Andy Stees

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.


Thank you for joining us on Andy's journey. I am Andy's dad, Chuck, and will attempt to keep you updated on his progress and share with you our thoughts and experiences. We encourage you to post your comments, expressions of care and prayers on this site.



The current situation is Andy suffered a stroke yesterday, Dec 24, and is in the intensive care unit recovering at Swedish Medical Center, Englewood, CO.


There is a long background leading up to this event. Andy has a congenital heart disease which will at some point in the future require open heart surgery repairing his tricuspid valve. In addition on occasion he experiences arrhythmia. Like many who have arrhythmia he takes blood thinner medication. The reason for this is an arrhythmia can cause blood clots so the blood thinner mitigates that risk. Two days ago he experienced an arrhythmia. He went to the hospital to get this under control and after treatment apparently his heart rate and blood pressure were back to normal levels. We are not exactly sure on the subsequent  timeline but before he left the hospital Andy  suffered a stroke. The tragedy in all this is that the hospitals did not react quickly enough to allow for an intervention. By that I mean the opportunity to remove the clot from his brain - should the doctors have chosen to go down that path - was not available because too much time had passed and the consequences of removal were too risky.


All we know at the moment is there has been damage.  It is too early to say how much, prospects for recovery, how long recovery will take and all the other questions you might ask.  Learning more about Andy's situation is pretty much a function of time.  The doctors say we'll know quite a bit more in the next two weeks and a little bit more every day.  As I mentioned above, we encourage you to visit this site and share  Andy's journey with us.


As far as visiting is concerned: Andy is in intensive care at the moment. I have to say that care is really excellent and he is in good hands.  At the moment, except for family members, let's limit visitation to prayer.  Andy has strong faith and I am quite certain in some way he does hear your prayer.  We'll work with the medical community to keep you abreast of when visitation is appropriate. When the time comes for visiting please coordinate your visits with Virginia 303 641 7853 or me (Chuck) 408 317 8230