Sunday, June 21 Update

Update From TIRR Houston Rehab

It has been almost a month since my last update. Balancing work, Raygan’s care and home life while still being in Houston makes time fly by. I would say the are two big improvements Raygan has had in a little under a month since my last update.

The first would be her ability to move her legs and torso. She had been able to move her arms, especially using the arm slings we put her in. She has started moving her legs quite a bit while being supported with bungee cords. She can move the both up, spread them wide, move them back down and then come back to center. She also has started moving her torso. She arches her back some times and she can pull herself back up when she is slumped over when the therapist have her sitting on a bench. All of the activity I would say is sporadic still meaning the doesn’t always do them and there is variation on how much force she has in doing the movements.

The second major improvement is in her ability to communicate using yes/no answers. While still sporadic, when she is alert, we use a letter charge to quickly select letters to spell words. The other day she chose a random word to spell…ocean…and he was able to select the letters very quickly. We also have a yes/no phone app loaded on her phone and she uses her index finger to answer questions with an audible yes/no response from the phone.

The doctors have been working to tweak her medicine to try and improve her alertness. They gave her small doses of adderall and have stopped some of her medications that have sedative properties. In general, he does stay alert alot more but has a long way to go.

We have also been getting trained on all the equipment she will be going home with. The most complex is the ventilator which she continues to need. We are getting alot of the other equipment we need donated from a medical equipment mission in McKinney which are blessed to have found.

Her stay at the rehab as been extended to 6/24 for now but we hope to get a a week or two more if possible. We have PT, OT and Speech Therapy lined up for her ready to start when we get her home.

Prior Update From Middle Of March
Raygan was put in a medically induced coma state back on Jan 27th by giving her sedation medications. They kept her sedated for a little over a week. It’s now been 47 days since she was taken off sedation medication. During those 47 days she has been unconscious. I want to try to describe Raygan’s situation in a little more detail to help each of you understand better and be able to pray for her more specifically.

It is normal for traumatic brain injury patients to take along time to “wake up”. The brain damage that the the secondary brain injuries caused (brain swelling and stroke being the worst of those) was significant and the worst part of that damage was in the lower brain/ brain stem area which is the part of the brain that is basically the light switch of a person’s consciousness. It is the part of the brain that affects our ability to wake up. Damage to areas in that part of the brain are permanent because the issue in that area does not regenerate like areas of the upper brain can. From MRI’s and CT scans, the doctors tell us that significant parts of her brain stem are damaged and dead but the scans do show small areas of living tissue mixed in. It’s kind of speckled looking when you look at it on the images. So we just don’t know what the long term effects of the damage are going to cause for Raygan.

Worst case is that there isn’t enough functioning parts of her brain stem for her to be able to wake up. The best case scenario is that she can wake up and just has disabilities. The brain stem not only affects consciousness but also controls involuntary movements as well as some voluntary movements of the body. Things like breathing, pain responses, reflexes, coordination, arm and legs movements all are controlled from this part of the brain. The medical staff measure consciousness on a scale that involves measuring the eye pupils reactiveness to light or lack there of, her response to pain from doing things like pinching her, basic reflexes like a cough/gag reflex, her being able to move her body actively in any way and her ability to respond appropriately to verbal commands.

For far, there have been a few a few things that show signs of at least basic involuntary or reflex movements. The one consistent sign of responsiveness as been the reactiveness of her eye pupils to light. That has been the one consistent thing that the doctors say indicates that at least some of the brain stem is functioning. On a handful of days for short durations we have seen her eyes moving back and forth under her eyelids, she had blinked her eyelids very slowly a couple o times, she has slightly moved her head back and forth like she is shaking, she has had slight responses to pinches like slight movement of her left arm up and she has slightly moved her left hand and fingers. I would say that there has been about 10 days where we have seen these kind of movements.

She has been on the ventilator since being admitted to the hospital the second time. They have tried multiple times to take her off the ventilator but her breathes are not strong enough to get enough oxygen and get rid of enough carbon dioxide. When I say that she is breathing on her own or leading the ventilator, I mean that she is still on the ventilator but the machine waits for her to initiate the breath first and then it just adds additional air volume in and air removal enough to match what a healthy person would do. She had gone for a maximum of two days in a row leading the ventilator but then she gets tired or something causes her breathing on her own to get worse and they they switch the ventilator to actively push air in and remove air out. That setting still does allow her to start a breath on her own in between automated breaths but it makes sure a specific number of air in/air out events happens in every minutes.

The ultimate short term goal is to get her to the rehab in Houston called TIRR which is the best in the country for dealing with her kind of brain injury.

I hope this additional information helps all of you better understand. We are so grateful for each of you taking time to help us acknowledge the power of our Creator and pray for his intervention in Raygan’s life at this time. We love y’all and we know Raygan does too!

History Of What Happened To Cause Raygan’s Injuries

For those of you that didn’t have the details of what happened to Raygan, we wanted to provide a few details. Raygan has been going to graduate school in Delaware studying Music Performance. On Friday, Jan 23rd, Raygan was riding her electric scooter home from a friends house. We do not know how it happened but she fell off the scooter while riding on the sidewalk, hit her head and was knocked unconscious on the side of the road. A good Samaritan found her and called 911. She had one fracture and two small brain bleeds. She initially recovered enough that the hospital discharged her to our care on the following Monday but by Monday night we had her back in the emergency room. Since that time, her condition rapidly declined with complications of traumatic brain injury. The doctors tell us that she has sustained significant and permanent brain damage. With God’s help and will the support of many prayers from all her family and friend, she has gotten over many hurdles but she has miles yet to go. We created this page to provide updates to her situation and to ask for specific prayer requests for healing and be able to collectively pray for Raygan. We love and appreciate y’all for uniting in pray with us for our beautiful daughter!