“I had diverticulitis in my colon. I thought they were going to cut out a section and hook me back up. I didn’t know it was going to end up the way it did. When I came to my senses the day after surgery, I learned they had removed about a foot of my colon and placed an ostomy bag on me.

“I used to be a welder, but I’m retired now. It’s hard to do what I know how to do with that thing on you.”

How do you feel these days?
“Pretty good. I’m fat and sassy again.”

— DeWayne Saxton

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“Years ago I was working for Southwestern Bell when I hurt my back. I fell backward, tore the heck out of my shoulder and messed up the L4 and L5 in my spine.

“The first two or three years after that were the hardest because I had three major operations. I had what they called a radical 360 where they go in and put two screws in the front and two in the back. It took two years for it all to heel because they had to cut through muscle and so on from the front to get to my spine.

“The strange thing is that coming out of the surgery I had a near-death experience. When they brought me out of the operating room, they couldn’t wake me up for eight hours. The last thing I remembered was talking with my mom, who had passed away about two years earlier. She was in this beautiful field of flowers, and she told me, ‘If you want to go back, go behind that black line.’ There was this black line hanging in the air. So I started walking toward it and the flowers started fading. Just when I got to the line, I woke up.

“So I feel that my mom gave me a choice: you can stay here or you can go back. It was pretty weird. It made me believe in an afterlife, that there are good things out there waiting for you, that we do have guardian angels. That’s just my personal belief.”

— Fred Aguilar

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The post Belief in afterlife following near-death experience appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I just finished my term in the military. I was in the Army for four years, but I got hurt on a convoy.

“It happened at a training facility in California. I was riding in the back of this really big truck, about 10 feet high. It was rolling down to be part of a convoy, and we hit a bump. I fell out of the back with all my gear on. I broke my left wrist and fractured both feet.

“The recovery was long. I’ve had three surgeries and a whole bunch of therapy, but my feet still aren’t back to normal. I’m getting there slowly but surely. I’m still on a low dosage of pain meds when I need it, and I have some more doctor appointments at the VA Hospital in Houston.

“I’m considered a retired veteran. It’s kind of surreal because I’m getting paid for the rest of my life. I’m only 24 years old and I still have all my benefits. So I have school paid for and everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m not that deserving of it. But then I think, you know, I was willing to sign on the dotted line to risk my life. I’d have to say that I feel truly blessed to be where I am right now.”

— Omega Gregoire

The post He’s still recovering from freak Army accident appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’m reading the Bible because our church has this thing going on. If you read it for a whole year and check off all the sections, they give you a certificate. I’ve finished the whole New Testament so far.

“I really wanted to get religious after my quadruple bypass surgery. I realized that one of these days, we’ll all be going to heaven. It’s done a lot for me.

“I’m trying to get in better shape after the surgery. I’m taking my medication for being bipolar. After being homeless for a while, I finally have a home. And I have a new grandbaby.”

The post She ‘gets religious’ following bypass surgery appeared first on The Baytown Project.