Quintin: One Year

What Happened to Quintin?

On April 26, 2010 Quintin experienced what may have been a cerebellar stroke. While crossing the street with his best friend, Quintin fell backward and hit the back of his head on a curb. He was unconscious for several moments, then was able to walk, with assistance, the short distance back into the building. After showing signs of a serious concussion he was taken in an ambulance to Legacy Emanuel hospital.

He was in the ICU at Emanuel until his 29^th birthday, June 5, when he was stable enough to transfer to the hospital’s Trauma Care Unit (TRACU). After nearly a month in TRACU he moved to Vibra Specialty Hospital in Portland.

At the end of October Quintin moved to an adult foster care home in Vancouver, WA. He has excellent around the clock nursing care from a team of people who believe in his potential to make positive progress toward recovery.

At times he seems alert and “awake,” other times not. He still has a tracheostomy tube in his throat and is sometimes on a ventilator to assist with his breathing. He is able to breathe independently; when he's on the vent it's usually there as a precautionary back up when he has a fever or needs his energy for something else that's going on. The trach does not allow air to pass over his vocal cords, but speech therapists can periodically check to see if he’s made progress towards being able to speak.

When he fell his occipital bone was broken, causing a brain bleed. The bleeding obscured the injured area, so we may never know the cause of the fall. It took several months for the internal swelling around the injury to subside. Now that the swelling is gone, CT scans have shown that there are damaged areas in the cerebellum, pons, and brain stem. Typically, brain tissue does not grow back, but it IS possible for connections in the brain to reform, and that’s what we are patiently waiting for now.

Quintin has been in the hospital for several days but returned tonight to his home care facility. He had a fever and it was thought he might have a mild case of pneumonia, so they put him on antibiotics while we waited for test results to come back. Because his white blood cell count was normal and chest x-ray was clear it’s unlikely that it was pneumonia, so the infectious disease specialist stopped the antibiotics. The next day his fever resolved. Sounds backwards but we’d rather not have him on antibiotics if he doesn’t need them! He looked great today and yesterday.

While Q was in the hospital his GP and one of his neurologists saw him. The neurologist decided to start him on a drug called amantadine. A recently published study showed amantadine can help boost consciousness in patients recovering from traumatic brain injuries. This short article gives a good outline of the study.

At the year mark we (Quintin’s family and doctors) continue to see positive progress. He’s been learning to use the headset a bit more, hopefully to communicate in some basic ways – Dale has been consistently working with him to use the up and down controls of the orange cube as yes/no responses to questions. It’s slow going, but there’s progress, and we look forward to future milestones.

Quintin

Search

Pages

Followers

Tags

What Happened to Quintin?

Archive

One Year

2 comments:

Post a Comment