04/16/2020

Short Term Shawna

Hey friends! I hope that all of you are staying healthy and safe out there!

I am a day late on this post, but you know . . . homeschool. I helped to make a pretty cool barometer for a 6th grade science class yesterday, so I am feeling pretty great about my middle school skills right now. However, don’t ask me about infinitive phrases. I can’t seem to grasp that concept . . . and I’m a writer! Yikes!

Today’s post is a bit of a repost about a HUGE moment in our life.

Yesterday was a CRAZY anniversary for us Beuclers! Not your typical anniversary you celebrate, but one that I am VERY thankful had a happy ending. I mean, how many of you can wish your significant other a “Happy Brain Surgery Anniversary Day”?

Eighteen years ago yesterday, Reid had brain surgery. He was 26 years old at the time.

Also, my friends all fell in love with Reid’s neurosurgeon. He was very young, and thankfully, very talented in the art of putting his hands into people’s brains!

Oh, and I survived becoming “Short-Term Shawna”! 😉

The week before his surgery, Reid started to get headaches. He never had headaches, and being in our mid-twenties, we didn’t know enough to be concerned. He took some Advil. Took some more Advil. Threw in some Vicodin. Nothing worked.

On Wednesday of that week, I convinced him to drive himself to the emergency room. He made it to the parking lot, decided it was nothing, and he drove back home.

But, the pain got worse.

Friday morning, after much convincing and discussion, I drove Reid to the emergency room. He was in the ICU by 2pm.

Reid had hydrocephalus. They believe that when he was in utero, a piece of skull broke off and wedged itself into his brain. As he grew over the years, the piece of skull worked its way out, and ended up floating through the brain fluid. It ended up landing at the base of his brain, where all of the brain fluid should be able to drain. With the drain blocked, his brain began to swell.

We were told that if he had waited a few more days, he would have started having seizures.

That night, I stood at his hospital bed in the ICU with his mom, his step dad, and his sister. The neurosurgeon explained the surgery and its complications. We had been dating a year. So scary!

They kept him in ICU over the weekend to monitor him as they wanted to have a full staff of people come Monday morning.

Let me just say that that weekend was such a testament to how amazing people can be. Being 26 years old, the fact that Reid was having brain surgery really shocked our friends and family. We basically took up the entire ICU floor’s waiting room for the entire weekend and made it the ICU nurse’s full-time job maintaining the “two person at a time” visitor rule! Friends came. Friends’ parents came. Family came. Reid’s guy friends actually pooled money together and bought him a Xbox to play while he was recuperating. Sweet, sweet friends.

On Monday morning, April 15^th, Reid was wheeled into surgery. It was a scary day. We were told that one of the biggest complications we may see would be to his short-term memory. While he joked about a “get out of jail free” card if he forgot something, I was given the nickname “Short Term Shawna”. We had known each other for sixteen months at this point, and it became quite the joke that he would wake up and not remember me. This sounds so cruel looking back, but hey . . . if we weren’t laughing, we would have been crying.

After another several days in the hospital, Reid came home. We all granted him two years of “forgetfulness”, but to this day he has been known to throw around the brain surgery card if something is forgotten. Oh, and I am still “Short Term Shawna” to a few of his friends.

Such a CRAZY time, and such a strange anniversary. But, so thankful we got the outcome we did

Here is a pic a couple of days after Reid got home. Man, we were all so excited to see him back up and walking! And, due to his shaved and scarred head, he rocked the Kangol hat for a couple of months! We were all such BABIES in this picture!